soiltype

Oh, you don't know what bigotry is.

That's pretty much how I use it for software too. I don't want it to make stuff for me. I do want it to unblock me when I feel stuck unraveling something arcane.

I didn't call that commenter an LLM, despite what I'd consider an embarrasing lack of mental model of what it means for a speculative fiction novel to age poorly. Who am I bigoted against?

What are you talking about? Bigotry against a program that's literally incapable of understanding semantic meaning?

To say "anticlanker" sounds like you hate LLMs, or do you approve of them and you use that term disparagingly? I am not "anticlanker" I'm just a person who is aware that unscrupulous people very very frequently have LLMs generate comments and posts for them

I've often dreamed of and revisited this idea. I first started thinking of it seriously when I realized I was paying the same rent in February as in January despite a significantly shorter-than-mean (30.4375) month...!

My ideal year is 12 months, each 5 weeks long, each week 6 days long. At the summer solstice, 3 intercalary days (bank holidays), at the winter solstice, 2 or 3 intercalary days depending on leap year.

The rowdy Venetians beating the shit out of each other came from a society with strict rules about honor and dueling, and they dueled over honor.

You're doing exactly the thing you described at the top of your comment.

TFA explicitly mentions that participants would regularly sneak deadly weapons into the fights and had to be policed.

I also don't think street fights are particularly honorable at all. They literally were just deciding disputes by a combination of force and deception (which plays a role in all combat) rather than communication, compromise, cooperation, diplomacy, empathy, or any other virtue. Slashing a critic's throat doesn't make your viewpoints valid it just makes them unchallenged.

Weirdly favored, if it is an LLM. Of course bad actors will be training them out of the obvious rhetorical tells, but a complete lack of semantic reasoning will fortunately always be a valid reason to ignore or dismiss someone's arguments, human or chatbot.

Actually this is a very interesting comment so I do want to continue to engage. Thanks for not rising to my tone, I suppose.

So you admitted that the public purse and what it is willing to pay to commission for public art is useful measure of a pseudoscientific constant

No I did no such thing. I said rich people paid for art they wanted to exist in the past and still do today. It measures nothing.

I'm not sure that fountains of human excrement convey the grandeur that your attributing to modern art however.

You've quite missed my point if you're looking for grandeur in it. I see an artist pushing the boundaries of art. Your questioning of its value is the value (or, part of it).

we so far have not.

That can't be stated definitively even if we limit ourselves to large-scale painting. But of course, we have far more media available to us today than 2D paintings and other traditional art forms. Breathable tanks of piss, films, video games - none of these existed in the 17th century. And each of them is capable of evoking great emotions, greater even than looking at a painting of a hundred Venetians beating the shit out of each other. You've never watchec a movie that left you feeling awe? Ah, even the piss? Sure. What if it was a thousand women in a tank of piss? Use your imagination - that's what art is about.

In archeology there is a constant and agreed upon "decadent" style that can indicate when cultures have experienced conditions, for external or internal reasons, that ultimately led to their decline and downfall

I have never in my life heard of this claimed in an academic setting - only from retro-fetishist cranks, if you'll pardon me saying, making some "hard times create strong men" argument (which can't be entertained, being ahistorical). Nor can I think of any such phenomenon in ancient Greco-Roman history from Mycenae to the Visigoths. Are you able to expand on that?

those with the means to produce it don't have any great emotions.

Actually, re-reading your original post, this comes across as so asinine I do have to wonder if I'm replying to an LLM. Because it makes no sense to say that artists don't have emotions today that can compare to checks notes rowdy Venetians beating the shit out of each other.

I do not think this pseudo-intellectual desire to ape art styles of the past is really very compatible with the soul of an artist. Artists make two things: what moves them, and what they are paid to make. Ideally, these are the same thing.

No one is stopping you from commissioning paintings such as the ones you revere as the peak of art, by the way. Open your wallet if that's what you want. That's how great art was made back then. But if the depth of your insight on the human condition is whatever you're posting here, I do not know if your commissions would capture the meaning you seem to want.

You have the named displayed on your screen at the same time and you keep a straight face.

I can confidently say that house is not music.

Hey, this is really fucking stupid.

I have to assume that's intentional, lol

Rare is relative. Those changes all happened over much longer timescales and with far fewer species involved in a given ecosystem. It's not the same thing as what we're doing. You're making essentially the same argument as "Earth's climate has always been changing, what's the big deal?"

The big deal is that when a species becomes invasive, the effects can cascade. You don't just lose their direct competitors and their prey, you can lose anything they pollinate, nest in, are nested in, etc. You can replace a diverse ecosystem with a near-monoculture.

Of course, if you don't hold the fundamental belief that biodiversity is Good, and is Better than raw biomass increase, I see why this doesn't bother you, but I do hold that position.

This is absurd. Without human intervention, catastrophic boundary crossing by organisms is slow and rare. With humans, it happens at unsustainable scale. We all know what it looks like for an invasive species to dominate an ecosystem and crowd out existing niches, and that's what it means to introduce a species where it doesn't belong. Just because it can also happen without humans around doesn't mean what we're doing is no big deal.

Obscene is the right word because it's quite manageable in health terms, it just feels bad to you.

Aren't cities older than writing?

although it's true and funny that rich assholes often have terrible taste, it's important that criticism of pervert glasses doesn't make their ugliness load-bearing. what happens if the next gen looks good, we're suddenly okay with them?

Not everything has to be a culture war front.

This is seemingly spoken from an ignorant and insulated position. The victims of invasion don't get to decide whether or not they live on a war front, nor do the countless skilled and creative individuals losing their entire careers almost overnight.

By the way it's class war you're talking about, not culture war.

The point about the UI affordances strikes me as very relevant. I find that the way I want to use LLMs in coding is not available.

We have chatbots in a sidebar that will just generate code for you or, more helpfully, answer your questions. We also have inline LLM code completion, which I've turned off completely because they're incredibly noisy.

What I want is something between those. My ideal use of LLMs while coding would be, i start writing a function and need to act on some data. I don't know what method to use, maybe I'm in an unfamiliar language/framework and don't know what my options are. I want the AI to explain what methods I can call to do X in this specific place, no more, no less. It would need to know what outcome I want, which would be hard to do without jumping out of the code and typing into the chat, but I basically want it to function like Intellisense on steroids. Something that doesn't break my focus.

Current LLMs are anti-flow. For me, that's poison.

No

I misread that you were retracting "notable" and replacing it. I thought you were adding "it can't suck for any reason" to your definition.

Ok, that's an unusual definition of notable.

I mean I wasn't making any rhetorical argument. That part of the comment was just me musing.

What do you mean by notable?

The problems do diminish significantly if you need fewer lanes by half or more, and have fewer vehicles per person.

Low-density sprawl in the American style is impossible without cars. Streetcar suburbs could exist but those are necessarily more concentrated and again need less road coverage.

Nor can you say the sprawl is what people "actively want" when it's illegal to build to any other pattern in the vast majority of the country.

Guessing you're American is ad hominem?

Cars are not the solution to that. Hooligans and irritating people are just a possibility in literally every social environment, they always have been, and they always will be. Answers to that problem are social - it's a bigger problem in America than Japan, for exmaplem.

Answers which involve removing oneself from society (by entering a private car) are not good answers. And when you factor in the externalities, you're just displacing "I'm upset, possibly even unwell due to sleep lost" onto "we replaced 90% of the local natural environment with pavement and paint it with crushed human beings every single day".

Look I don't fault you - Americans drive cars because every alternative is absolute dogshit, I don't disagree. But I can't e realistic about that and not this:

As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment

That's like saying gunshots may sometimes be more dangerous than throwing rocks.

but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy

Even if this was true (I don't think either change is happening nearly fast enough) car-dependency is directly upstream of numerous other environmental problems, most of which don't disappear even if you take parking out of the mix, such as grounds heat and flooding caused by paved roads, such as obsession with energy- and water-inefficient low-density residential zoning (sprawl), such as particulate pollution from tires, such as ecosystem damage from the need to dump literal tons of salt on icy roads for tires to drive on, such as the emissions of road paving itself... you get the idea.

None. Why would you think that? My guess is you're an American living nowhere near an urban rail system but I thought most people here would at least be passing familiar with modern trains. Even some American cities have them.