LovableSidekick
@LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why Americans Can’t Buy the World’s Best Electric Car 5 hours ago:
When Americans of all political stripes eventually wake up to global realty - they’ll most likely do it lying on a sidewalk with their fingers in their ears saying na-na-na-na-na-na…
People will eventually have to face that the economic golden age of the 1950s and 60s wasn’t a normal state we can return to if greedy billionaires just let us. The rich definitely grabbed the biggest share of the prosperity, but that brief era of prosperity wasn’t normal, it was entirely abnormal, and it’s been over for quite a while. We’ve been fooling ourselves and keeping it going for the last half century by living on credit, and that’s about to end.
- Comment on Robot performs first realistic surgery without human help: System trained on videos of surgeries performs like an expert surgeon 6 hours ago:
“OMG it was supposed to take out my LEFT kidney! I’m gonna die!!!”
“Sorry, in the training video it was the Right kidney.”
- Comment on Pop it in your calendars 6 hours ago:
I will support this by continuing to be apathetic toward (and in fact ignorant of) a game known as Subnautica 2.
- Comment on Are some people just unable to become fluent in a foreign language? 1 day ago:
Depends on how you take it. When you say anyone who doesn’t have a neurological disorder can do something it puts a negative light on people who haven’t done it. Not being multilingual is a common negative statement about Americans, for example, always comparing them with Europeans. But most Americans don’t live close to multiple places where different languages are prevalent, so their only reason to learn other languages is purely academic. Similar to the average person’s motivation to learn calculus. I think I framed it pretty realistically.
- Comment on X CEO Linda Yaccarino is now ex-CEO 1 day ago:
Heyyyyyyyyy Yaccarino!
- Comment on Are some people just unable to become fluent in a foreign language? 1 day ago:
TBH that sounds like saying anybody can become “fluent” in calculus if they just apply themselves. In my experience that’s just not the case. People have different aptitudes. You might be right that with sufficient motivation and unlimited time, anyone without a neurological disorder could theoretically learn a language, but in a real-life context where people have a lot of other concerns and responsibilities going on, I think some people are reasonably able to do that and others not so much.
- Comment on Firefox is fine. The people running it are not 1 day ago:
Unfortunately Firefox is a product whose job is to show ads for profit, so the only way to “donate” to it is to click ads.
- Comment on Holy sh*t: Jack Dorsey just Announced Bitchat(A secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app for iOS and macOS that works over Bluetooth mesh networks) Licensed Under Public Domain. 2 days ago:
Ingenious name
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 2 days ago:
Back in the 1990s I did a thought experiment using 1990s industrial cost figures and production volumes, that were readily available online. Turned out Americans could save the Brazilian rainforest by cutting our beef consumption by 10%. I don’t have the math on hand but the gist was that if demand for beef dropped 10% so would demand for cattle feed, which was mostly corn. Reducing corn production by that much and devoting the land to hemp cultivation (which would work) would produce enough hemp fiber to replace all the wood pulp being imported from Brazil to make paper. At tha time most trees being logged in the Amazon region were being pulped and exported to the US to make paper. So boom, demand for Amazon pulp logs drops to zero, rainforest saved!
Admittedly this was simplistic and did not account for pulp producers selling to other countries that may have been competing with the US to buy the pulp. But they would have to compete with whatever other pulp sources those customers already had. Anyway, just the fact that the numbers worked out so well gave me a little understanding of how a tend in one area can affect seemingly unrelated areas.
- Comment on AI is driving down the price of knowledge – universities have to rethink what they offer 2 days ago:
Insightful. I think what happened with tuition was that universities were actually undercharging u ntil around 1980, when they realized they could charge a lot more so they did. In America there’s a prevailing mindset that the economy boomers grew up in was normal, and today’s economy is stunted. Today’s economy is simply what it would have been decades go if the business world had risked charging higher prices and paying lower wages back then instead of waiting for an excuse like COVID.
- Comment on Employees at Amazon headquarters were asked on Monday to volunteer their time to the company’s warehouses to assist with grocery delivery 2 days ago:
Shifting personnel to grocery duty to handle a surge or whatever is fine. Asking employees to donate their free time is bullshit. I might do it if Bezos volunteered to come clean my house.
- Comment on Firefox is fine. The people running it are not 2 days ago:
For clarity, Mozilla isn’t one thing. There’s Mozilla Corporation (profit) and the Mozilla Foundation (nonprofit). Firefox is a product of Mozilla Corporation. And yes, the need to make a profit is a bug not a feature.
- Comment on ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show | ICE agents can now ID anyone by just pointing a smartphone in their face. 2 days ago:
Bear in mind what AOC told us about the “Big Beautiful Bill”. ICE now has a bigger budget than the FBI, DEA and Bureau of Prisons combined.
- Comment on Anubis, The Opensource Defender Against AI Bots: I fight bots in my free time 2 days ago:
Great interview! The whole proof-of-work approach is fascinating, and reminds me of a very old email concept he mentions in passing, where an email server would only accept a msg if the sender agreed to pay like a dollar. Then the user would accept the msg, which would refund the dollar. This would require spammers to front way too much money to make email span affordable. In his version the sender must do a processor-intensive computation, which is fine at the volume legitimate senders use but prohibitive for spammers.
- Comment on Anubis, The Opensource Defender Against AI Bots: I fight bots in my free time 2 days ago:
It’s screens out bots, regardless of whether they use AI or are just traditional asshole-created bots.
- Comment on Future teachers in Oklahoma! 2 days ago:
A senior software dev I worked under was a creationist but never used that word, he always said he was “not an evolutionist.”
- Comment on Future teachers in Oklahoma! 2 days ago:
When you fail the Oklahoma teacher exam because you studied the wrong parts of the Bible.
- Comment on Tesla loses $68 billion in value after Elon Musk says he is launching a political party 2 days ago:
Couldn’t have done that like a year ago when it might have helped???
- Comment on Someone should make an anticapitalist Dexter. A serial killer who kills evil rich people. 2 days ago:
True, capitalism commodifies everything, but it always has a doublethink view of dissent and rebellion. They’re okay as long as the bad guys are a clearly evil empire (as in Star Wars) but not if it’s the US or conventional culture in general. I mean, Disney isn’t gonna mek a series about the adventures of the Black Panthers.
- Comment on Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes 2 days ago:
LOL, sort of like hiring the CEO’s unemployed brother in law to build your new factory because he has a friend who knows about construction.
- Comment on Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes 3 days ago:
TBH that sounds like a lot of code I’ve seen from outsourcing companies in India. Their typical approach is to copy an existing program, module, web page or whatever and modify it as quickly as possible to turn it into what’s needed. The result is often a mishmash of irrelevant code, giant data queries that happen to retrieve some field that’s needed along with a ton of unnecessary crap, mixing frameworks, etc.
- Comment on The worst part of getting old is that you get less and less "first experiences" and are always comparing current with previous ones 3 days ago:
But if you live long enough it’s all new again! Favorite lines from Andy Huggins, 74-year old standup comic:
“Went to the doctor to see if I had arthritis. Turns out I have early onset rigor mortis.”
“The great thing about dating women my age is I don’t have to meet their parents.”
“Anybody ever drop their phone in the toilet? I did that, so I put it in a bag of rice.
Anybody ever drop a bag of rice in the toilet?” - Comment on Someone should make an anticapitalist Dexter. A serial killer who kills evil rich people. 3 days ago:
Right, and that will happen because TV shows aren’t produced by billionaire-owned media corporations.
- Comment on Former and current Microsofties react to the latest layoffs 3 days ago:
In the early 2000s I had a manager who hardly ever gave me anything to do. Like in 6 months I did maybe 3 weeks work. And it’s not like I never asked. I was already fairly disgruntled and had other reasons, but it led to me leaving the company for a job at a cancer research center. The problem with not doing anything at MS is that unless you can hide it somehow your review comes up and you have nothing to show for the year, you’re kind of screwed. So after a relaxing 6 months it was a good time to jump ship. Anyway, a couple years later I read MS was laying off like 600 people - which might have been their first layoffs ever, I dunno. It was supposed to clear out “deadwood” - so I checked after another couple months and found out my old manager was still there! So much for “clearing out deadwood” lol.
- Comment on Time travel doesn't work unless you also have teleportation. If you travel to the past/future, Earth will be in a different position in its orbit, and you'll die in space. 3 days ago:
Teleportation or having your time machine also be a spaceship so you can land.
- Comment on Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes 3 days ago:
My daughter has used AI a lot to write grant proposals, which she cleans up and rewords before submitting. Part of her prompts include telling it to ask her questions and incorporate her answers into the result, which she says works very well and saves her a ton of time.
- Comment on Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes 3 days ago:
Retired dev here, I’m curious about the nature of the mess. Is it buggy AI-generated code that got into production? I know an active dev who uses ChatGTP every day, says it saves him a hell of a lot of work. What he does sounds like “vibe coding”, and as long as you just use AI for grunt work and keep a human is in the workflow to verify the code, I don’t see how it would differ from junior devs working under a senior. Have some companies been using poorly managed all-AI tools or what?
- Comment on Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes 3 days ago:
And no doubt struggling to blame their bad decisions on each other and preserve their salary bonuses.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
Yeah man, the light from that little high window is perfect!
- Comment on Study finds smartphone bans in Dutch schools improved focus 4 days ago:
So they’re saying removing distractions improves focus? Woah dude, spoiler warning!
