321–330 of 537 posts
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> vs. much worse taste I have never had that issue when heating stuff up. Your pizza example is not reheating (and generally you never want to reheat anything that’s supposed to be crispy in the microwave; though not on the stove top either).
Reheat pizza on a stovetop covered on low heat. Better than the first time it was cooked. Yw
Cool post, but: > And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early. Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actu…
If you were to create a decentralized and limited supply currency, how would you distribute it so that it's “fair”?
Sounds a bit like if the world was running only on proprietary software created by Microsoft and you criticized the move to open source because that would enrich Linus Torvalds and other code creators/early adopters.
Are people better off by continuing to use centralized broken software that they have to pay a subscription for (inflation) than if they did a lump sum buy of a GNU/Linux distro copy from a random guy and become liberated for the rest of their life?
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I am learning Japanese (again) now and it's such a stark improvement vs when I first tried. When I don't understand something, LLMs explain it perfectly well, and with a bit of prompting they give me the right practice bits I need for my level. For a specific example, when 2 grammar points seem to mean the same thing, teachers here in Japan would either not explain the difference, or make a confusing explanation in J…
> When I don't understand something, LLMs explain it perfectly well But my man, how do you know if it explains perfectly well or is just generating plausible-sounding slop? You're learning, so by definition you don't know!
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Up until recently, I could, if I wanted to have a living doing VFX. I could, if I wanted to, craft new worlds, and get paid for it. In two years, that won't be the case. Its the same for virtually all other Arts based job. An economy that currently support say 100% of the people now, will at most be able to support 10-30% in a few years time. > It's ridiculous to think drawing will become a lost art because of LLM/Di…
My girlfriend is a ceramist. She makes porcelain pieces ( https://malinamore.art/ ) that are sold for hundreds or even thousands of euros. Why would someone buy a plate off her, when they could get one from IKEA for 1.50 eur? Yet ceramics is not a dead art. Beats me?
> Bitcoin failed as a currency because the people who got most invested in it do not care about currency As far as I understand, bitcoin is fundamentally unusable as a currency. Transactions are expensive and limited to ?7k? every few seconds. It's also inherently deflationary, you want inflationary currency, you want people spending, not hoarding.
It's much worse, the maximum on-chain transaction rate is something like 7 per second. Also the time intervals between blocks have a huge spread, so it can take more than an hour for a transaction to be confirmed if you are unlucky. This is obviously impractical, so people came up with schemes such as Lightning to avoid touching the blockchain as much as possible. Of course this makes it much more difficult to judge…
Great protocols are built in layers.
You have decentralized instant settlement for an average of 0.005% even for micropayments with the Lightning Network (another protocol built on top of Bitcoin). That's orders of magnitude away from the settlement time and resilience of the current payment networks.
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You would if you were able to do basic mental maths and you learned to engage and run basic sanity checks. That's still much faster than grabbing the slide rule. (And it's not like people are infallible) Obviously if one product hallucinated and one doesn't it's a no brainer (cough Intel FPUs). But in a world where the only calculators were available hallucinated at the 0.5% level you'd probably have one in your pock…
I've seen my accountant's fingers flawlessly fly using a calculator to track expenses down to the penny. Few people have those mental skills even in the days before calculators - either mechanical or digital. Slide rule are good for only a couple of digits of precision. That's why shopkeepers used abacuses not slide rules. I have a hard time understanding your hypothetical. What does it mean to hallucinate at the 0.5…
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>LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. I would not buy a calculator that hallucinated wrong answers part of the time. Or a microwave oven that told you it grilled the chicken but it didn't and you have to die from Salmonella poisoning.
My grandma did not have a microwave oven because she didn't see the point of it.
I think there's a decent chance that folks on the fringes find interesting uses for immutable and programmable distributed ledgers, even if the prevailing culture of crypto is hellish.
I keep hearing this theory, that “eventually” we will find the use cases for distributed ledgers, and I don’t buy it. Bitcoin was invented at roughly the same time as the iPhone, and the iPhone immediately found use cases. Right away the global economy reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it demonstrated real value to actual people. We did not need to wait and twiddle our fingers for years going “I think…
A third of the world is unbanked. A permissionless monetary system makes a huge difference for those.
When I was still very skeptical about Bitcoin, I met a guy in Turkey who was from a very poor African country and was just studying there. His father would buy Bitcoin in their home country with the local currency (P2P) and send it to his son, that would then convert it also P2P for Turkish Liras. They could do this securely an within minutes. The alternative was using Western Union and paying taxes in both countries, which in total added up to ~50% of the sent amount.
It's great not needing Bitcoin, as it is great not needing Tor. But that doesn't mean there's no use case for them.
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I'm shocked every time I go to City Hall and wait while the clerk types my name letter by letter with two fingers. Doesn't he do that every day?! How as it never occurred to him or anyone else that maybe, just maybe, they would benefit from a typing course. It’s just one example of a pattern I’ve noticed with a lot of office workers.
Maybe it's not that important? Taking 5 seconds vs 2 seconds to type a name is probably not that much of a difference? Especially when most of the time you are typing stuff that you need to ask how to spell anyway?
Poor typists always slow down processes, and frequently become a bottleneck, local or global. If you can speed up a process by only ten seconds per Thing, by improving someone’s typing skills or by fixing bad UI and workflow, you only have to process 360 Things in a day (which is about one minute per Thing) to have saved an entire hour.
It can be very eye-opening to watch a skilled typist experienced with a software system that was designed for speed, working. In more extreme cases, it can be that one person can do the work of ten. In more human-facing things, it can still be at least a 50% boost, so that two skilled people can beneficially replace three mediocre.
Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline. > There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge th…
People will write lengthy and convoluted explanation on why LLM isn't like calculator or microwave oven or other technology before. (Like OP's article) But it really is. Humans have been looking for easier and lazier ways to do things since the dawn of civilization. Tech never ever prevents people who really want to hone their skills from doing so. World record of 100m sprint kept improving even since car was invente…
A very good example! (...although probably not how you think it is ;)
Indeed the world record is achieved by a very limited number of people under stringent conditions.
Meanwhile people by and large† take their cars to go to the bakery which by foot would be 10min away, to disastrous effect on their health.
And by "cars" I mean "technology", which, while a fantastic enabler of things impossible before, has turned more people into couch potatoes than athletes.
† Comparatively to world record holders.