• 21 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • The most effective method of protesting would be to find a way to get the masses to turn against the lawmakers in such a way that they convince the lawmakers to solve the problem that the protest is focused against.

    But most of these protests just piss off the masses. They run their day with traffic, they destroy heritage sites that people care about, and while they do get in the news and get some publicity, people’s memory is quite negative. And there are zero focus on anybody who could actually change the situation.







  • This Wired article is an interesting read, well worth the time.

    I wish we could see into the head of Stockton Rush a little bit more. The job of all entrepreneurs is to a large degree knowing who to listen to and who to ignore, as well as figuring out which rules you can break. Usually the lives of passengers and yourself is not on the line, though and that’s why so many of the highly competent engineers left his team.

    A lot of his decision making seemed money driven. He got quotations for testing services but declined because of the cost. Salvaging the old titanium rings from the old busted hull to use on the new hull was a risky choice but new ones were surely very expensive. Perhaps a much larger budget would have led to a more committed team of experts and the resources to test things to a higher degree of confidence.

    As this article points out, OceanGate just never came up with a design that was good enough for the job at hand.

    But what can you say. The ocean floor is littered with countless dreams.


  • Of all the billionaires who do exist Bill and Melinda would probably agree with you. Bill has been pretty clear that he always played the game to win but he’s also stated he intends to give it all away and he’s openly recruiting other billionaires to give it all away as well.

    I suppose evil billionaires could give it away to make the world a worse plCe, say by developing something like sharks with lasers on their heads, But again in these guys case they’re giving it away to help eliminate malaria around the world.

    If all billionaires were like Bill and the Melinda I suppose the world would be a significantly better place.







  • If you deposit your money at a bank, or PayPal, or some online digital bank transfer service,** you do not have your money anymore.** They have your money.

    Now you have some kind of contract that says they’ll give you your money on demand. But sometimes they won’t give it to you when you want it. If any judge or cop wants to see every person or business I’ve ever transacted with the bank will happily give it over.

    On the other hand, cash is cash. If I possess it, then I have it. And nobody gets to know how much, or how suspicious, or with whom I’m transacting.



  • One of the best things ever about LLMs is how you can give them absolute bullshit textual garbage and they can parse it with a huge level of accuracy.

    Some random chunks of html tables, output a csv and convert those values from imperial to metric.

    Fragments of a python script and ask it to finish the function and create a readme to explain the purpose of the function. And while it’s at it recreate the missing functions.

    Copy paste of a multilingual website with tons of formatting and spelling errors. Ask it to fix it. Boom done.

    Of course, the problem here is that developers can no longer clean their inputs as well and are encouraged to send that crappy input straight along to the LLM for processing.

    There’s definitely going to be a whole new wave of injection style attacks where people figure out how to reverse engineer AI company magic.




  • I think the rules are typically negotiable in advance, especially when it’s down to just 2 contenders.

    Debates have the potential to show more than eloquence or intelligence, they also show soft skills like whether the candidate can control the conversation, control under pressure, how easily they succumb when bullied, and give the audience an opportunity to read their body language, which may develop (or remove) trust.

    Biden famously told Trump in a debate: “would you shut up, man?” And in that moment quite a few Americans were swayed to select him believing he’s not susceptible to getting run over by trump mouth diarrhea attack like so many other politicians are.