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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2022

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  • I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

    Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
    And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

    I guess, what I’m saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.


  • It’s a thing here in Europe. I’m guessing, because our walls are generally concrete, we usually either throw on decorative plaster or a wallpaper, to make it feel a bit warmer and have a uniform surface which accepts paint more readily.

    It’s even quite common that if you rent an appartment, that the walls have wallpaper on them, which is painted with a fresh coat of white paint every time someone moves out and the next folks move in.
    And then some people, after they move in, will just paint (some of) the walls in a different color, if they feel like not living in pure white…


  • Ah, true. Thanks.

    Theoretically, it was supposed to be pseudo-code, secretly inspired by Rust, but I did get that one mixed up.

    And I am actually even a fan of the word unwrap there, because it follows a schema and you can have your IDE auto-complete all the things you can do with an Option.
    In many of these other languages, you just get weird collections of symbols which you basically have to memorize and which only cover rather specific uses.



  • Normally, I would reply to the guy, because, you know, he’s a human being, but there’s so many replies, I doubt, he can actually read all of them and potentially someone else has already made that point.

    Anyways, I feel like something he kind of misses here is that many of us do it from a heartfelt place. Like, we’re all techies. We’ve all used commercial software to a point where we’ve grown so frustrated with it that we decided it is a waste of time.

    So, it’s not us saying “Why don’t you go and just have more time/money?”.
    Rather, it’s us saying “This thing is wasting your time? Here is a solution that I felt wasted less time in the long run.”.

    Yes, sometimes that does miss the mark, because not every complaint is looking for a solution. Or because we may be frustrated with restrictions of commercial software, which are not a problem for less techy people. Or even because we’re embedded in this tech world and are hoping to make it a better place, which someone just quickly visiting may not care about.

    But other times, I do just happen to know a lot about technology and a non-techy genuinely did not know about the solution I suggested and is actually really appreciative of me bringing it up. It does happen. And it’s not easy to discern who would appreciate a suggestion and who won’t.








  • May I introduce you to the concept of Microsoft Excel?

    One time, someone from HR asked me, if I could help them with an Excel formula. So, I quickly looked up how to do something like that in Excel, adapted it as needed on my laptop, then sent it to them. And well, it didn’t work on their system, because I coded it in English, whereas their OS was in German.





  • Somewhat tangential, but USB-C docking stations, as useful as it is to have everything in one cable, it can also be annoying.

    At the office, I often just want to charge my laptop with them, but they also give me a wired internet connection, which, thanks to corporate networking shitfuckery, doesn’t work. So, every time I plug in, I have to disable that wired connection.

    Also, recently a colleague had problems getting her headset working when she was plugged into certain docks, ultimately due to a bug in the OS.
    Like, alright, that should be fixed in the OS, but that USB-C dock doesn’t even have a speaker attached to it. It’s completely useless that it shows up as an audio device.
    And even after we found a workaround to fix her headset, she will now have to switch over her audio device every time she plugs into a dock.

    So, basically it’s now one step to plug in the cable, but potentially multiple steps to undo half of what you unwillingly plugged in…


  • Yeah, problem is that I’m not aware of anyone who actually writes octal numbers as “OCT123” nor decimal numbers as “DEC123”. It’s basically a made-up syntax, supposed to look plausible for both date notation and number system notation. It’s part of the joke, which LLMs won’t understand.