BertramDitore

@BertramDitore@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The world was a nicer place before the advent of leaf blowers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I understand your skepticism, but gas-powered leaf blowers have annoyed the hell out of me for years. I live in a relatively small city in Northern California, and I can always hear and smell a leaf blower before I can even see it. I can’t overstate how strongly gas-powered leaf blowers smell. The smell of gas permeates my apartment, even with the windows closed, and is the kind of smell that gets stuck my nostrils for hours. The noise is pretty disruptive, but the smell is way worse to be honest. I’m not sure why they smell so much worse than other gas-powered things, but it’s like they’re just spewing gas out into the air.

  I have no problem with electric or battery-powered leaf blowers, just please use them at a reasonable time of day - after 8am and before 10pm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sumo community tournament relaunch!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes! I haven’t watched the movie, but apparently a few of the older cast members on the show were also in the movie. I’ll definitely check it out!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sumo community tournament relaunch!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If anyone’s interested in sumo but doesn’t know where to start, I recently watched Shiko Funjatta! (Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t!) and really enjoyed it. It’s a lighthearted show about the struggle of keeping a very old college sumo club running in the modern era. Serves as a very cool intro to the sport, but it also has great drama and an excellent cast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does it seem like every other post on here is deleted shortly after being posted?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I kind of get it in cases where no one has commented yet, and the OP realizes a mistake or how stupid a question it is. But once there’s engagement, I wish the OP would leave it up.

  I’ve noticed this a lot lately: I’ll comment, my comment will get engagement, so I’ll check the thread again to reply or read other comments, do that, then come back later to follow up again, and it’s all been deleted. Like, even if the original post was stupid or embarrassing, the fact that there was genuine engagement, to me, means it shouldn’t be deleted.

  But again, I understand the anxiety of leaving your own stupid words up if they really bother you, so I won’t lose sleep over this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Marc Andreessen predicts one of the few jobs that may survive the rise of AI automation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you. He gets more normalized any time someone talks about this asshole and doesn’t mention his extremist and wildly unpopular views. He is a terrible person, and not enough people know why.

  This article does a pretty solid job of explaining how horrible he is, though I’m sure there are better ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World's first 3D-texture UV printer for consumers now available for pre-order — prints onto 'nearly any surface'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, that’s really impressive. I don’t really know why, but I want this.

  Though I initially thought it was handheld, which would make their claim to be able to print on nearly any surface a little more believable. Still seems like incredible tech.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re not paranoid, it’s a real pattern, and that pattern is racism. Some white people, in their wildest dreams, can’t imagine how a person of color might get a role instead of a white person. It’s not about skill, it’s not about creativity, it’s not about the quality of the film. It’s just blatant racism.

  Remember how the little mermaid live action movie started getting shit before it was even released? That was because the lead actor was black, and peoples’ imaginations are so underdeveloped that they couldn’t see that she is legitimately an amazing talent who played the role just as well if not better than any white lady could have. Now, live action Disney remakes are stupid, so maybe that’s not the best example, but it’s all just racism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Cheers", but set in a fantasy tavern.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One of my favorite Japanese dramas, Isekai Izakaya Nobu, based on an anime of the same name, has a plot kind of like this. Lots of fun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google shows new AR glasses, VR headset at TED⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  don’t think that FAANG companies realize how toxic their image is

  Ain’t that the truth. Their behavior and the products they’ve been launching the last few years prove this to me. They’re completely out of touch with society and what consumers actually want. LLMs are another perfect example of that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An LLM would probably run the USA better⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It isn’t just you and me. Not even the people who designed them fully understand why they give the responses they give. It’s a well-known problem. Our understanding is definitely improving over time, but we still don’t fully know how they do it.

  Here’s the latest exploration of this topic I could find.

  LLMs continue to be one of the least understood mass-market technologies ever

  Tracing even a single response takes hours and there’s still a lot of figuring out left to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An LLM would probably run the USA better⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I highly doubt that. For so many reasons. Here’s just a few:

  • What data would you train it on, the Constitution? The entirely of federal law? How would that work? Knowing how ridiculous textualism is even when done by humans, do you really think a non-thinking algorithm could understand the intention behind the words? Or even what laws, rules, or norms should be respected in each unique situation?
  • We don’t know why LLMs return the responses they return. This would be hugely problematic for understanding its directions.
  • If an LLM doesn’t know an answer, instead of saying so it will usually just make something up. Plenty of people do this too, but I’m not sure why we should trust an algorithm’s hallucinations over a human’s bullshit.
  • How would you ensure the integrity of the prompt engineer’s prompts? Would there be oversight? Could the LLM’s “decisions” be reversed?
  • How could you hold an LLM accountable for the inevitable harm it causes? People will undoubtedly die for one reason or another based on the LLM’s “decisions.” Would you delete the model? Retrain it? How would you prevent it from making the same mistake again?

  I don’t mean this as an attack on you, but I think you trust the implementation of LLMs way more than they deserve. These are unfinished products. They have some limited potential, but should by no means have any power or control over our lives. Have they really shown you they should be trusted with this kind of power?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨D.A. Hochman officially brings death penalty back to Los Angeles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, Marcellus Williams was executed on September 24, 2024, after significant evidence of his innocence was well known. Even though the victim’s family had consistently said they did not want him to be executed, the Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey acted liked a one-man murderous mob and insisted that this innocent man be killed, after already being wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 24 years. He didn’t even want the evidentiary hearing to go forward. What legitimate reason would someone ever have to deny someone the right to show evidence of their innocence? It’s not the first time that asshole AG Andrew Bailey didn’t care about whether or not someone actually committed a crime.

  There are few things that make me angrier and more afraid than someone who genuinely thinks they have the power to purposefully work against the truth when someone’s life is on the line.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨D.A. Hochman officially brings death penalty back to Los Angeles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, that’s what it all boils down to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨D.A. Hochman officially brings death penalty back to Los Angeles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Just try a little empathy exercise: what if you were arrested for a heinous crime, that you know for certain you didn’t commit, but you don’t have an alibi and there’s enough evidence that points to you, that you end up being tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death.

  You know that you didn’t commit the crime, but nobody else believes you or can properly make your case. In carrying out your sentence, the government is murdering an innocent person who was wronged by the justice system. If you had been sentenced to life in prison, there’s a good chance some new facts might have come to light and exonerated you. This happens all the time.

  Why does the government get to kill people, when killing people is one of our worst crimes? To me, the death penalty is state-sanctioned revenge. It’s the government saying it’s entitled to commit an awful crime, in order to punish an awful crime. Sometimes it’s committing the very same crime the person was sentenced for. That logic has always been completely confounding to me.

  Still curious what’s wrong with the death penalty?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Casey Newton founded Platformer, after leaving The Verge around 5 years ago. But yeah, I used to listen to Hard Fork, his podcast with Kevin Roose, but I stopped because of how uncritically they cover AI and LLMs. It’s basically the only thing they cover, and yet they are quite gullible and not really realistic about the whole industry. They land some amazing interviews with key players, but never ask hard questions or dive nearly deep enough, so they end up sounding pretty fluffy as ass-kissy. I totally agree with Zitron’s take on their reporting. I constantly found myself wishing they were a lot more cynical and combative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s an interesting article, but it was published in 2022, before LLMs were a thing on anyone’s radar. The results are still incredibly impressive without a doubt, but based on how the researchers explain it, it looks like it was accomplished using deep learning, which isn’t the same as LLMs. Though they’re not entirely unrelated.

  Opaque and confusing terminology in this space also just makes it very difficult to determine who or which systems or technology are actually making these advancements. As far as I’m concerned none of this is actual AI, just very powerful algorithmic prediction models. So the claims that an AI system itself has made unique technological advancements, when they are incapable of independent creativity, to me proves that nearly all their touted benefits are still entirely hypothetical right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The article explains the problems in great detail.

  Here’s just one small section of the text which describes some of them:

  All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.

  (I originally put this as a top-level comment, my bad.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Internet Desk⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Your description of those desks totally knocked some of my old memories loose. I remember going to a friend’s house in the late 90s when the first smallish “all-in-one” PCs started coming on the market (before the iMac claimed that space in ‘98). They had their new all-in-one PC set up on a tiny desk in the hallway outside their office. It was there so everyone in the family could use it, but I remember being shocked at how small it was, and so impressed that it didn’t need the whole corner of a room.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I hate the interfaces, but especially the super-loud non-mutable beeps which seem to be common on every model I’ve seen. My two-burner induction setup has analog knobs for temp control, which is awesome, but it stills beep when you turn them, with every single temperature increase. Drives me crazy.

  I’ll never go back to gas though. My new apartment came with a gorgeous brand new gas range, and it absolutely sucks compared to my $50 countertop induction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah got it, thanks for the clarification.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup! I should have been more specific, Mobius Sync uses syncthing on iOS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s always been free for me using Mobius Sync…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pope funeral 'is being rehearsed': Swiss Guard 'prepare for pontiff's death after the 88-year-old warned 'I may not survive' pneumonia⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, the previous pope was a member of Hitler Youth, though he was conscripted like everyone his age. So yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next one was a proper full-fledged Nazi.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing Muse: Our first generative AI model designed for gameplay ideation.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ugh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why there is no photos of earth from space?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve earnestly answered some of your other questions, when it was quite clear you were either trolling or incredibly stubborn, and this additional question (which purposefully ignores the basic answers I gave you weeks ago) makes it obvious you don’t actually want to learn anything. Stop asking questions if you don’t intend to genuinely engage with the people who are taking the time to respond.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DeepSeek sends shock waves across Silicon Valley.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ed Zitron has the best takes on this imo. One of his pieces is linked in the posted article, but here it is again. His podcast also has some of the most grounded and hilarious insight into the absurdity of the AI bubble. If you want to hear from him in a more mainstream setting, I highly recommend the interview he did with Brooke Gladstone on On The Media. That was the first time I heard anyone really talk about the AI industry with genuine frankness and honestly.

  Basically, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and all of the big tech players have defrauded us and investors by raising laughably high amounts of money and wasting precious resources to build inferior and closed products, when any reasonable person would have known there were better ways. This whole thing also proves how essential competition is to a healthy market and producing things people actually want to use.

  In essence, DeepSeek — and I’ll get into its background and the concerns people might have about its Chinese origins — released two models that perform competitively (and even beat) models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, undercut them in price, and made them open, undermining not just the economics of the biggest generative AI companies, but laying bare exactly how they work. That last point is particularly important when it comes to OpenAI’s reasoning model, which specifically hid its chain of thought for fear of “unsafe thoughts” that might “manipulate the customer,” then muttered under their breath that the actual reason was that it was a “competitive advantage.” -Zitron

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are old ladies so popular on the internet?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Since this community is for any kind of question, I’ll answer, but I get the vague sense that you don’t really want a genuine answer, based on the inherent bias you included in the question (calling someone older than 20 a hag is pretty uncool, for example).

  But here goes: people have different tastes. Different things turn on different people, and your lack of experience being aroused by older women says nothing about the legitimacy of those who are. Also being 21 for example, is still considered very young by most people. Your question presumes that everybody in the world must only be attracted to very young women, and frankly that’s a bit strange and just not how the world works.

  Try to put yourself in some other people’s shoes, and I think this question would answer itself. Your sexual preferences are not everyone’s preferences.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did UCLA Just Cure Baldness?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  100%

  I’ve had dreams where my long locks were dramatically blowing in the wind, only to wake up and run my hands through my…well shit, that’s just my scalp.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did UCLA Just Cure Baldness?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I started losing my hair when I was a teenager, so I’ve been bald for most of my life. I’ve been shaving my head for decades because it’s the only way my head and face don’t look absurd. I’m totally used to it, and long ago accepted that I’d never have hair on my head again.

  But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my hair back.

  If this turns out to be legit and works on most people, there could be a worldwide explosion of self-esteem in adults.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israel orders army to plan to let Palestinians leave Gaza⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Aside from this being textbook ethnic cleansing, I’m sure the always honest and honorable Israeli military would never use this as an opportunity to more efficiently murder everyone who funnels to their “exits.”

  I really wish we would stop helping them be better at genocide.