++this.

If you're already driving around with a mask and a gun kidnapping people, why not get some extra money on the side with robbery?

I once did some programming on the Cybiko, a device from 2000 that could form a wireless mesh network with peers. The idea was that you could have a shopping mall full of teens and they'd be able to chat with each other from one end to the other by routing through the mesh. It was a neat device!

There's a lot of externalizing of costs going on. The trucks are idling because the drivers are operating at the slimmest possible margin under the assumption that idling doesn't cost anything.

What we actually would want to get to is that idling does have a cost (environmental, health, pleasantness of the area, etc). And that cost ought to be passed up the chain so that the various goods being shipped are more expensive.

But without a more centrally-managed economy, the implementation is to put all the pressure on the truck drivers and leave them responsible for passing that pressure to the next step up the chain. It doesn't work out very well in practice because the drivers need to make a bunch of capital expenses for something like adding a cab AC and adding a batter-powered lift, but they've been operating at low margins so they're not in a position to do it.

A year ago, I saw some local work being done on city pipes. The team was using a bot with three telescoping radial wheeled legs like

\   /
 \ /
  O
  |
  |

and wheels at the end of each leg. They put it in one end of the pipe, extended the legs so the wheels touched, and then drove it around in the pipe.

It was a welding device, so they could do spot-fixes from the inside.

I think key context is that the guy is representing himself as having special knowledge about what Signal is doing internally and what they'll do next.

It's not "you bump into some rando on the street. Don't you know she's CEO of Signal??"

It's "you're giving a Ted Talk about Signal. The woman in the front row offers a correction and you're like, 'shut up, dummy.'"

I'm downvoting because of your edit complaining about down-votes.

Iran's not shooting missiles in defense of Palestine, just in retaliation for Israel shooting at them.

But there's certainly a level of "oh, is blowing up an apartment building a bad thing? Then WTF have you doing???"

This is good advice for all tertiary sources such as encyclopedias, which are designed to introduce readers to a topic, not to be the final point of reference. Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, provides overviews of a topic and indicates sources of more extensive information.

The whole paragraph is kinda FUD except for this. Normal research practice is to (get ready for a shock) do research and not just copy a high-level summary of what other people have done. If your professors were saying, "don't cite encyclopedias, which includes Wikipedia" then that's fine. But my experience was that Wikipedia was specifically called out as being especially unreliable and that's just nonsense.

I personally use ChatGPT like I would Wikipedia

Eesh. The value of a tertiary source is that it cites the secondary sources (which cite the primary). If you strip that out, how's it different from "some guy told me..."? I think your professors did a bad job of teaching you about how to read sources. Maybe because they didn't know themselves. :-(

I think it was. When I think of Wikipedia, I'm thinking about how it was in ~2005 (20 years ago) and it was a pretty solid encyclopedia then.

There were (and still are) some articles that are very thin. And some that have errors. Both of these things are true of non-wiki encyclopedias. When I've seen a poorly-written article, it's usually on a subject that a standard encyclopedia wouldn't even cover. So I feel like that was still a giant win for Wikipedia.

I think the academic advice about Wikipedia was sadly mistaken. It's true that Wikipedia contains errors, but so do other sources. The problem was that it was a new thing and the idea that someone could vandalize a page startled people. It turns out, though, that Wikipedia has pretty good controls for this over a reasonable time-window. And there's a history of edits. And most pages are accurate and free from vandalism.

Just as you should not uncritically read any of your other sources, you shouldn't uncritically read Wikipedia as a source. But if you are going to uncritically read, Wikipedia's far from the worst thing to blindly trust.

I don't think the article summarizes the research paper well. The researchers gave the AI models simple-but-large (which they confusingly called "complex") puzzles. Like Towers of Hanoi but with 25 discs.

The solution to these puzzles is nothing but patterns. You can write code that will solve the Tower puzzle for any size n and the whole program is less than a screen.

The problem the researchers see is that on these long, pattern-based solutions, the models follow a bad path and then just give up long before they hit their limit on tokens. The researchers don't have an answer for why this is, but they suspect that the reasoning doesn't scale.

They said "please stop donating". Returning funds or organizing what to do with them is a bunch of work. If they're shutting down because running the instance is too much work and they feel hassled then I wouldn't begrudge them just keeping the few thousand left over.

Thanks for linking that. Reading the paper, it looks like the majority of the "self-host" population they're capturing is people who have a WordPress site. By my reading, the wording of the paper would disqualify a wordpress.com-hosted site as "self-hosted". But I'd be very suspicious of their methodology and would expect that quite a few people who use WP-hosted reported as self-hosted because the language is pretty confusing.

Some people think, "oh this witch leaving a note means she's really powerless and I can keep taking the rhubarb." It's not going to be so awesome when she forecloses on his first-born.

I don't understand how you think this works.

If I say, "now we have robots that can build a car from scratch!" the automakers will be salivating. But if my robot actually cannot build a car, then I don't think it's going to cause mass layoffs.

Many of the big software companies are doing mass layoffs. It's not because AI has taken over the jobs. They always hired extra people as a form of anti-competitiveness. Now they're doing layoffs to drive salaries down. That sucks and tech workers would be smart to unionize (we won't). But I don't see any radical shift in the industry.

To be honest, you sound like you're only just starting to learn to code.

Will coding forever belong to humans? No. Is the current generative-AI technology going to replace coders? Also no.

The reaction you see is frustration because it's obvious to anyone with decent skill that AI isn't up to the challenge, but it's not obvious to people who don't have that skill and so we now spend a lot of time telling bosses "no, that's not actually correct".

Someone else referenced Microsoft's public work with Copilot. Here's Copilot making 13 PRs over 5 days and only 4 ever get merged you might think "30% success is pretty good!" But compare that with human-generated PRs and you can see that 30% fucking sucks. And that's not even looking inside the PR where the bot wastes everyone's time making tons of mistakes. It's just a terrible coworker and instead of getting fired they're getting an award for top performer.

Makes sense.

For a reference point: I'm a millennial, living in a pretty liberal state of the US. Reading the front page of Reddit (not logged in, running ad-blockers so I think I get a "generic" experience), Ars Technica, occasional HackerNews threads, Something Awful forums. My friend circles are unanimous that Israel is an apartheid state, Russia is an invader, immigrants are not any kind of problem. It includes a few trans people who are vocal about their experiences. I would not call it a radically progressive group. For example, I don't think most of them would actually be comfortable with mass-executions of wealthy people.

Before joining Lemmy, I'd never encountered "tankies" in enough quantity for them to have any kind of label or for anyone to self-identify as "anti-tankie". It's still a weird idea to me.

Commercial software has advertising: people whose job is to advertise it. That means TV and web ads for Bluesky, influencers talking about it. It also means a team of software engineers building parts of the system specifically to draw people in, whereas non-commercial software often rejects that (lack of infinite-scroll on Lemmy's default UI, for example).

Activity Pub also requires a different mind-set that doesn't exist elsewhere on the internet today. You need to decide which instance to join, or maybe to host your own instance. But it doesn't really matter, because you can federate with other instances. But you have to drive some of that federation, so it does matter a little. It's pretty complex and confusing and its a problem that only exists in this one niche of software.

Bluesky gives you an infinite feed that feels like you're connected to the entire Internet without you doing any work. I think the AP service are doing really well, considering what they're up against.

immediately shut up about this evil as soon as Biden took office

Citation needed.

Every single person I know who reluctantly voted for Biden spent the next 4 years complaining constantly. Online forums were full of liberals calling Biden "basically a Republican". Plenty of news stories covered how more progressive Democrats felt Biden wasn't doing enough.

I had this mouse and liked it. You rest the heel of your hand on the table and don't move your wrist at all. The mouse movement is fingers-only. Acceleration allows you to cover the entire screen with this very small amount of movement, and because it's all fingers it's highly accurate.

And like all ball-mice, it had a built-in fidget toy.