DaftyduxWhat is your "hunch"?
toomanypancakesYears of shrimp posture
gigastasioI have long suspected - and I don’t know where real music historians stand on this - that a few of the pieces of music attributed to Mozart were actually written by his sister.
jestho
Mister NeonThat the investor class in America has been panicking for about a decade because there hasn’t been a technological innovation on the same level as the smart phone in that time.
brimfield
justdaveisfineThis is a random one: (I have no clue if this is backed in any real science or history as I haven’t not looked it up)
I suspect the myth of mermaids (with lower half fish and upper half human) stemmed from woman divers along coastal regions, who wouldn’t have had any swimming clothes and so would likely be doing so undressed (or only slightly dressed) and likely obscured by the water.
I could also see the part of the myth that mermaids drown sailors as more or less of a ‘don’t mess with them’ warning to people on the ships in case they decided to go check it out or start to stare a little too hard and not focus on what they’re supposed to be doing.
Nah, sailors wanted to fuck seals.
AstroLightzAbout 160° (~2.79 rad). Been slouching too much and need to fix my posture.
Approximately 30% of any population anywhere in the world are utter and complete fuckwads.
forty2That AI will fizzle out. It will have niche uses, but for most of us it won’t be nearly as pervasive (or useful) as we’re being led to believe.
Mostly I think we’re going to get refined advertising algorithms and photo-realistic porn.
I actually use ai on a daily basis. Not LLM’s mind you, those tend to be garbage. But where ai actually shines is automating mundane tasks. I trained it on how I like to color grade my photos and videos, and now instead of spending hours, sometimes days, for bigger projects color grading, now it’s 30 minutes to an hour.
So yes the majority of the ai use cases will fizzle out, but it will stick around in areas where it automates workflows.
AceFuzzLordFor context before I spout my hunch, within the past maybe month or so, someone who worked as a news hostess in the US had her mother kidnapped and hasn’t been found and/or returned yet ( dead or alive ) with no arrests so far.
Given the general climit in the US right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if the person who did it knew exactly who they were kidnapping and did it out of spite/hatred for this news hostess. Especially since, IIRC, this happened in Texas.
As to what has happened to the mother since, that’s up for debate since there’s basically not much evidence in the case besides a doorbell camera showing the man coming, mask on with a gun, and trying to block the camera with his hand. That’s the latest I heard.
That happened in Tucson Arizona homie.
I haven’t been keeping up with it, so thanks for the heads up.
Obviously.
With the past couple weeks I have had, I haven’t had time to catch up on that specific news. Between dealing with having been in a car crash and studying for winter quarter finals, it’s been hard for me to find the energy to follow up on this kidbapping.
That the reason imperial Europe had such a huge and lasting impact on the world was because Europe was playing on a harder difficulty than everyone else.
Europe was functionally foodless when it comes to agricultural with next to no edible plants native to the region, most of their crop foods were imported from Eurasia. Boar were as lethal as the wolves and the wolves besieged cities. The living conditions were functional perfect petri dishes that bred so many massive plagues that they accidentally biowarfared the Americas, they literally didn’t consider the diseases they had as bad enough to leave those guys home. The history of constant warfare in Europe had them so invested in finding new ways to kill each other that they hit the iron age while the Americas were still in stone age despite being an older population.
In contrast, we’re finding out that all the “wasted land” in the US used to be curated foraging gardens. Whole forests regularly maintained by the natives to provide food year round with minimal labor for an exponentially larger population. The great planes tribes maintained a migratory lifestyle that was far less work than the farming efforts we use now. Conflict was frequent, but never to the level that needed technological advancements like Europe.
So when Europeans finally got out of their squalid hell hole, anyone not on their level, which was really just china, was solidly out classed. What was india going to do? They were solidly in the bronze age and fighting an enemy that’s very arival might kill villages with disease alone and they never had to fight an enemy that could host long distance supply lines over seas which meant a counter offense could only ever push them out of the area but never back to the source in a way that could prevent them coming back. Like trying to play volleyball but your opponents can be on both sides of the net and you can’t. The Americas were even worse off, the Technological disparity made the fight entirely one sides.
Finally, Europe took this “git gud” mentality as proof that they were superior in every way, so they implemented their way of life everywhere they went. Those forage gardens were knocked over and burned to grow fields of low nutritional grains because that’s what worked in Europe. The European diet was pushed everywhere despite the local diet being better in most cases. The European work ethic became the standard with no realization that it was born out of desperately struggling to survive and adaptation to any other location would have greatly improved their quality of life.
And all of it still lasts to this day. Half of the things we classify as weeds are edible foods that were dietary staples. Our work life balance, sleep schedule, housing styles, land distribution, hierarchy, are all descendant of feudalism. The whole reason for the midwest dust bowl was because they tried to force Europeans farming tactics into the region with no consideration for the difference between regions.
Of course, I’m not a historian. It’s just a hunch. I’m a fan of history and it was an interesting comparison to see how closely the European exceptionalism mindset aligned with the souls like git gud attitude that a specific subset of gamers developed at the height of their popularity.
RaoulDuke
The Stoned HackerThis was a fascinating read. As someone with a strong disdain for European ideals (love the socialism, hate how they got there) I was ready to raise my pitchfork at fhe start but this… this makes sense. Europeans have a scarcity mindset and when they came to places that didnt need that as much they turned into the seagulls from finding nemo. And as a result they decimated my people and millions of other peoples across the globe like mine who seemed to have shit better figured out socially.
Honestly, having been learning a lot about Indigenous cultures in the Americas lately, even European socialism can be seen as done the hard way. Most of the north American tribes had a culture of meeting the needs of everyone. Native Mexicans had a social welfare system that effectively made care for the young and infirm a community activity.
Who could’ve known that community resources actually benefitted the community? What a radical and crazy idea it would never work
/s
whaleross
Maven (famous)Between Europeans and the Americans, the Americans lacked pack animals and a region which could create bronze. Also, due to the European exposure to pack animals and other reasons, lethal diseases went mainly from Europeans to the Americans instead of the other way around. It also isn’t a good sign when a foreign civilization has the technology to show up at your shores while your civilization doesn’t.
Between Europe and the rest of the Old World, Europe wasn’t able to colonize the rest of the old world until after the Industrial Revolution started. The Industrial Revolution started in Europe mainly due to increased state competition compared to other parts of the world and higher labor costs making capital investments worth it.
That if you’re amazed by how good/smart LLMs are, it’s because you’re well below average. LLMs are still incredibly stupid and bad at things.
I’m required to use LLMs for work (we have metrics and I’ve been told I should use AI daily) and while every once in a while they are useful (i.e. getting examples for stuff that has inadequate documentation) 99% of the time they just piss me off. The output and results are seldom what I want and rather than spend the time to direct it to do what I want I’d often rather just do the work myself. Furthermore when my coworkers send me PRs that are obviously AI the code quality is pretty shit and usually doesnt actually accomplish what we need in a way that makes sense. As someone who has invested a lot of time in improving my coding ability and knowledge I see AI code and it makes me whince.
I’m sorry they’re forcing it on you. That’s unfortunate. You might send them this reasoning section:
sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/#Reasonin…
in an attempt to change their minds.
There are additional links in the More Info section at the bottom that provide supporting evidence.
Ah it’s fine my boss told me that interacting with the AI is enough and that he doesnt care if I’m just asking it the weather. It’s a large publicly traded company and the AI push is coming from a lot higher up the change so sadly theres not much i could do to affect the situation.
Use your time complaining to the AI about using the AI, or write a Markov bot to do the work for you.
If they just want you to burn tokens, maybe see how well the LLM handles raw /dev/urandom-style output
Popular take here on Lemmy for sure., but just doesn’t really say much. They are as capable as they are. There are objective measurements. A qualitative statement about smart or good just isn’t that useful. If you aren’t impressed by the technology, fine.
For me, I think the field is interesting. But I won’t let my hatred of billionaires or worker subjugation cloud my judgement about interesting technologies. There is a difference between “This is going to be bad and exploitative” and burying one’s head in the sand and repeating the “they aren’t good” trope.
imo, llm doing well and being good would be worse situation that what is currently going on.
Imagine how much more power billionaires would get over everything? They could up the prices and people would just have to accept it because they soon couldnt live without llm, they could influence people by manipulating the hidden prompt, they could just threaten to cut off anyone they want, have access to any system their llm is connected to. The current censorship could be extended to anything they like too. And people would just lap all that up and call anyone speaking against it a conspiracy theorist or whatever.
I’m not just repeating it. That is my first hand judgment of their abilities.
I am a professional software developer, and I have been told by way too many people that these models are amazing at writing code, and yet every time I’ve seen the code they write, it has been unimpressive at best and absolute dog shit at worst. I was writing better code as a college sophomore.
It makes sense though. They’re trained on everyone’s code, and the vast majority of code available for them to steal is absolute dog shit.
The developers who look at their code and don’t see any problems are developers who themselves write dog shit code.
You’re just objectively wrong. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you can see their raw objective scores across numerous software engineering metrics.
I’m a programmer that’s been in the business for decades. That doesn’t make me any more correct than you. I have seen it write some impressive things at impressive speeds. If you haven’t that’s fine. You just haven’t seen it work then. But it doesn’t matter what I have seen or what you’ve seen. What matters are data, and the data are clear when it comes to ability.
Not ability per unit water consumed, dollar spent, or per unit power consumed, but ability nevertheless.
Ok lol
My very first conspiracy theory: Space fuckery. I’ll lay out the dots and you can connect them.
On the morning of March 19 or 20, I observed what I was certain at the time was my first meteor sighting. This was in the greater Dallas area.
Skip to Sunday I found a story about meteor sightings reported in Houston and other areas. The sightings were from the previous day, March 21.
Since last weekend there have been further meteor reports across the US.
On Thursday March 26 there was a visible missile launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force station.
This is all in good fun for me. But with this administration and the blunders in Iran, it won’t surprise me to learn later that they had something to do with it.
That putting lead in gasoline decades ago fucked human progress and we’d have achieved much more by now if not for that.
Fun fact: The guy who invented leaded gasoline later went on to invent fridges that use CFCs as coolant (Thomas Midgley Jr). Probably the person who single-handedly had the worst impact on the environment in all of history.
Too many people asked “can we do this thing?” when they should have been asking “should we do this thing?”
Too many people asked “can we do sell this thing?” when they should have been asking “should we do sell this thing?”
Captain AggravatedHe got polio and was bedridden, and he came up with this hoist system of pulleys and ropes to move himself around with, which went wrong and strangled him. So at least his death was sufficiently hilarious.
muxikaTL; DR: some people are just animals that believe in nothing.
Idea: what most divides us from other animals isn’t thinking, consciousness, or the ability to create tools to adapt. It’s belief. Not in a higher power, but in existential drive. I think it shows a level of intelligence that sets us apart as a species.
Hunch: some people are too stupid for this, and are closer to other animals than they are to us. They don’t believe in anything. Decisions are made by instinct and self preservation above all.
I’d imagine that, if you were to analyze their genes, they might have traits from “another branch of the family tree.”
What do you think existential drive is?
The reason it feels like we’re slaves no matter how much technology improves is incredibly simple, but invisible: money can’t be created unless an equal amount of debt is also created.
This mathematically ensures that life is a game of musical chairs at all times. Interest serves to model the missing chairs.
I’m not crazy and I’ve never heard of it as a conspiracy theory but personally I’m not 100% convinced about Labrador, Canada. The only pictures I can find of the place are either pictures of scenery that could be anywhere, extremely generic, or low-resolution aerial shots of settlements, nothing that concretely convinces me it exists. I know it’s remote and sparsely populated, but there are more remote, less populated places that I can get normal pictures showing daily life a lot more easily.
That’s pretty typical of the pictures I can find; nothing that shows any culture or lifestyle that couldn’t be mocked up in a moment.
Compare, for example, an image search for Tristan da Cunha (a far more remote, less populated, and less visitable place than Labrador) with one for Labrador, Canada. Most of the images you get back from the Labrador search featuring buildings will actually be of Newfoundland because of search engine algorithms these days so discard those. The Tristan da Cunha pictures show people and life, even if they’re mainly of tourists, but the Labrador pictures are all like that one at best.
It would be impossible to find a picture that both shows daily life, and also has proof in the picture that it’s actually from Labrador. But this is true for any sparsely populated place. And especially in cold climates, daily life just doesn’t happen outside a lot anyway.
A sign saying Labrador to me is less proof to me than a body of pictures documenting the culture; and I don’t necessarily mean artistic or traditional culture, it could be streets, houses, road-signs, shops, infrastructure, etc. that have features that rule out it being anywhere else, that’s what’s lacking. If Tristan da Chunha is a bad example, you could try Greenland (only double the population of Labrador but sparser), which is even colder.
Israel had a larger hand in Benghazi than is being let on and Israeli intelligence provided Republicans with a lot of intel regarding the attack as Obama was starting to rift with Israel on how to handle the Middle East.
bizarrolandI have a hunch that there’s something fucky with passkeys, and it’s gonna turn out to be a security and or privacy nightmare in the near future.
Passkeys are just public and private keys. They have been securing the internet for decades.
The something fucky is that is just centralized public-private key pairs. There’s no need for centralizing that under corporarions. Actually, you lose one of the big featues of public key cryptography.
It’s just a power grab from corpos