ourob
@ourob@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on Using AI generated code will make you a bad programmer. 4 weeks ago:
I’ve seen the comparison to pair programming with a junior programmer before, and it’s wild to me that such a comparison would be a point in favor of using AI for improving productivity.
I have never experienced a productivity boost by pairing with a junior. Which isn’t to say it’s not worth doing, but the productivity gains go entirely to the junior. The benefits I receive are mainly improving my communication and mentoring skills in the short term, and improving the team’s productivity in the long term by boosting the junior’s knowledge.
And it’s not like the AI works on the mundane stuff in parallel while I work on the more interesting, higher level stuff. I have to hold its hand through the process.
I feel like the efficiency gains of AI programming is almost entirely in improving your speed at wrestling a chatbot into producing something useful. Which may not be entirely useless going forward - knowing how to search well is an important skill, this may become something similar, but it just doesn’t seem worth the hassle to me.
- Comment on Take-Two Interactive shuts down the Studios behind Kerbal Space Program and Rollerdrome 6 months ago:
In its current state? Not unless it gets heavily marked down (KSP2 does have better tutorials and a more accessible progression system).
With the studio being shut down, it’s likely that what we have now is all we’re getting.
- Comment on The Retro Web 9 months ago:
They are under expansion chips.
- Comment on The Cult of AI. How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future 9 months ago:
- Comment on Explore Nintendo Switch Emulators & Installation Guides 9 months ago:
This entire site feels like it was written by ChatGPT or some other LLM.
- Comment on Test Yourself: Which Faces Were Made by A.I.? 9 months ago:
The eyes. Look for non-circular pupils or noticeably different-sized pupils.
- Comment on Test Yourself: Which Faces Were Made by A.I.? 9 months ago:
Also, pupils are often not regular circles in AI images. The only one I got wrong was the real picture of the guy wearing dirty glasses.
- Comment on Women STEM students up to twice as likely as non-STEM students to have experienced sexism 10 months ago:
Source? The Yale link above specifically mentions:
Nationally, women make up 57.3% of bachelor’s degree recipients but only 38.6% of STEM bachelor’s degree recipients.
Anecdotally, I was in a STEM-focused school and major over 20 years ago, and it was overwhelming male-dominated. One of my colleagues graduated less than 10 years ago, and her experience was not dissimilar. She had to deal with quite a bit of sexism too, unfortunately.
- Comment on Why is this so hard 10 months ago:
USB plugs are actually a great at-home demonstration of quantum mechanics. The USB plug exists in a quantum superposition of alignment - being simultaneously correctly aligned and not aligned until being inserted. Once insertion is attempted, the wave function collapses to a random alignment.
- Comment on 2017 Medium Article: "Why The Hyperloop Will Fail" 10 months ago:
Elon didn’t start hyper loop because he thought it would be successful. He started it to kill California’s high speed rail plans.
- Comment on Substack says it will not remove or demonetize Nazi content 10 months ago:
(transcribed from a series of tweets) - @iamragesparkle
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.” And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, ohok and he continues. "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
- Comment on Exclusive: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say 11 months ago:
It’s crypto all over again, but with a less-useless technology underpinning it. Seriously, a computer doing grade school arithmetic is what will threaten humanity? I’m sure it’s interesting from a research perspective how that math is being done, but math is the easiest thing for a computer to do.
- Comment on NASA Requests Funding for $1 Billion 'Space Tug' to Deorbit the ISS 11 months ago:
I would love to see the cost/feasibility of boosting to a stable/graveyard orbit. The ISS is massive and not built for that kind of maneuver, but it would be great to be able to preserve it for the future.
- Comment on A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams 11 months ago:
It also prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty, and it actually used the Antarctic treaty for inspiration.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
Which is not to say that it’s exactly the same situation as Antarctica, but the treaties are more similar than you might assume.
- Comment on A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams 11 months ago:
Doesn’t the outer space treaty place similar restrictions on mars?
- Comment on OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO 11 months ago:
A far more likely scenario is that they have been overstating what the software can do and how much room for progress remains with current methods.
AI has blown up so fast with so much hype, that I’m very skeptical. I’ve seen what it can do, and it’s impressive over past machine learning algorithms. But it does play on the human tendency to anthropomorphize things.
- Comment on Jeff Bezo is now cosplaying as a working class man. 1 year ago:
Tony Stark titan of industry
Ooh, that’s going to get under Elon’s skin. I wonder if he’ll challenge Jeff to a cage match for the Tony Stark-wannabe title…
- Comment on Totally not listening to it right now.... 1 year ago:
I still feel the Perfect Strangers theme fits better.
- Comment on YouTube is now fully blocking ad blockers around the world 1 year ago:
iOS web browsers are forced to use the safari/WebKit engine, so you don’t get Firefox extensions, sadly.
The main benefits of using Firefox on iOS is if you prefer it’s interface or want to sync with desktop Firefox (which is why I use it).
- Comment on Google paid a whopping $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine everywhere 1 year ago:
This is my beef with basically all modern interfaces. Stuff changes and moves with just enough of a delay to cause me to miss click. Autocomplete changing recommendations on phones, UI elements shifting on web pages, etc.
- Comment on Windows 12 May Require a Subscription 1 year ago:
I’m having to use windows+office for work after a few years of being linux only, and god do I hate modern office’s interface.
The ribbon, on its own, isn’t super offensive to me - its just a chonky toolbar. But why on earth did they have to get rid of the classic menus?! If I don’t know where a feature is, it’s so much easier to skim through text menus than flipping from ribbon to ribbon, hovering over each button for tooltips, and popping out secondary toolbars of icons to find what I want. It’s maddening for someone who only needs to use office intermittently.
- Comment on Grisham, Martin join authors suing OpenAI: “There is nothing fair about this” 1 year ago:
I think he’s also not sure how to untangle the knots he’s tied in a satisfying way, and the disappointing reception of the tv series ending probably further killed his motivation. Like you said, he’s got plenty of money, so it’s easy to procrastinate untangling his story threads.
- Comment on Do You Speak Droidish? The Pentagon Is Spending Millions On A Language For Drones 1 year ago:
Some software is absolutely more secure for being open source. There’s a reason why popular cryptographic libraries tend to be open, even those used in military applications.
If the security of your software component relies on an attacker not having access to your source, then your component is only secure until someone reverse engineers it and figures out how it works, at which point it is entirely compromised on all systems it’s deployed to.
So you need something else to provide security besides obscuring how the software works. In cryptography, that comes from a large, highly random encryption key. The reason that your online bank transactions are safe from an attacker snooping on your network is because, even having the full source code to the crypto libraries, it would take a computer longer than the age of the universe to guess the encryption key through brute force.
The benefit of open source is that it gets a lot more eyes on the code to find flaws and vulnerabilities - and to verify that the software does what the vendor claims, which is very much not always a given.
- Comment on The only ‘new’ feature that would excite me enough to buy an iPhone 15 is USB-C 1 year ago:
I went from an 11 pro max to a 13 mini last year because I was sick of having a brick in my pocket, and I feared that the 13 mini would be the last small non-budget phone. Hopefully Apple will go back to making small phones, but in the meantime, I will be hanging on to my 13 mini for as long as I can.
- Comment on 'It's robbery': Salvadorans slow to adopt Bitcoin 1 year ago:
This is why I don’t accept that any crypto is currently acting as a functional currency. Who is out there actually pricing things in bitcoin? You’d have to be a fool since you would have little to no control of whether or not you could possibly make a profit.
- Comment on Germany Will Force 80% of Gas Stations to Install EV Charging, Too 1 year ago:
Honestly, it makes sense for any business off of a highway that sells things to provide fast chargers. They still take several minutes at a minimum to charge, so you have a captive and probably bored customer. Seems like a gas station, restaurant, whatever would quickly make back the money spent on charging infrastructure in increased sales from people who’d rather shop or eat than sit in their car for a half hour.
- Comment on Riker sits down 1 year ago:
- Comment on [REPOST] Woman says she started wearing ‘terrible wigs’ after work banned her pink hair 1 year ago:
She’s Ms. Extra because she’s resisting bullying by an incompetent employer?
It’s not wholly unreasonable for a business to have some kind of appearance standard for front-of-house employees. But it is unreasonable to hire people for those positions literally sight unseen, and it’s a stupidly written policy if pink hair violates it while ridiculous wigs do not.
Besides, it’s 2023. Brightly colored hair is hardly an outrageous and rare sight to see. No one is going to stop frequenting a business because they were greeted by someone with pink hair.
- Comment on Sam Bankman-Fried is going to jail 1 year ago:
You’re just not thinking like a narcissistic billionaire.
You see, the financial system didn’t make him a billionaire. His innate genius and talent did. All the system has done is prevent him from truly achieving greatness, with its laws and regulations.
But post-apocalypse? All that is swept away. He can be more than a mere billionaire. He can make the world the way it should be, directly, without the slow, imperfect process of buying politicians and funding think tanks.
And, of course, he will be one of the ones to rise to the top. He’s a billionaire. The cream of the crop. He didn’t just luck into his wealth through family or
gamblinginvesting. His inherent greatness placed him at the top, and it will obviously do it again when society collapses.