JayleneSlide

@JayleneSlide@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best ‘simple’ budgeting app⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Negative all around. I was replying to OP. The company to which I referred is MX. The public-facing product (API) is actually called Platform, but it’s very explicitly white label software. Customers will generally have little to no idea that they are using MX Platform. It might actually say MX somewhere, but that can be eliminated in implementation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best ‘simple’ budgeting app⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  As others have said, a spreadsheet is the simplest. If you do your banking with a credit union, chances are they make MX available to you in your online banking. A lot of banks use MX too. Their software provides the projections and forecasting you seek, as well as Open Banking connections to all of your other accounts. If you have loans, it also has burndowns of outstanding debts. Extra bonus: MX doesn’t sell your data.

  Disclosure: I used to work for MX.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop calling them tech companies: GenAI and SaaS — are they really tech? It’s time to call a spade a spade.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You raise good points. Thank you for your replies. All of this still requires planet-cooking levels of power for garbage and to hurt workers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop calling them tech companies: GenAI and SaaS — are they really tech? It’s time to call a spade a spade.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And an additional response, because I didn’t fully answer your question. LLMs don’t reason. They traverse a data structure based on weightings relative to the occurrence frequency in their training content. Loosely speaking, it’s a graph (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(abstract_data_type)). It appears like reasoning because the LLM is iterating over material that has been previously reasoned out. An LLM can’t reason through a problem that it hasn’t previously seen unlike, say, a squirrel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop calling them tech companies: GenAI and SaaS — are they really tech? It’s time to call a spade a spade.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  By the same logic, raytracing is ancient tech that should be abandoned.

  Nice straw man argument you have there.

  I’ll restate, since my point didn’t seem to come across. All of the “AI” garbage that is getting jammed into everything is merely scaled up from what has been before. Scaling up is not advancement. A possible analogy would be automobiles in the late 60s and 90s: Just put in more cubic inches and bigger chassis! More power from more displacement does not mean more advanced. Continuing that analogy, 2.0L engines cranking out 400ft-lb and 500HP while delivering 28MPG average is advanced engineering. Right now, the software and hardware running LLMs are just MOAR cubic inches. We haven’t come up with more advanced data structures.

  These types of solutions can have a place and can produce something adjacent to the desired results. We make great use of expert systems constantly within narrow domains. Camera autofocus systems leap to mind. When “fuzzy logic” autofocus was introduced, it was a boon to photography. Another example of narrow-ish domain ML software is medical decision support software, which I developed in a previous job in the early 2000s. There was nothing advanced about most of it; the data structures used were developed in the 50s by a medical doctor from Columbia University (Larry Weed: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Weed). The advanced part was the computer language he also developed for codifying medical knowledge. Any computer with enough storage, RAM, and the hardware ability to quickly traverse the data structures can be made to appear advanced when fed with enough collated data, i.e. turning data into information.

  Since I never had the chance to try it out myself, how was your neural network and LLMs reasoning back in the day? Imo that’s the most impressive part, not that it can write.

  It was slick for the time. It obviously wasn’t an LLM per se, but both were a form of LM. The OCR and auto-suggest for DOS were pretty shit-hot for x386. The two together inspried one of my huge projects in engineering school: a whole-book scanner* that removed page curl and gutter shadow, and then generated a text-under-image PDF. By training the software on a large body of varied physical books and retentively combing over the OCR output and retraining, the results approached what one would see in the modern suite that now comes with your scanner. I only achieved my results because I had unfettered use of a quad Xeon beast in the college library where I worked. That software drove the early digitization processes for this (which I also built): digitallib.oit.edu/digital/collection/kwl/search

  *in contrast to most book scanning at the time, which required the book to be cut apart and the pages fed into an automatically fed scanner; lots of books couldn’t be damaged like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop calling them tech companies: GenAI and SaaS — are they really tech? It’s time to call a spade a spade.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No, no they’re not. These are just repackaged and scaled-up neural nets. Anyone remember those? The concept and good chunks of the math are over 200 years old. Hell, there was two-layer neural net software in the early 90s that ran on my x386. Specifically, Neural Network PC Tools by Russell Eberhart. The DIY implementation of OCR in that book is a great example of roll-your-own neural net. What we have today, much like most modern technology, is just lots MORE of the same. Back in the DOS days, there was even an ML application that would offer contextual suggestions for mistyped command line entries.

  Typical of Silicon Valley, they are trying to rent out old garbage and use it to replace workers and creatives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My sister’s AMAB friend likes to look like a girl and even said she wanted to be a “Japanese woman”, why would conservatives think using she/her pronouns for her is forcing an agenda?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you look at from a different perspective, it all makes more sense. Right now, you’re trying to apply the incorrect logic and an ethical consistency to anti-trans efforts. The anti-trans efforts are a test to move the Overton Window rightward. Trans and NB people are such a tiny minority. By targeting and othering that demographic, Conservatives are testing how much the rest of the citizenry will tolerate the next steps in fascism: targeting other minorities, miscegenation, segregation, concentration camps… whatever it takes to make a white xian US.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hey, do americans just want to take a break from normal politics for a bit and focus all our efforts solely on the wild boar problem?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This right here. I fell down the “wild boar problem” rabbit hole a couple years ago. I was curious about what controls have been tried and what could be done to bring things back into balance. The statistic I read said that 75000 boars must be killed per year in Texas just to keep their numbers stable there. Holy hell. That’s a lot of dangerous game hunting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DoorDash will let users buy now, pay later for fast food, a possible worrying sign for the economy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I live on a sailboat. It’s not too late. Sure, you may not be discovering new lands, but making an ocean passage is still seriously challenging.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The toothbrush is all I've ever been able to see (Friday the 13th, NES, 1989)⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks. And now all I can hear is “BRUSH brush ~brush brush~ FLOSS floss ~floss floss~.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is lying on the floor more entertaining than lying on a bed?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My partner and I are both well into our 50s. When on land, our bed is on the floor, and we snap out of bed. We usually live on our sailboat; getting in and out of our berth is more akin to spelunking than getting out of bed.

  I (think I) understand the point you’re trying to make: this shit gets harder with some age. Do I have that correctly?

  I can’t emphasize this enough: take care of the hardware. Yoga, Pilates, weight training, cardio, core strength, stretching, attention to posture, etc. I have coworkers and friends 10 to 20 years younger than I with half the mobility, strength, and speed. And I have all kinds of issues from abusing my body in my youth. But some basic care keeps things usable.

  If anyone’s curious, here are some good starting points for keeping your mobility or restoring physical capacity lost to age:

  • “Ten Golden Exercises” by Daniel Philpot
  • Mackenzie Method physical therapy — Robin Mackenzie was a serious innovator in PT; “Bob & Brad,” the YouTube channel, are Mackenzie Method therapists
  • Yoga with Adrienne YT channel — she has some great starter videos for all kinds of mobility levels
  • any floor method Pilates that doesn’t require machines, for example YT channel “Move with Nicole”

  All that is a lot of words to say: the dreaded middle aged decline doesn’t have to be inevitable. But you do have to put in the preventative maintenance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This is absolutely by design. The corporate raider playbook is well-read. See: Sears, Fluke, DeWalt, Boeing, HP, Intel, Anker, any company purchased by Vista (RIP Smartsheet, we barely knew ye), and so on. Find a brand with an excellent reputation, gut it, strip mine that goodwill, abandon the husk on a golden parachute, and make sure to not be the one holding the bag.

• YSK Your Rights Around Dealing Funerals and the Death Industryfunerals.org ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨youshouldknow@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨1⁩ ⁨comment⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What can be the reasons for self-sabotaging behaviours when it comes to relationships?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Came looking for this comment. It’s absolutely critical to know thyself, and understanding one’s attachment style is one of the easier bits of self-knowledge.

  One of the most accessible books on the topic is “Attached” by Levine and Heller. For me, that book was such an eye-opener. I read it as my second marriage was imploding, and I was grabbing at everything to try to save it. The example conversations for my and my ex’s attachment styles were uncanny. I kept getting the feeling of “were y’all in the room with us for that argument?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the pros and cons to buying a smart watch from temu?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I am also a bicyclist with three different bikes. One watch replaces three bicycle computers. I can track performance metrics, longevity of components, and service intervals… for all of my bicycles.

  My watch also has functions for sailing performance metrics, kayaking, hiking, running, and lots more sports.

  That’s ignoring the other watch functions: timers, find my phone (great for when the phone slips between cushions and I didn’t notice), compass, barometric trends, notification filtering…

  My partner has the same watch. The longitudinal health stats from her watch was one of the key factors in getting her health complaints taken seriously. One medical facility completely, repeatedly dismissed her concerns as “nothing serious.” Turns out she had Stage-IVb cancer (now recovered).