I’m a pretty slow reader. I tend to reread sections, pause and play around with the ideas that come into my head, get lost while doing that and have to start over… I still prefer reading specifically because it allows me to do all that at my own pace. I don’t have to feel rushed along by a presenter or actively pause, rewind, try to scrub the timeline to find a point I want to rehash etc.
To be clear, I am in no way a conspiracy theorist, at all. Seriously, not just a bs disclaimer. That said, all of the recent photos of the moon that have come out in the last month or so look, to my eye, super CGI. Just uh, overly smooth and lacking in detail?
There is no atmosphere, ergo no light diffusion. Shadows will be crisper, lit spots will be brighter, dark spots darker. It makes sense that such differences could make an image feel "off".
I completely agree with you, yet this morning I was looking at pictures of Lingchi execution, and now I'm picturing the victim thinking to themselves "you know, my problems really aren't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things."
Let's not assume that he's lying. Neither the presentation nor my short usage via the API blew me away, but to really evaluate it, you'd have to use it longer on a daily basis. Maybe that becomes a possiblity with the announced performance optimizations that would lower the price...
It’s really been advertised heavily lately but I just discovered it a couple weeks ago, and in case you’re unaware the real aha moment with Cursor for me was Composer in Agent mode with Sonnet 3.5.
If you want the highest chance of success, use a reasoning model (o3-mini high, o1 pro, r1, grok 3 thinking mode) to create a detailed outline of how to implement the feature you want, then copy paste that into composer.
It one shots a lot of greenfield stuff.
If you get stuck in a loop on an issue, this prompt I got from twitter tends to work quite well to get you unstuck: "Reflect on 5-7 different possible sources of the problem, distill those down to 1-2 most likely sources, and then add logs to validate your assumptions before we move onto implementing the actual code fix."
Just doing the above gets me through 95% of stuff I try, and then occasionally hopping back out to a reasoning model with the current state of the code, errors, and logs gets me through the last 5%.
How do you account for the impact of culture/lived experience of the specific population viewing the painting? Intuitively it seems like that would be the biggest factor, rather than the objective attributes of the painting, no?
All art is subjective. Any attempt to "verify" a piece of art would be entirely dependent on cultural and personal sensitivities. Art isn't a math problem with a solution.
But you can dissect it into concepts and see if it is something truly new to the model - if the output contains things which aren’t there in the weights, you have a nice specimen to study and, crucially, a recipe to get a bunch of matrices to output untrained things.
This is like saying: All cooks are equally good, even the most disgusting slop (e.g. water/flour soup) isn't any better than a dish from a cook with several Michelin stars. Of course the latter is better. And if it is better, it is objectively better. Even if 0.001% of people prefer flour soup.
> culture/lived experience of the specific population viewing the painting
Isn't this lived experience baked into LLM language bases? It's certainly very hard to target all possible populations at once. And art doesn't need that, doesn't do that. Only rare marketing sometimes attempts to do that and only in very limited ways, such as a brand name acceptable all over the world.
It’s a tool with limited functionality. I think over time you vaguely learn the shape of its limits and work with what it can do, and it becomes genuinely useful.
Doing basic stuff with a very limited scope that’s likely well documented all over the internet, great.
Boilerplate, tedious yet simple things, works awesome as enhanced autocomplete.
More complex stuff, give it a shot, maybe you’ll get lucky, otherwise if it starts fucking up I’ve had the most success just taking a step back and doing it myself, maybe chatting with it as a live docs substitute, or a realtime stack overflow/discord programming channel which are also sometimes of dubious quality but frequently useful.
The misery really lies in getting stuck in that cycle of it just messing up over and over as you try to get it to make this thing work that is clearly beyond its scope and it’s just turning everything into a greater and greater mess of hallucinated bullshit.
> It’s a tool with limited functionality. I think over time you vaguely learn the shape of its limits and work with what it can do, and it becomes genuinely useful.
Yeah, I think this is exactly right. I use it for adding new files to an existing codebase, but without giving it access to that codebase, by passing in the definitions I want it to work with. It gets stuff wrong a lot, and I need to keep anything I'm asking for _well_ within a scope that I can be eagle-eyed about. But if I want to do something pretty simple that would be slightly annoying to write by hand, and can be done in a single file, it makes a pleasant alternative to typing out the code by hand.
I don't think I would be able to do this as a junior developer, I think this is only working because I can tell when it's full of shit, and I lasted about 90m of being willing to let IDE-integration happen, because it's too easy to be lazy and not scrutinize every little change, and that way lies total madness. This makes me beyond skeptical of non-developers writing anything significant with it: they'd be much, much better off learning Bubble or similar.
Eh, as someone who’s been vegan for a couple decades, ascetic for a solid chunk of that time, and active in various other ways to greater or lesser degrees, people will still shut down mentally when they don’t have the hypocrisy lever to pull.
People in the reactionary/denialist/antagonistic camp will just end with “okay yeah you’re right but I’m not changing/I don’t actually care/I accept that I do evil and shrug”.
People looking to inspire positive change being required to be perfect saints lest they and their movements be condemned seems like a hint that human psychology is not tuned to rise to this occasion.
That expectation of perfection is unrealistic. Humans are messy and bound to be hypocritical in countless ways.
The CEO of Phillip Morris may volunteer at the local children’s hospital and feed the homeless on weekends.
Yet his hypocrisy in doing good in his personal life while doing so much harm in his professional life doesn’t seem to interfere with his ability to do harm, in fact it likely helps.
The executive director of the nonprofit children’s hospital going out on weekends and beating stray dogs to death with a pipe, well his hypocrisy may very well end his ability to do good in his personal life.
It seems like we’re just destined to let people who do bad things without any pretense of doing good off the hook, while crucifying anyone who dares try to do a moral good who isn’t somehow perfectly aligned in their lifestyle, ideology, and entire life history. Despite the fact that the former may represent a large net negative to our world and the latter may represent a net positive.
TLDR: Even if the climate activists weren’t hypocrites, your friends would likely be no closer to embracing the terrible reality of climate change and the necessity of painful sacrifice to address it.
How do you make and keep a powerful polity while staying militarily weak ? (Tanks / planes / nukes not being an option in a society that decided to de-industrialize.)
This also involves population : a post-industrial society, is likely to have its military strength based on population (like pre-industrial societies did, where agriculturalists overwhelmed hunter-gatherers) : how do you keep your population low without becoming weak ?
(Christian polities didn't exactly stay meek, more like the opposite (after a while)...)
At least values can be transmitted memetically, without genetical lineage, so keeping a stable national population is probably the least unworkable issue as long as immigration and assimilation are high enough...
Perfectly put. Personally I am quite amazed at people who think this way. This is not adult level reasoning. It’s not something that will change by setting an example.
I just fear that large swathes of society are completely oblivious to what it means to live in a liberal civil society and how changes gets affected. The expectation of perfection seems like a result of being unfamiliar/unrealistic.
Bonkers that the climate change fueled by fossil fuels is leading to children starving to death due to changing weather patterns, more extreme droughts, and my god how many children and adults will live and die in agony as it really kicks in and global mass migrations for survival truly develop, I could never.
This was written as someone that drives a gas powered car. Your comment reads like a meme being seeded on the internet by oil companies to muddy support for a transition away from fossil fuels.
People defending themselves from bigotry, and bigots themselves, are not equivalent. Black people not wanting racists to exist, and racists not wanting black people to exist, do you see a distinction?
There has been such a consistent attempt at ramming square pegs into round holes online in trying to “both sides” a bunch of these issues.
One trait is immutable and the other is not.
One trait is entirely internally focused and is not defined by a rejection of anyone external to the subject, the other's trait is entirely defined by such an external focus on the rejection of another person's immutable identity.
You guess racist? I had a different first guess. Then I had a better second guess. I then had a three and fourth guess. Then I wasn't sure at all. None of them were racism. This becomes a personality test that speaks about who you are and what battles you always see.
This seems like word salad, are you sure you’re continuing to argue all this in good faith?
You’re now saying that medical procedures can change your skin pigmentation, so race is no longer immutable? You genuinely hold this position?
Is everything mutable then? Since with the right surgical and drug interventions you can theoretically change anything about a person’s mind or body, which trivially includes their height.
Wow, truly this is deep.
If there are short/tall people who are being targeted for harassment/oppression then yes they too are in the right to wish that heightists/heightism didn’t exist and their harassers are in the wrong.
It’s okay to just accept that your position was indefensible, you don’t have to pretend to believe in utterly asinine positions just to attempt to save face.
“I would totally be correct if we redefined what it means to be correct.” <- This is the honest end state of this type of behavior.
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