jwalton

LLMs do a cool parlour trick; all they do is predict “what should the next word be?” But they do it so convincingly that in the right circumstances they seem intelligent. But that’s all it is; a trick. It’s a cool trick, and it has utility, but it’s still just a trick.

All these people thinking that if only we add enough billions of parameters when the LLM is learning and add enough tokens of context, then eventually it’ll actually understand the code and make sensible decisions? These same people perhaps also believe if Penn and Teller cut enough ladies in half on stage they’ll eventually be great doctors.

If you’re 2x farther away, the intensity of the sound with be 1/4, because of the inverse square law, so logically your speaker would need to be 300% louder.

Bookshop.org has a DRM free section? Where do I find such a thing?

And Baen. Baen has a storefront of their own online at https://www.baen.com/.

It's somehow a little poetic that the author's chatgpt example has already been plagiarized by a realtor blog: https://www.elikarealestate.com/blog/beautiful-suffering-of-...

One of the largest camera stores in the US is https://www.bhphotovideo.com/. Since B&H was founded in NYC by Orthodox Jews, you can’t event place an order on their website on Saturdays.

but if your hobby is a website where others can post content you have a responsibility that the content shouldn't be illegal or harmful to others

I’m not entirely sure I agree with this sentiment. It certainly isn’t true from a legal standpoint in America, where section 230 explicitly absolves you from any such responsibility. I also don’t think most of the objections to the OSA center around a need to remove child pornography, but instead the fact that you are forced to employ technological measures that don’t currently exist to remove child pornography. All of this is a little besides the point though because…

If you can't deal with those responsibilities you can't run the website.

I absolutely can. If the law is unreasonable, I can block all users from the host country, and keep running my website. Which is exactly what Lobsters and a lot of other people are choosing to do.

This is why the LinkedIn app is and will always be banned from my phone.

There’s no small irony that this isn’t age doesn’t render correctly on Safari on iPhone. All the text wraps off the right edge of the phone. -_-

I just spent an afternoon recreating the custom threads on a Hayward chlorinator for my dad so I could 3D print a temporary replacement part. These don’t even use standard pipe fitting thread. -_-

Agreed. I’ve never used spring-boot, so telling me this is like spring-boot is less informative than the author might think it is.

How do you think google maps got such a good database of these things? When I last used it, Google maps used to actively ask you for this sort of information.

Well, step one to increase aerodynamics would be to switch to recumbent bikes, but they’re banned, because they’re too aerodynamic. :P

In my late teens I would frequently be late for university because I’d turn off my alarm or my gf would come wake me up and I’d go straight back to sleep. One day I decided to move my alarm clock to the other side of the room so I’d have to physically get up to turn it off. The next morning I got up, walked over to the alarm clock and turned it off, then I was startled awake as I started to fall over standing in front of the alarm clock.

I’d like to be able to blame this on some kind of medical problem, but I think mostly I just stayed up late playing Counterstrike too much. :P

I'm sorry, I feel like I'm missing something here. I have an M1 Macbook Pro running Sonoma 14.1.1 (I need to update...), I have a nice pair of Sony Bluetooth headphones. I turn my headphones on and off multiple times a day, they connect to my Mac, Apple Music doesn't launch. What are you all complaining about?

Edit: Just tried connecting my 3M Worktunes, and they didn't launch anything either.

Also, my favorite collection of JS weirdness, “Return true to win”: https://alf.nu/ReturnTrue?world=true&level=id

A link preview with an image is over 100 MB?

I think what’s being implied here is that, when you share a link to Facebook, Facebook will access the page to generate a link preview, so will download a tiny bit of HTML and an image. But when you share a link on mastodon, that link immediately gets propagated to many other mastodon servers, which then propagate it to others, so suddenly many thousands of mastodon instances are simultaneously downloading a little bit of HTML and an image, and the cumulative effect of that in this instance was 100MB over a minute or two.

It does seem like a typical static website ought to not have a problem serving that, especially if it’s behind Cloudflare. It seems odd that a single EC2 instance would have a hard time serving that.

But given more than one person is complaining about, it also seems like each mastodon instance could very easily delay propagation of the story by a few minutes to soften the blow here.

Back in the day, I spent a good month playing the original CS non stop. By the end of that, it was common for someone to accuse me of using wall hacks or otherwise cheating. Cheating in these games is definitely a problem, but I’m skeptical this is a good solution.

I had a Honda that nicely solved this by labelling the bars with “int”, so clearly the large markings were for a larger interval.

Which is exactly the opposite of how it worked. -_-

I thought about replying with something exactly like this, but generally this sentiment gets downvoted to oblivion.

I’ll add that we waited longer than we should have, and while it’s hard to conclusively say we would have had an easier time earlier, we ended up spending hundreds of thousands in fertility treatments.

You always think you have more time, but as they say “it’s later than you think.”

Unfortunately, the repository where this tool is developed is private

Have you thought about publishing the install.sh and final zip file through GitHub pages? Or Cloudflare pages? Then the repo stays private, but the built application can be accessed publicly, and behind a hard-to-guess url.

I think you need some info in your readme about what this tool is and why you’d want to use it instead of “rm”.

When you say “remove files safely” is this as in “you can easily recover the file if you delete something by accident”, or “safely” as in “the file is securely erased and no one will ever be able to recover the file again after you give away this hard drive to someone else”?

I think the actual issue is that a government holds the insane belief that by blocking one out of many ways that someone could make an anonymous threat, it somehow contributes to the safety of their citizens.

I was at a large company during the dot com bust. Someone added a world readable field (I assume by accident or because they didn’t realize we could all read it) to our LDAP called “Departure date”, which let you look up who was going to be laid off in the next few weeks. :/

This is very true, but "helping you realize you are doing something unintended" works just as well with a string as with a symbol.

I cannot be the only one who reads AVP as “Alien vs. Predator”.

Unfortunately this doesn’t work, at least not from a type safety perspective, because even without access to the symbol, nothing stops anyone from doing `let myFooId = 'foo' as any as FooId;`. You could detect this at runtime, but type safety is compile time.

See also https://kitschprompt.com/docs/intro

The relevant quote:

In the 1990s, a big part of Sega’s arcade business was selling cabinets like the Astro City that didn’t come with game boards included. Dottori-kun seems to exist primarily to provide a simple game that could be used for assessment in line with [Japan’s Electrical Appliance and Material Control Law]. It was included with the cabinet as sold (likely because the cabinet had to be in the same state as assessed for it to be valid), but was not usable for an arcade operator beyond basic testing that the game board worked, it would just be thrown away or maybe saved to be scavenged for parts.

A bit more detail here: https://www.vgfacts.com/game/dottorikun/

Just imagine a trial where Google is trying to explain to a jury of less-than-tech-literate-folk that they claim they don’t track you, and they don’t track you, but they do track you.