burliman

Neat. So some of them are nice. Doesn’t make the practice of “optimizing” search a noble deed because some of them think themselves on some high tower. In the end you are trying to push your site above others based on your ability to game the system, rather than relevance of your content. When you do this, I don’t think it’s relevant if you’re a nice person with feelings…

Okay so you fired someone, then decided later to bring them back. This means whatever guideline you use to fire people is floppy or petulant, you caved to public backlash, or the firing guidelines are clear but the information you took grave actions upon was bad (was unreliable and/or unverified).

Anyway, none of those things are good markers of leadership.

Edit: Forgot another reason for recanting a firing: your boss told you that you don’t have the authority. Nothing takes away your leadership teeth like that…

I used to accidentally find nudie mags in the woods with my friends. Why didn’t these guys do anything for me and my forest safety?

Okay now let’s ask it to write anti ransomware. My guess is it will help with that too. And then the balance is struck and the obvious becomes obvious: AI is a tool to enhance all aspects of our lives. But instead we seem to only hear about the ways we should be fearful and worried about it.

Esperanto.

I used to work with this old guy. He was one of those dudes that was insufferable, but at work he was a semi-interesting story teller. But really it was because his desk was next to the back door exit. If you wanted to sneak out, you had to do it past his desk. And you had to be on his good side to avoid any leaky mouths…

Anyway, this one time I was sneaking out, it was summer. And he had the door open to let some fresh air in. In its place he had mounted a makeshift screen to keep the flies out. But this screen wasn’t quite tall enough and left the top foot of the door wide open. I had already seen a fly as I came down the hall, so when I saw his construction job, I’d found the reason…

So I said, “hey nice screen.” He says oh yeah, blah blah. Blah blah. Then I sort of point out the missing gap above the screen… he gets real serious and says:

“Flies can’t fly more than 6 feet off the ground.”

I had so many questions. What about flies on a mountain? What about flies inside a skyscraper? My head was salivating for more chunks of juicy knowledge from this guy… but alas I had my sneaky schedule to keep, and I said wow, cool. And left.

But the confidence from this guy could not be matched.

Exactly. Some of the replies in this thread are so disingenuous.

I hope they do it. I hope they push themselves further into irrelevance. Remember, the users make the content, not Reddit.

Why limit to fusion? Ask for the optimal energy production solution, period. Might be something we never thought of.

I’m getting so exhausted with the constant outrage in every goddamn feed in my life.

Do you think the number of people spoofing user agents are going to even dent those numbers?

I wonder if they know the dollar figure in sales that ads, for all their expense, have gained out of me. I’d say it’s near zero. You may say I am subconsciously influenced and even if I don’t click the ad, I may buy the product at some other date due to recognition. Maybe. But that individual ad impression that someone paid for that I did not click (or blocked) does not know that. And it’s quite likely they don’t care, because ever missed click is still getting the word out so to speak.

But what they should care about is the absolute dislike I have towards aggressive advertising. And I am not alone. When I face an unskippable or full page or pop up ad, I don’t subconsciously want that product then or later. I consciously hate the product just a little more and more with each impression.

And now that it’s an arms race, the lines are being drawn, the hatred being cultivated, and the whole effort has lost its entire point: To make me friendly toward the product and to buy it. And I feel like sites like YouTube essentially don’t give a shit. They have the advertisers convinced through some great effort that ads are effective and worth it. All while doing everything that they can to keep us corralled and our eyes pried open to view them.

What would be the value of life then? I’ll save you the answer: no matter how big the number you say, someone else will say bigger. Until it becomes priceless, which is the answer.

However death and accidental death isn’t always avoidable. And when we pin the fault on someone we cannot expect to say “priceless” is what they owe the victim’s family. So we assign an amount of money or time that hurts, and call it good.

Doesn’t mean life is worth that. And saying so doesn’t help anyone.

Backblaze here.

Pretty sure those Edge numbers are from using it under duress…

Already do. Used to buy new phone every year. Now it’s every three years or so. That is completely due to price and lack of compelling innovation. Don’t care if shareholders make money or not. I just like good value.

Agreed. Physical ownership is the shelf of old DVD and CDROM PC and XBOX classic game boxes in my basement that take up space, collect dust, will never work again, and will only be a remembrance of nostalgia for a bygone day. Plus I’ll probably never seriously want to play them again… let’s be honest. I can watch a video of someone else playing, it scratches the same itch, and saves me the trouble.

I like digital ownership, but there needs to be protections so we can’t be screwed.

Difference is those other networks actually make content thats arguably seen as worth paying for. YouTube recycles user content and barely pays those users for it. Yes you can say that they deserve your money for servers and whatnot, but you can’t compare YouTube with those other services you mentioned and expect people to cry big crocodile tears…

Even GDPR fines are rarely paid in full. We hear about the levied fine since that’s public, but not the actual payment deal.

Their wealth is almost entirely composed of equity, which topples if the world fails. All the cash they have to build these mansions is derived from this. The value of cash itself is derived from this. The only things of worth in a post-apocalyptic world are the tangible things they bought with cash while it was worth something. Shelter, food generation, defense… those are still worth something, along with more important things: physical skills and practical knowledge.

They will find themselves in their mansion-bunker, surrounded by people who they have paid to be there, in a world where the currency they use to pay them has failed. Do they not see what will happen? Even if their plan involves complete self-isolation, how do they plan on maintaining these massive properties and fixing things when they break? Perhaps they have a plan to close themselves off to some smaller, easier to maintain part of it. But then what is the whole point if all you have is solitary confinement? Even if it all works and they can survive it, they will eventually emerge into a world that has failed, where their wealth means little to nothing and the skills that built that wealth are as useful as ornamental testicles on a monster truck.

Why do they put their money toward projects like this, instead of towards ways to make the world more stable so that it doesn’t fail in the first place. If I had the immense wealth they have, which was completely contingent on the world and people that it stood upon, I would do everything I could to make sure the world would not fall apart. And if it wasn’t enough and it was failing still, I would spend even more until almost nothing was left. Building a fortress in a failing state is stupid, and history can tell you that with 5 minutes of reading.

In all their supposed intelligence, it seems they haven’t thought it through much… or I am missing something glaring.

Why do we keep posting his drivel on every platform?

Just a wild guess: A video that you have to sit through on YouTube about a list of books to read. Probably is deeply unsettling to people who like the world to make sense.

Anyway that’s why I personally closed it once I realized it was a video link.

I used to interview all the time. I thought it was a fun, important process, so they kept giving them to me… until one day a candidate stormed out. We had a panel on one side of the table that had devolved into one-upping each other on who could ask the best brain teasers. Finally the candidate literally said, “Fuck this.” Then got up and walked out. HR asked us WTF and we shrugged and blew it off, but I knew why. We all knew.

Sometime after that I changed my tact into making interviews conversations to get to know each other instead. If I did send someone to a whiteboard, I always got off my ass and joined them up there. Made it a collaboration exercise and never asked any bullshit. Did that for maybe six months to a year and got some awesome people from that process…

At the end of that stretch, HR sat in on one and saw the process for the first time… sometime later I stopped being asked to interview. No reason was given, the invites just stopped coming in. We kept hiring people but I wasn’t a part of it anymore. Coincidence?

Electrical tape is classier.

Don’t get me wrong. I use Linux extensively, but mostly server loads and gateways. But have used Mint and Rocky as desktops. So I can’t see how someone can reasonably argue that they have the same polish as Windows (or MacOS) for the average user. Too much command line, too many disparate tools without consistency, just to name a couple.

Linux has its place, but it is not for the average person yet. I wish it would get there, but for decades people have been saying this.

Philosophical mustings?

Driverless cars will have an impossible standard to live up to. California has 48.5 injuries per 100 million miles driven (and 1.4 deaths). Unless that is zero with driverless cars, then the public will see an unreasonable risk. Any single accident gets tons of press… I found it very difficult to find an objective injury rate for driverless cars. Probably because there are five levels of automation, and many of them allow human error to come into play. Also they are self reported by the driver companies.

You made me think of that xkcd about standards.

Anyway, the eurocentrism argument, while perhaps true due to the Latin root, seems to be a little bit of a savior complex don’t you think? China itself pushed for Esperanto to be used as a business language internally late last century as I recall.

The US Navy has probably around 100 nuclear powered vessels, both submarines and Nimitz class carriers. Each of those have miniature nuclear plants on them.

I know their use cases are different but small and portable is small and portable. Virginia class subs typically stayed within cost budgets, but newer V blocks saw cost overruns, as well as the Gerald Ford carrier, which was about 3 billion over budget if I remember.

Not sure if overruns were due to being nuclear or because of other reasons. They are high tech military items that aren’t exactly mass produced, so lots of ways to overrun. However they are more mass produced than nuclear power stations in the civilian sector. Maybe some lessons can be learned.

Edit: Also forgot an important point that modularization was a key design point of the Virginia sub.

Even if that politician called me personally I would feel this way. This is a statement about robocalls more than about AI.

However if they had a ChatGPT style interface for asking them in depth policy questions that would answer as they would answer, I would be all fucking in. That would be awesome.

Article doesn’t explicitly state this but it is very likely this would need to be trained extensively on each individual brain. So there would almost certainly be an explicit opt in.

Edit: didn’t watch the video. No thanks YouTube.

I am both shocked and pleased that Ford did not make this list. Seriously, the brand with the most sold pickup truck doesn’t make a list for just about everything?

Teleportation, because the only upside to invisibility is subterfuge. Not that I am some saint who denies ever wanting that, it just seems like teleportation would be just as good at any use case invisibility has. It would also have lots of very life changing above board benefits too.

Celebrating the fifth anniversary of this post.

That’s a good point. There is at least as much to learn from Antarctica as from Mars. Maybe less maybe more, but certainly more relevant since it’s on Earth. Plus easier to get to than Mars. Yet we can’t scrounge up enough to keep a larger presence there.

Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that we are living in another dark age. We need a real renaissance to shake it.

Don’t radarr and sonarr download better versions automatically? Seems these measures were drastic.

Probably replaced by Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

I pay for them still. But still download and watch on Plex. Oh shit I meant a friend of mine does this.

Or just pick the first option, which is basically what this article is saying. I don’t want it running all the time.

If you use google images to do basically the same searches you get the same diversity issues. It’s reflecting the training data, and the larger world by extension. Whatever they would have us do to fix that must be applied to reality before it can or should be artificially skewed in AI models. Because if you bias the model to compensate you will create a worse bias. One that was intentional.

Even if you don’t agree with that take, have a look at the Firefly example. they asked for a trucker named Paul, and they got a woman in the result set. Maybe somewhere out there exists a woman trucker named Paul, but it’s a clear reduction in accuracy and quality because Adobe attempted to inject artificial diversity.