• 5 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2024

help-circle
  • isaacd@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe Generative AI Con.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    6 days ago

    “If we run terabytes of text through a statistical model, then spend millions of man-hours labeling outputs, we can approximate the way humans respond to a prompt.” –OpenAI, more or less

    Wow, what a surprise. I’ll do you one better: if you take me to a river, I can tell you where the water is going to go next! Maybe we can get some VC money by promising to deliver clean water to every business in the world without all the expense of pipelines and plumbers? I mean, just look at all this water. It may not go where you want right now, but let us dump sewage in it for a couple years and who knows what it’ll do.




  • As this thread demonstrates, there are plenty of ways to say “I’m doing terrible, actually” without breaking the social contract. If I’m having an awful day, my go-to is “hangin’ in there, how are you?”

    The last part is important. Some people don’t want to talk about how you’re doing (maybe they don’t have the emotional bandwidth at the moment, maybe they’re in a hurry, maybe they just don’t care) so give them an out, a clear signal of something else they can discuss without seeming rude. The easiest way is to return the question, but you can also just jump into the imminent topic of conversation, like:

    “How are you?”

    “Keeping on keeping on. Hey, just wanted to reach out about that thing on page 4, do you have a minute?”

    Or if they started the conversation and you don’t know what it’s about, there’s always “Takin’ it one day at a time, eh? What can I do for you?”

    The biggest “risk” of this approach is that someone may offer sympathy or ask you what happened, which is a whole new set of protocols. But for me it’s worth it to not have to lie.





  • This is a great concept. I hope it catches on.

    I participate in a pledge called #50forFOSS. On the first Friday of every month, I choose an open source project and give the maintainer $50, no strings attached. It lets me target small projects that may not have a lot of users, but are valuable to me, as well as bigger ones with more expenses. My mindset these days is that I need to insist on paying for the software I use, because if I don’t, someone else will (i.e. advertisers and venture capitalists, which is bad) or no one else will (i.e. abandonware, which is worse).

    Disclaimer: I started #50forFOSS and there’s a very small group of us who are doing it.





  • Only tangentially related, but the cheapest (by weight and per unit) type of hamburger patties at my local Costco this month are Impossible Burgers.

    If you’re not familiar with these, they’re completely vegan, made from soy protein, but the texture and flavor is almost identical to beef. They cook like beef, taste like beef, and “bleed” like beef. And (for a few weeks, at least) they’re cheaper than beef.

    That’s a new and exciting sandwich IMO.











  • Back during the real estate frenzy of the late 2010s I would get calls all the time asking how much I would sell my house for. I’d say “I could probably let it go for 2 million dollars.” (Even at the ridiculous peak, it was never worth more than 750k.) There would be a few seconds of silence on the line while they actually looked up my house. Then they’d say “oh.” And hang up as fast as humanly possible.