Viewing profile — barnacs

The "AI" does not give "financial advice". It autocompletes your prompt. If you provide the right context and ask the right questions you will get the most likely consensus on such…

It turns out LDL has different subfractions based on size. Normally, the liver produces large ones which shuttle fat around the bloodstream, lose their payload and shrink then the …

Mathematics is a language. If anything, it's much more well defined and formal than most others. Train on enough examples and statistical autocomplete gets you places. I'm surprise…

I hold my stance that LLMs are stochastic parrots. Making the parrots ever more complex and training on ever more data produced by intelligent, creative beings may make them more u…

Similar to your contractor example, I like to think of the useful way to use LLMs as doing "grep -C" (show lines surrounding the match). You provide some context you are looking to…

It will be interesting to see when ads and propaganda are seamlessly (but purposefully) integrated into the output of LLMs. Who will decide what you should want or think? Will you …

I remember making a Qt app for a friend that would upload dropped files via ftp and copy the link to the clipboard. Good old days!

This is getting way too dystopian for my taste. People in the know need to stop pushing the narrative that this is somehow anything more than statistical autocomplete.

I don't think most people have been inconvenienced enough yet. ID verification is invasive enough and should cause enough friction to push another bunch over the edge.

Hopefully this will give yet another push towards decentralized, open source services. Platforms where noone and everyone is responsible and the state does not get to decide the ru…

Just a reminder: LLMs are statistical models that predict the next token based on preceeding tokens. They have no feelings, goals, relationships, life experience, understanding of …

Get with the newspeak, it's called "sideloading" now and your corporate overlords get to dictate the terms.

In the end, your newly renamed "department of war" is just going to waste a bunch of your taxpayer money to purchase some useless overpriced tech from their cronies. My symphaties …

I highly recommend self-hosting a meta-search engine to get away from any single provider without losing the benefits of either. I have been using searx[0] happily for years. [0]: …

I don't think using git should necessarily be taught as a part of a CS education. Any self respecting engineer will be capable and have the curiosity and motivation to dig into it …

If the fields of a structure or the string keys of an untyped map don't match then you don't have compatibility either way. The same is not true for restricting the set of valid va…

Every time you introduce a type for a "value invariant" you lose compatibility and force others to make cumbersome type conversions. To me, invalid values are best expressed with o…

Agreed. "Be the change you want to see". In this case, both as a user and a professional.

> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you g…

Pretty much every single country in the world has taken on more debt than they can serve. And the 2008 crisis wasn't triggered by Greece either. The private creditors should have t…

Right, but next time your data may be threatened by some European idiot rather than one from the US. To quote from my other comment: > In my view, data can only be protected by its…

I happen to live in the EU so I may have a slight clue what I'm talking about. But if you want an authority on the subject, look up Yanis Varoufakis and how sovereignty and democra…

> other important aspects like what?

As a European citizen, I can assure you, my options are getting ever more limited. Several global companies have kicked me off their platforms recently due to all the regulations t…

As if the surveillance and regulation by the unelected EU bureaucrats was any better for the European citizens...