paretoer

There are a lot of people who basically believe in a conspiracy of stupid people while at the same time believing anyone who believes in a conspiracy is stupid.

It is an amazing trick of modern propaganda. These people are so manipulated they can't even see the completely contradictory double think they are engaged in.

It just always happens to be the "dangerous" ideas are those that they don't believe in lol. How can anyone be so fucking dumb.

Having lost 30lbs so far in 2024, you are highly under estimating the devastation of our gluttonous foodie culture.

All the factors you mention I suspect are completely meaningless in comparison to consuming excess calories and I am pretty sure research would back this up.

I was starting to have various health problems a year ago this time that have all gone away literally like magic.

I think what you are talking about is actually a form of denial. Blaming meaningless variables we can't control so we can ignore the fat elephant in the room right in front of us.

Having worked at large corporations and now a small company, I think the reason for this is so no one can be blamed for anything when things go wrong at a large corporation.

The main function is that it insulates upper management from any responsibility of what is going on the ground. They don't even really know. If something goes wrong you can fire some useless cog in the machine 3 links below but they still have an important title so the optics hold.

Without all these layers then upper management has to actually take responsibility for the operation of the company. Instead, they get a nice asymmetrical bet with looking like a genius if things go well but plenty of fall guys if things go bad. It mirrors the pay out of their stock options. If things go well they make a killing, if things go horribly bad they only collect their inflated salary.

The asymmetrical bet is well worth all these useless meetings to them. It is just an operating cost of the rules of this game.

This is nothing new. I grew up going to Canada every weekend in the summer.

Canadians have known more what is going on in America than Americans for at least the last 35 years.

I love Canadians but never in my adult life have Canadians not been just salivating to have a conversation about American news with an American.

As someone who doesn't use social media this analogy strikes me as a rationalization for something you know is bad for you and a waste of your time but you can't stop so you make up this fiction about how you would lose more by stopping.

An alcoholic who can't stop going to the bar because they will lose their drinking buddies is not a dollar auction.

As someone who doesn't use social media this analogy strikes me as a rationalization for something you know is bad for you and a waste of your time but you can't stop so you make up this fiction about a dollar auction.

The old "can't make money with numpy, its all produced in already"

An even more fundamental problem is in trying to judge something completely subjective like how good food tastes.

I assume you believe you have good taste in food and I very well might find what you think is good to be terrible. It is not impossible the majority finds what you think is good to be terrible too.

My experience is that the only way to know if I like a dish is to eat it and reviews are completely useless.

Totally agree. I would think part of a good defense is to simply not care about politics on any level.

Personally, I think all these counter measures are a fool's game. It most likely ends up being a form of self labeling as a person to look into.

My defense is to be a boring person, not trying to hide anything, lost in a sea of noise.

But it will cause a reduction in wages and the quality compared to hand crafted fabrics will be inferior when automated.

I suspect this is a feature of the modern world.

I have heard of a few philosophers of their day years back being considered "the most learned man in Europe". Not the smartest, but the most learned. Learned implies agency, smart implies something innate.

With the advent of IQ tests and the computer you get the brain as computer metaphor gone much too far.

Terence Tao has a 64 core threadripper, so if you are just using a 4 core i5 don't even bother.

Then of course if you believe an i5 is basically worthless it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy even though for most tasks both would be plenty fast enough.

I don't personally see a solution other than student loan money being much harder to get.

There is so much bad research because there are too many researchers.

For myself, I think I am smart enough to have worked on a PhD in economics but not smart enough to have done anything worthwhile or to have advanced the field. I am certain I would not have. Then in the face of this massive student loan debt I would have produced junk research and try to game the system to make the investment worthwhile. The incentives are all ridiculous in the current system for most.

The idea politicians will cut student loan money in order to produce better scientific research would be a good way to optimize for losing an election.

Personally, I don't think there is a way out. If anything it probably just gets worse.

Anything that starts with "no..xyz" is always bullshit IMO written for an audience of morons.

I question how valuable the ontology is even once you come up with it.

It seems to me if the idea behind all this was that valuable, it would have transformed banking in the 2000s and all banks would currently run on Palantir products.

Like the graph for songs in the example, Palantir always seems like some some kind of technological theatrical performance to convince non-tech people that it is more than it really is.

The nail that sticks out gets hammered down!

These people shouldn't complain when their is no creativity left in society.

I almost never put my camera on. I think people mostly like turning their camera on to show off their home office, living room or book case. Beyond that, there is just no point. It is a distraction overall.

Business meetings in headsets is just completely delusional. It is one of the dumbest tech ideas of all time.

I just think these are the thoughts of old people.

The creative mediums of the day are tiktok videos and video games.

It is the same line of thought from back in the day that the electric guitar is just noise, people should play a "real" instrument like the clarinet!

Rap is just noise, they aren't even singing! People should play a "real" instrument like the electric guitar.

Tiktok is not art! I am talking "real" art like Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol's movie Sleep. No one is making REAL art like that anymore I tell ya.

Maybe for a very short amount of time.

I suspect this quickly will be like specializing in the repair of cheap, Chinese made desk lamps from Walmart.

If the cheap desk lamp breaks, you don't pay someone to fix it. You buy another one and often it will be a newer , better model. That is the value proposition.

Of course, the hand crafted, high end desk lamp will be better but if you just want some light, for many use cases, the cheap option will be good enough.

Totally agree the difference is in the scaling properties.

On the other hand, I look around the room I am in and it is filled mostly with "low quality" Chinese made products. While you can't compare these products to expensive, expertly crafted, high end products, there is another scaling law at play when it comes to price. The low quality Chinese products are so cheap that I don't even consider the more expensive options. When the low quality desk lamp is close enough and 20x cheaper than the well made desk lamp, there is no decision point for me.

If it breaks, I will just buy another one.

That is the base style. You can get much different image qualities adding different types of film, cameras, etc to the prompt.

With that said, I loved Midjourney a year ago but I am at the point I have seen enough AI art to last several lives.

AI art reminds me of eating wasabi. It is absolutely amazing at first but I quickly get totally sick of it.

You can't be using KDE Plasma then.

I don't even know how to access the KDE Plasma help because it is just so easy to use.

I am writing this on a $500 ASUS Vivobook that came with Windows 11. The hardest thing was making the KDE thumb drive because Windows kept giving me a blue screen of death.

Once installed everything just works.

IMO the unreasonable uselessness of LLMs is because for most tasks involving language the accuracy needs to be unbelievably high to have any real value at all.

We just don't have that.

We have autocomplete on steroids and many people are fooling themselves that if you just take more steroids you will get better and better results. The metaphor is perfect because if you take more and more steroids you get less and less results.

It is why in reality we have had almost no progress since April 2023 and chatGPT 4.

I am not a software engineer and these tools allow me to make a giant mess of an app in a weekend that kind of does what I want but I only get that weekend. Once I come back to it after any length of time, since I have no idea what I am doing or what is going on it is impossible to update or add to the app without breaking it.

Now I have all these new ideas but I am back to square one because it just seems easier to start over.

I look forward to more powerful models in the future but I do wonder if it will just mean I can get slightly farther and make an even larger mess of an app in a weekend that I have no way to add to or update without breaking.

The main utility seems like it would be for content creation to pretend I made an app with all these great features as a non-software engineer but conveniently leave out the part about it being impossible to update.

50 years ago at my elementary school playground in the US I remember a scorching reflective metal slide that would slide you right into pool of mud.

I haven't seen one of these slides in America in at least 30 years. Any new playground I have seen is made of plastic and/or wood but I guess that doesn't get the clicks.

I kind of remember the Turing Test was a big deal for some 70+ years.

We should have known that once we pass the Turing Test it would almost instantly become as passe as Deep Blue beating Kasparov on the road to general intelligence.

I am taking a break from my LLM subscriptions right now for the first time to gain some perspective and all I miss it for is as a code assistant. I would also miss it for learning another human language. It seems unsurprising that large language models use cases are with automated language. What is really surprising is how very limited the use cases for automated language seems to be.

All the actual creative people I know don't care what other people are doing. What other people are doing is usually a sign of what not to do if you want to be creative.

"Creatives" so strongly against AI art I suspect are not creative at all. They are the same class of people who are so uncreative that the entire internet looks almost exactly the same, even though you could basically do anything.

We don't call the person on the Ikea furniture assembly line "creative".

With that said, I am bored to tears with the output of generative AI art on its own. It is like taking a 4 bar beat sample generator for music and looping the output 100 times creates a pretty boring song. Someone actual creative though can see that the beat sample generator can be used for the base material for something interesting musically.

Of course the creative fraud is going to be afraid of something new and happy if things stay uncreative and the same.

I think the entire idea is fatally flawed.

My experience is that the best music is found randomly. I like so much, I don't even know what I really like. Even what I like is always changing. I need to listen to ton of random things I don't like and I will find a small amount of gems. The absolute gold though is finding songs I didn't even know I would like.

The algorithmic version of sifting through records at a record store for a music lover is random. Random with an easy way to play the next song.

All these recommendation systems are just Satie's musique d'ameublement generators for non-music lovers. Furniture music generators, music to play during a dinner to create a background atmosphere for that activity.

Many people are just interested in expert credentialism and expert theatrical performance for an audience though.

If you really want to know a subject well beyond theater, you obviously would have to know many adjacent subjects and many seemingly unrelated subjects since "subjects" in this context are just imaginary divisions within human knowledge.

If your interest is credentialism though then the unrelated subjects are just a complete waste of time and most likely the adjacent subjects are just a distraction from memorizing your lines for the theatrical "subject matter expert" performance.

It is really a question of the best way to pretend to be a great mind when you are average and that is to specialize to a degree that minimizes the amount of people who know what you are talking about on the subject of interest.

We have built an entire class of society on this method.

I would say it is a completely underhanded way to negotiate and I love negotiating. The only good answer to that bullshit question is "The maximum you are willing to pay". Then you can start over with a real negotiation.

The best way to understand the company culture is by what is asked on the interview and what the person doing the interview is like.

This question tells you everything you need to know about the company culture and that it is not going to be a good experience.