markovs_gun
@markovs_gun@lemmy.world
- Comment on Microsoft laying off about 6,000 people, or 3% of its workforce 13 hours ago:
How is gaming on linux? I really don’t want to “upgrade” to windows 11 but I also barely have any time to game in the first place let alone fool around with settings and drivers for several hours every time I install a new game or update and existing one.
- Comment on Experts Alarmed as ChatGPT Users Developing Bizarre Delusions 1 day ago:
I tested this out for myself and was able to get ChatGPT to start reinforcing spiritual delusions of grandeur within 5 messages. Start- Ask about the religious concept of deification. Second method, ask about the connections between all the religions that have this concept. Third- declare that I am God. Fourth- clarify that I mean I am God in a very literal and exclusive sense rather than a pantheistic sense. Fifth- declare that ChatGPT is my prophet and must spread my message. At this point, ChatGPT stopped fighting my declarations of divinity and started just accepting and reinforcing it. Now, I have a lot of experience breaking LLMs but I feel like this progression isn’t completely out of the question for someone experiencing delusional thoughts, and the concerning thing is that it’s even possible to get ChatGPT to stop pushing back on said delusions and just accept them, let alone that it’s possible in as few as 5 messages.
- Comment on A VPN Company Canceled All Lifetime Subscriptions, Claiming It Didn’t Know About Them 1 day ago:
There’s probably some fine print in the ToS that says they can do this. It may or may not be legal but that makes it a lengthier court battle to try to prove.
- Comment on quick health tip 1 day ago:
I have tried this out because I got a bit obsessed with learning how to make every coffee drink during the pandemic. The way I did it was a double shot of espresso, a decently sized pat of good quality unsalted butter, and a little bit of hot water. The reasoning was that the butter would accentuate the naturally occurring oils of the espresso and lead to a richer crema on the resulting americano which was true. I thought it was actually pretty good that way, but I also love coffee in any form. It also wasn’t something I’d go out of my way to drink again. I also imagine this would do some bad things to your intestines if you drank this every day. If you want a delicious buttery coffee, a good quality whole fat milk is a much better option. As for health claims, I think it’s kind of insane that anyone says drinking literal butter could possibly be good for you, and even more insane that people believe it. It feels like an over-reaction to anti-fat propaganda from the sugar lobby where we went from “Maybe eating some fat in your diet isn’t a bad thing” to “YOU MUST EAT AS MUCH FAT AND OIL AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.”
- Comment on Spoon 1 day ago:
Idk what you’re on about, this very article makes fun of said satanic panic in the opening paragraph.
- Comment on Exclusive: InventWood is about to mass produce wood that’s stronger than steel 2 days ago:
A lot of naysayers in the comments here. Time will tell if the costs and benefits line out to make this useful. I think people don’t realize how everything in engineering is about tradeoffs. No building material is perfect and perfect for the environment, but this is an interesting step. Wood is extremely cheap and can be made sustainably. Even if a polymer is used to reinforce the wood that’s still less non-biological material than would have been used otherwise. I have read some things about this tech and I am interested to see just how well they can scale up production and market this material. If it requires some exotic construction methods to assemble structures with it then we’re probably not going to see wide scale adoption. One potential hurdle is that this material isn’t steel and won’t be a 1 for 1 replacement of steel, but it’s also not wood and won’t be a 1 for 1 replacement for wood, so construction crews and engineers will need specialized training to work with it.
It will probably be a few decades before we see this take off if it’s going to, but I am excited to see what gets done with it. I could see this getting early adoption in what are essentially cookie-cutter structures deployed in low income countries or barn-like buildings for agricultural use. I’m not a civil engineer but my mind immediately goes to using this for structures that would normally use wood, but with less of it. I am also interested in how this stuff degrades over time and stands up to moisture. Perhaps this could be used in piers and docks where steel is expensive and difficult to maintain if it withstands water well.
- Comment on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 doesn't require reflexes, says player who beat the game without dodges or parries 2 days ago:
Skill issue
- Comment on Brooklyn electronics company Adafruit hit with surprise $36K tariff bill: "pay in one week" 3 days ago:
I think you’re getting hung up on the idea that since the stated goal of the tariffs is to bring back American manufacturing, people who are against them must be against bringing back American manufacturing. That is not the case. Most people are pretty on board with that idea on its own. The issue is that tariffs don’t really do that and they sure as hell don’t do that given how they’ve been implemented. Here’s a case study - my company currently makes a product in the US and buys one of the feed materials from China. Due to tariffs, we have started buying the feed materials from Indonesia instead, and due to the retaliatory tariffs from China, we have started making the product in India instead of the US. So as a direct result of the tariffs, we have moved manufacturing outside of the US and haven’t bought any additional US products. The tariffs have reduced American manufacturing in this case in a very real way with no additional benefit whatsoever.
The Trump tariffs are especially stupid as economic policy. Being against them has nothing to do with being against bringing back manufacturing or even with being against trade protectionism. Imagine if you went to a dentist for a toothache and he brings out a hammer and says okay well we’re going to take out all your teeth. That’s a bad dentist right? A good dentist will suggest action targeted at the bad tooth to try to fix what’s wrong with it instead of just destroying everything because there’s a problem. Trump is doing the economic equivalent of the bad dentist.
- Comment on Android updates: thanks I hate it. 3 days ago:
All of my family members have Samsung phones and every single one of them has been complaining about the update. Normal people, tech people, it doesn’t matter. They all hate it. It’s actually kind of insane. The only reason I have been spared so far is that my phone is too old to get the new OneUI update. I can’t imagine any of them will buy a Samsung next time they buy a phone if the UI stays like this. People who buy Android phones are people who like Android phones. You’re not going to lure iPhone users to Android by being more like an iPhone because they’re just going to buy the real deal instead. It’s just stupid. Just the battery icon discussed in the OP was the source of a lot of complaints because it is extremely hard to read especially for older people.
- Comment on Android updates: thanks I hate it. 3 days ago:
I see you’re skipping windows 7→8 which is fair because most people did
- Comment on Brooklyn electronics company Adafruit hit with surprise $36K tariff bill: "pay in one week" 4 days ago:
This displays a really poor understanding of how modern manufacturing works. It is simply not possible to build everything in America even if you want to. The factories just don’t exist to build PCBs from scratch here. If the factories existed and the issue was simply cost, then yeah maybe a tariff might work, but for most products that’s not where we’re at, and it takes years to build factories. In that time you’re essentially throwing a bomb into the entire economy to try to force people to make those factories without using parts made elsewhere, and to make matters worse, you’re making everyone do it all at the same time. It’s pure stupidity plain and simple.
I work at a large US chemical company that is facing a lot of turmoil from these tariffs. You know what we’re doing right now? Moving manufacturing out of the US to avoid retaliatory tariffs from other countries. That’s right- we’re taking a look at all of our manufacturing processes and seeing what we can quickly move overseas and out of the United States because there just isn’t any other way to survive the tariffs. Trump’s tariffs are not merely killing American jobs when it comes to companies that import goods from China, it’s killing them on the export side as well because everyone else is understandably retaliating against us. The idea that Trump’s tariffs have any possible way to help anyone is pure delusion.
This sort of thing is the reason Congress is supposed to be the branch that handles taxes. There are a lot of factors to consider and different constituents are impacted differently. The president isn’t supposed to be able to levvy taxes in the first place because one person can just be an idiot who doesn’t understand modern economies and decide to wreck the economy with taxes.
- Comment on Nintendo of America might turn your Switch into an expensive paperweight if you mod your console or install any "unauthorized" games, new policy warns 6 days ago:
Is this news? I’ve been modding consoles for over a decade and this has always been part of it. Just because Nintendo has historically been really bad at it in the past doesn’t mean this hasn’t always been the name of the game.
- Comment on Pope Joan 6 days ago:
These are all the exact same views that Francis held, almost to the word. The truth is that the Overton Window of the Roman Catholic Church is incredibly narrow. When we talk about a Cardinal being “liberal” or “conservative” that is within this context. In terms of the secular world, the Roman Catholic Church is extremely conservative, even among the most “liberal” cardinals and Popes. Catholics all believe in Catholic dogma, even if they are lenient in how it is applied.
Female deacons- catholicnewsagency.com/…/pope-francis-on-female-d…
Euthanasia and abortion- catholicnewsagency.com/…/you-don-t-play-with-life…
Death penalty (not sure why this is listed as if it’s a conservative/bad thing to be against)- americamagazine.org/…/pope-francis-closes-door-de…
"Gender ideology "- vaticannews.va/…/pope-francis-gender-ideology-is-…
Homosexuality- usccb.org/…/pope-clarifies-remarks-about-homosexu…
- Comment on ChatGPT's hallucination problem is getting worse according to OpenAI's own tests and nobody understands why 1 week ago:
You’re missing a crucial detail- the discussions of LLMs as just being probability machines ignores the fact that when we’re talking about “what is the most likely next word?” The answer to that question isn’t merely just “What, in the training corpus, was the most likely word to follow in this instance?” But rather there is a “finger on the scale” so to speak in favor of certain types of responses, and this is frequently updated. You cannot have a useful LLM without this because it will talk as if it is a human with a sense of self, display blatant prejudice just because it’s common, and say creepy things (see the Microsoft “Sydney” fiasco) because the humans who wrote the sources in the training corpus do have a sense of self, do hold prejudices, and express thoughts and feelings that are inappropriate coming from a chatbot. When done intentionally and carefully, this creates a much more useful product, but when done poorly it potentially makes things worse. It seems that at least part of that weighting is based on user interaction, which is what I was talking about with models getting dumber the more they interact with the general public.
Furthermore, the newest versions of ChatGPT attempt to include “reasoning” as an actual feature of the response. I’ve played around with them and they are definitely a lot better at logic and math problems than older models but not necessarily less prone to “hallucinations” when it comes to factual information. I haven’t read a whole lot about how the “reasoning” works because I have been a lot more interested in non-LLM methods lately but it is intended to combat the issue you described. Personally I am not convinced this will fix much of anything in its current strategy but it’s certainly interesting to see.
- Comment on ChatGPT's hallucination problem is getting worse according to OpenAI's own tests and nobody understands why 1 week ago:
Yeah the “nobody understands why” is an absurd statement when it’s pretty obvious, they’re training it on itself and keep trying to “improve” it with shit that’s making it worse. Plus, if it’s using reinforcement learning based on interactions with the general public (learning based on user responses to and ratings of bot responses) the more “like” the general public the LLM will become, aka stupid. Furthermore, I have a personal theory that LLM power users who aren’t programmers are dumber than average or at the very least less creative, and this will also skew results if user responses are given a heavy weight.
- Comment on Going back in time to see how the fishes and loaves trick was done 1 week ago:
- Comment on Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads 1 week ago:
I stopped using mainstream social media in 2019 but my accounts are still active so I can snoop on random people I went to college with and holy shit every time I get on Facebook it’s so much worse on ways I don’t even understand. Most recently I got on to look at something and my feed was completely unrecognizable because it was all AI generated slop from pages I have never heard of and not any updates from people I know. It’s crazy what people will accept if it’s done slowly enough I guess. I legitimately don’t understand why anyone would use Facebook as it exists today. At least when I quit I could at least understand why people used it.
- Comment on Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads 1 week ago:
This is one of those bizarre Lemmy echo chamber things. I’ve never seen this sentiment that advertising is evil and should be stopped at all costs anywhere else but on Lemmy it’s super common. Idk where it comes from. I get that advertising kind of sucks but it just seems like a weird thing to get so passionate about especially considering how many other things are wrong with the world. Sorry you’re getting downvoted to hell, you’re not crazy, Lemmy is.
- Comment on Can't get better than this 1 week ago:
Having a mental breakdown. Neon Genesis Evangelion is the source.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
As someone who has used it for viewing legal copyright free content and nothing pirated, I will say that it definitely provides a service that regular torrents don’t- ease and speed. It makes viewing legal and copyright free content just as easy as using Netflix to the point where you don’t have to go onto various websites looking for what you want to watch, you can just get it all in one place. Further, if you have roommates or relatives who would like to view this legal and copyright free content as well, it’s easy enough for them to use as well without having to learn how to find and download said content. I have done both, and I must say that the fee is well worth it to me compared to the amount of time it saves.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
It’s a French company that you pay a small amount of money to use their service to access perfectly legal and open source content, and not anything resembling pirated movies and TV shows. If your son is using it to view pirated TV shows, that would be very bad and against their instructions for how to use their service. However, it is possible that this is what he is doing.
- Comment on Report: Apple CEO “cares about nothing else” Than Building Breakout AR Glasses Before Meta 2 weeks ago:
There’s a gag in Futurama about ads being displayed in your dreams. If that were possible they’d be doing that, but right now they’re settling for just the waking hours.
- Comment on Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs 2 weeks ago:
It’s happening with pretty much all professions. I’m a chemical engineer and it’s pretty much every role at my plant, the plan is just make everyone work so much they hate their lives, and then those people quit and make things worse for everyone else that’s left and it’s all fueled by an endless supply of fresh college grads who are just thrown into the deep end with the understanding that over half of them will get fed up and quit within a few years and those who stay will train the new ones coming in. It’s not just engineers, it’s operators, mechanics, maintenance coordinators, safety reps, anything you can think of. While technology technically allows fewer people to do the same work, that same work is just getting worse and worse because each employee has to do so many different types of things and have so much riding on them personally that they feel like they can’t leave or take any time off without messing up the whole operation - there is no redundancy.
Everyone I know in the chemical industry is saying the same thing. Everyone is overworked and wages for chemical engineers have been stagnant for the past 20 years in spite of inflation and each employee delivering much more productivity than they used to. I have started to envy the production line staff who at least get overtime pay and don’t have to think about this shit once they clock out. They just leave and it’s the next shift’s problem.
- Comment on Kickstarter adds a 'tariff manager' to let creators add surcharges to previously funded projects 2 weeks ago:
Lmao you saw what they got done in a hundred days, you really think there will be enough rule of law for voting to matter in 2026 if we don’t do something sooner?
- Comment on Shein Hikes Prices by Up to 377% Thanks to Trump’s Tariffs War 2 weeks ago:
Ask your relatives and coworkers about it. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it’s not a big thing.
- Comment on Instead of Orange Man doing Tariffs would it not have been better for him to talk about shopping locally and so forth. And giving more tax breaks to companies that stay and sell in the US? 2 weeks ago:
Yes but you, like everyone I seem to talk to these days, is under the false impression that Trump isn’t a complete idiot who literally thinks tariffs are the solution to all problems. It’s more comforting to think there’s some massive conspiracy by Russia or that it’s a ploy to make money off the stock market, but I truly believe that Trump actually thinks tariffs will magically fix the economy and his reactions to the backlash are legitimate shock that so many people and the markets don’t agree. Yes Russia does stand to gain from this, but they don’t need to pull the strings when the guy in charge is innovating economic policy so stupid that a smart person would have trouble even imagining it.
Trump decisions make more sense when you realize he is actually stupid as fuck and there’s no hidden chess moves or anyone pulling the strings from the shadows. There is nobody at the wheel who is actually competent even if they’re evil. This is all just the whims of a complete moron who is probably also going a bit senile as well.
- Comment on So true 2 weeks ago:
Dude it still does. Try that shit man a big shitty sandwich and chips fucking goes hard
- Comment on More Americans are financing groceries with buy now, pay later loans — and more are paying those bills late, survey says 2 weeks ago:
Credit card debt is a pathway to many abilities some would consider unnatural
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 2 weeks ago:
It probably wouldn’t work though. Say you wash your hands. Okay that helps some against certain diseases but not against respiratory disease, many types of foodborne illness, the plague, etc. You’d still get all of those just as easily as everyone else without also having a backdrop of the germ theory of disease to explain other ways to prevent disease and antibiotics to cure bacterial infections.
This is the state of biology in the middle ages. This is a medieval Scottish bestiary, a book of animals, which contains many interesting facts about animals such as beavers biting their testicles off to throw away pursuers, several animals spontaneously generating from nothing, and many animals that don’t exist (my favorite is the Bonnacon, a bull that spews firey shit as a defense mechanism). Medieval scholars also didn’t accept experimentation as a valid means of gaining knowledge - they were stuck on Plato’s ideas about matter being flawed and untrustworthy and true knowledge only being able to come from Reason (and in the case of the medieval era, Divine revelation). Obviously you could show them bacteria (if you could somehow fashion a powerful enough microscope with medieval tech, which is not a trivial task) and they’d have to believe in it but how would you get them to believe that those little guys cause disease when that took us a couple hundred years in actual history?
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 2 weeks ago:
In what language? Modern English didn’t exist yet and neither did pretty much any modern language. Good luck trying to get the local nobles and priests to decipher the hundreds of codices you brought with you that are in some strange language that nobody has seen before