I think my favorite thing is how people are out there reconsidering their programming careers and doing shit like quitting when you have a bunch of less than quality developers lazily deploying code they pulled out of the ass of an LLM which does no bounds checking, no input validation, none of that basic as can be security shit at all, they just end up deploying all that code to production systems facing the internet and then nobody notices because either the competent developers left for greener pastures or got laid off. I keep on telling people this is going to take like 5 or 10 years to untangle considering how hard it is in a lot of cases to fix code put into tons of stuff like embedded devices mounted up on a light pole or whatever that was considered good enough for a release, but I bet it'll be even more of a pain than that. These are after all security holes in devices that in many cases peoples day or life going well depends on.
What it has done so far for me is put copywriters out of a job. I still find it mostly useful for writing drivel that gets used as page filler or product descriptions for my ecommerce side jobs. Lately the image recognition capabilities lets me generate the kind of stuff I'd never write, which is instagram posts with tons of emojis and other things I'd never have the gumption to do myself but increases engagement. I actually used to use markov chain generator for this going back to 2016 though so the big difference here is that at least it can form more coherent sentences.
Oh I'm right in the middle of your first point. I'm going to have on my grave stone: "Never underestimate the reputation and financial damage a competent but lazy software developer can do with an incompetent LLM"
So what you're saying is that it's a good bullshit generator for marketing. That is fair :)
It's really excellent for that. I can give it an image of a product I'm trying to sell, and then say 'describe this thing but use a ton of marketing fluff to increase engagement and conversions' and it does exactly that.
There's tools out there to automatically do this with A/B testing and I think even stuff like shopify plugins, but I still do it relatively manually.
I'll use it for code sparingly for stuff like data transformations (Take this ridiculously flat, two table database schema and normalize it to the third normal form) but for straight up generating code to be executed I'm way more careful to make sure it isn't giving me or the people who get to use that code garbage. It isn't that bad for basic security audits actually and I suggest any devs reading this re-run their code through it with security related prompting to see if they missed anything obvious. The huge problem is that at least half of devs with deadlines to meet are apparently not doing this, and I get to see it in the drop in quality of pull requests within the past 5 years.
I find it a distraction on validation tasks. I prefer to know what the hell I am doing first and be able to qualify that as I work with test cases.
With respect to other engineers I haven't found any of our ML tools actually pick up anything useful yet from a code review.
On engagement, I saw a negative recently where someone started replacing banner images for events with AI generated content and their conversion to tickets plummeted. YMMV. People can spot it a mile off and they are getting better at it. I think the end game is soon.
> On engagement, I saw a negative recently where someone started replacing banner images for events with AI generated content and their conversion to tickets plummeted. YMMV. People can spot it a mile off and they are getting better at it.
Indeed.
I like this stuff, I have fun with it, I have no problem with others making and sharing pics they like just as I myself do… but when I notice it in the wild on packaging or advertising, it always makes me wonder: what other corners are getting cut?
(20 years ago, similar deal but with product art that had 3mm pixels and noticeable jpeg artefacts)
> I think the end game is soon.
Dunno. The models are getting better as well as the consumers noticing more — I've not seen Cronenberg fingers in a while now — and I don't know who will max out first, or when.
Were they trying to generate images for marketing creatives like that? People can notice what that looks like right away and it's repulsive for sure unless they can't tell. Text on the other hand is another story
I'm sorry but if you're bean-counting email co2 usage and coming up with a unit of like 15 grams of a physical substance per email then by that logic we should basically all go ted K luddite on our computers and phones, and simply throw them the fuck out the window right now. Imagine the pounds of CO2 I emit playing sonic the goddamn hedgehog why don't we.
I think environmentalists need to find more effective focuses than these if we want our goals to be achieved and for us to be taken remotely seriously
I agree. This is also the type of mentality that if one throws it out to the public makes everyone throw up their hands and say “do we worry about browsing the internet now? That’s a lot of CO2 too?”and then people get tired of worrying about it and just say “toss it all, I don’t care any longer”. There is fatigue that sets in when we’re supposed to constantly worry about everything so might as well worry about nothing and not fix the really big problems like where we source our energy from and getting rid of fossil fuels and the chemicals that corporations are trying to convince us are not that bad into our bodies. Now I gotta worry about emails and the most energy efficient file transfer methods? I don’t think so.
No matter the amount of CO2 emitted, can we agree emails and attachment produce a certain amount of it and that we could probably do better with alternate solutions than sending files by email. In that context, the idea behind firefox send was one possible way of being more efficient. That's all what I'm saying.
I can get behind that for sure. I often live in places with stuff like electricity shortages and I'm sure we could be doing more robust/better communications using all sorts of underutilized technologies and standards that already exist - I really like stuff like LoraWAN. However nitpicking on emails when there's way way way bigger consumers of electricity seems like the most distracted nonsense ever
You dont have to have the same goals, its pretty serious but also its ok in the grander scheme of things if you don't want to think about this stuff. This wasn't even about "messaging", it was just a thing with a nice environmental upshot. No reason to be defensive.
No seriously, just extrapolate that for a second and try to tell me with a straight face that all the gamer kids playing with whatever it takes to render a modern game, and by the logic I'm reading from that french article those kid are basically each a victorian age factory spewing out so much carbon gunk we're going to need to bring back chimney sweeps, like yeah I don't really think that the logic of restricting emails is going to change a lot when people are literally just out there playing video games.
I'm being "defensive" because as an environmentalist I think that we need to get real and target the real emitters. It's mostly military functions, international shipping, and still going and generating power in the first place using non renewable sources that maybe we should be focusing on rather than this BP-orchestrated carbon footprint bullshit that they foisted on people as a psyop to convince us that we're the problem that need to change
Right, but you're just offering fatalism back, right? Its fine, but that's not like an argument against it. Its just articulating the problem again but saying its impossible to solve.
No I'm offering that it's incredibly wrong to go bean counting email co2 usage when this is a dead end solution blaming end users for a problem caused by large corporations. It causes people to take environmentalism less seriously and doesn't change a thing for the greater good.
It's not letting me reply to your further comment but here's some links for you to really 'get it'
I'm a little confused. GP was simply pointing something out as maybe a good aspect of this kind of file transfer flow. It doesn't matter what "people think of environmentalism" in this case (and so many other cases). Environmentalism != the environment. Nobody was chastising you for having too big an email attachment.
In general I dont get this line where people think this stuff is all just a huge PR (as press relations) issue. It doesnt matter what you or I think. We are kinda way past that. There is no cultural battle to win, and even if there was, it really wouldn't matter!
I think it's worth noting the currency term 'peso' for the money used in a lot of former spanish colonies, directly translated, means 'weight'. For example there's a famous mexican singer of recent who goes by 'peso pluma' and it means featherweight, like the boxing classification, not as much to do with money
It could very well be a pun to do with how he gets money, though. Wiki says he makes narco music, and bird references are common to drug slang in both US English and (Mexican) Spanish.
Oh yeah I have a friend who modded his to go faster and he says he's going faster than the cops driving the speed limit while going down a certain hill on a highway and he's in the bike lane and they can't do shit about it but watch him zip by
Always these pesky capacitors (I had like 3 LCD monitors with a faulty capacitor from prolonged use, it is somewhat of an easy fix, no need to throw away the whole monitor).
I got injured a couple of times in the past few years enough to need crutches to walk on broken limbs and a neighbor gave me her old 100+ year old wood ones. Found them to be way better than the new aluminium ones that they make now. They may not have any padding at all, and are somewhat heavier, but I just found they were more comfortable to use somehow. The foam padding on the new ones causes chafing and absorbs stuff like your hand sweat which gets really gross in tropical countries.
I definitely don't need them anymore but keep them around as a cool antique which I might need again someday and as a reminder that contemporary designs aren't necessarily better... Crazy that they've been in service for longer than anyone alive in my family.
I think in general “padding” doesn’t work as well for human bodies as its popularity implies. It feels more comfortable for the first few seconds but less so afterwards. Usually it puts pressure on soft tissues in a way that cuts off blood flow and nerve function, whereas our body is already shaped and evolved to interact properly with firm surfaces with our own padding and bones in just the right places.
For example, serious long distance cyclists mostly still use old fashioned hard leather saddles, which case a lot less pain and numbness on a long ride than the modern padded ones.
This information is not accurate. Tensioned leather saddles are in no way an aesthetic choice, but a radically different design that is more comfortable. I’m a long distance cyclist and only use Brooks saddles. The entire seat is tensioned heavy leather that shapes to your body over time rather than having a hard molded section with padding over it. See here: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/leather.html
Modern race seats are molded material- plastic or carbon fiber, with a small layer of padding and then a covering. There may be race seats without padding, but most have a little. They have a small amount of padding that is then often used with padded shorts.
I see this quite often with gym equipment. If it's designed poorly no amount of padding helps, while better designed equipment may not even have much more than a rubberised pad for grip.
Padding works very well to dampen vibrations, without it a body part in prolonged contact with a vibrating hard surface will accumulate trauma pretty quickly and will be out of use. The leather bicycle saddles have a similar effect as the leather is not nearly as hard as the seat post or steel rails it stretched between and it's flexible enough to not pass high frequency vibrations from the seat post to the soft tissue. This is also why leather had been used forever as padding on tool handles.
Yeah, leather saddles also often have an actual suspension with springs. Suspension systems of almost any kind are great for bodies, especially if you can make them not involve overly soft surfaces directly against your body.
Mattresses as well. When we moved into our house it came with some furniture, including a bed with a memory foam mattress in the master. After a few days I noticed I was getting back pain and figured it was just from unpacking.
One time I feel asleep in the other bedroom, with our old mattress which was a lot firmer, and I woke up without any pain. Tried a few times on both, and yes, the firmer mattress is better for me.
Maybe you should actually read something from the official website before spending time writing multiple paragraphs assuming it's fake. Alot of the people involved in golang also were involved in bell lab's plan9 project, going back to the 1980s (Kernighan and Pike especially go back that far). The CSP threads from plan9 were influential in the development of the programming language. And you can find this on their official site:
It's about as alcoholic as perhaps kombucha or maybe a strong kefir, somewhere between 1-2 percent. With no tolerance, I definitely catch a nice little buzz if I have any of these things, they're about all I will enjoy at this point though. There's speculation that letting kids drink the stuff has been a contributor to heavy alcoholism in the former soviet union [1]
Kvass can be as low as 0.5% alcohol by weight, but traditional methods put it around 1%. The widely sold kvass in Soviet Union was 1% ABV.
I don't drink at all, so I'm pretty sensitive to the effects of alcohol. I can't detect them at all after drinking kvass. I could feel them after drinking a home-made and even some store-bought kombucha.
> There's speculation that letting kids drink the stuff has been a contributor to heavy alcoholism in the former soviet union
I doubt it. Other countries also have a tradition of fermented drinks, often based on milk, that are just as alcoholic.
I think the thing that got me to quit is that I kept on meeting the most messed up people or hearing of them basically just dying or accidentally/intentionally killing people while drunk. People who would in their disinhibition ask or tell me the most headed shit too, I think the guy in a tropical country asking me if I knew where to buy a human liver with a beer in his hand was probably what you could call a highlight in this regard.
If asian grocery stores are a thing in your area the nonalcoholic Japanese plum wine (umeshu) drinks are super delicious
It's also a form of solvent abuse that causes something close to 3 million deaths a year [1] from not only its direct effects on the body but via accidents and violence caused by its effects on the mind. To get numbers here: "A new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) highlights that 2.6 million deaths per year were attributable to alcohol consumption, accounting for 4.7% of all deaths, and 0.6 million deaths to psychoactive drug use. Notably, 2 million of alcohol and 0.4 million of drug-attributable deaths were among men."
I don't really think anyone has to "demonize" the stuff, some people really pickle their brains in it, and then die
It readily dissolves organic tissues - Especially things like your stomach lining, or myelination in the brain. There's even some paint thinners which contain it. Just because people have been accustomed to it for thousands of years doesn't make these realities go away.
I remember one guy who drank a single light beer when we were hanging out watching the superbowl after he had already been told by the doctor not to drink anything from going hard in his younger days, and the next morning I got to take the day off work to bring him to the hospital to have his esophogas stapled up.
What it has done so far for me is put copywriters out of a job. I still find it mostly useful for writing drivel that gets used as page filler or product descriptions for my ecommerce side jobs. Lately the image recognition capabilities lets me generate the kind of stuff I'd never write, which is instagram posts with tons of emojis and other things I'd never have the gumption to do myself but increases engagement. I actually used to use markov chain generator for this going back to 2016 though so the big difference here is that at least it can form more coherent sentences.