squaresinger
@squaresinger@lemmy.world
- Comment on OpenAI stops ChatGPT from telling people to break up with partners 2 hours ago:
Have a look at relationship subreddits. They are full of people who have been manipulated and gaslit for years or decades who have no idea what is actually normal. For people like that a reality check is really helpful or even vital.
- Comment on ‘We didn’t vote for ChatGPT’: Swedish Prime Minister under fire for using AI 3 hours ago:
You don’t have to modify the model to parrot your opinion. You just have to put your stuff into the system prompt.
You can even modify the system prompt on the fly depending on e.g. the user account or the specific user input. That way you can modify the responses for a far bigger subject range: whenever a keyword of a specific subject is detected, the fitting system prompt is loaded, so you don’t have to trash your system prompt full of off-topic information.
This is so trivially simple to do that even a junior dev should be able to wrap something like that around an existing LLM.
- Comment on Too bad we can't have good public transportation 3 hours ago:
You are what appens if someone is too dumb to understand anything but extremes. Being able to understand nuance requires at least the mental level of a 10yo.
It is an quite extraordinary feat to be so dumb that you think a country has to be either terrible at everything or great at everything and anyone who says a country is not terrible at everything must be totally in love with everything that happens in that country.
Literally kindergarden level of argumentation.
- Comment on The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) 3 hours ago:
Dotcom was a bubble too and it popped hard with huge faillout even though the internet didn’t disappear and it still was and is a revolutionary thing that changed how we live our lives.
Overvalued doesn’t mean the thing has no value.
- Comment on The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) 3 hours ago:
And that’s why it’s being done. Everyone hopes that they make it out at just the right time to make millions while the greater fools who join too late are left holding the bag.
Bubbles are great. For those who make it out in time. They suck fo everyone else including the taxpayer who might have to bail out companies and investors.
Always following the doctrine of privatizing profits and socializing losses.
- Comment on ‘We didn’t vote for ChatGPT’: Swedish Prime Minister under fire for using AI 4 hours ago:
That’s the big issue. If it was only about competence, I think throwing dice might yield better results than what many politicians are doing. But AI isn’t throwing dice but instead reproduces what the creators of the AI want to say.
- Comment on What’s the best written Pokémon game? 4 hours ago:
This could have been a great “difficult choice” moment. But Pokemon games don’t do these. If you want to 100% the game, you gotta catch em all. I haven’t played Arceus, but I’m quite sure the game never acknowledges whether you caught the Shaymin or not. And with no stakes on the line, there is no “difficult choice” moment.
- Comment on Too bad we can't have good public transportation 4 hours ago:
You really have trouble understanding numbers, right?
- Comment on mRNA vaccines for HIV trigger strong immune response in people 6 hours ago:
You just responded to a comment that explained exactly what you are asking for.
Long-term side effects are called that because they stay for a long time, not because they appear after a long time. They develop quickly after the vaccination and stay for a long time.
- Comment on mRNA vaccines for HIV trigger strong immune response in people 6 hours ago:
No effect.
- Comment on Florida sues some of the biggest porn platforms, accusing them of not complying with the state's age verification law 6 hours ago:
If the customers are still in Florida and they still earn money in Florida, they are still subject to Florida law.
- Comment on Steam Survey for July 2025 shows Linux approaching 3% 17 hours ago:
If you have an issue with the way gnome works by default, then you are using it wrong and you should feel ashamed for that.
- the Gnome dev team
- Comment on The number of times a person mentions ChatGPT in a random conversation might work as a rule of thumb to measure her intelligence (inverse proportion, of course) 19 hours ago:
It’s kinda weird in general that most languages have gramatical markers for gender.
We don’t have a separate pronoun and separate word endings for e.g. young vs old, for poor vs rich, for educated vs unlearned and so on.
Many languages don’t even have a neutral form (like “they” in english), thus forcing you to mark the gender of the person you are talking about gramatically.
Like, for example, why would I care whether the baker making my bread is male or female? I care that they are a baker and know how to make good bread. Otherwise they don’t even have to be human for all I care.
- Comment on The number of times a person mentions ChatGPT in a random conversation might work as a rule of thumb to measure her intelligence (inverse proportion, of course) 19 hours ago:
Same in German: “die Person” is feminine.
- Comment on What’s the best written Pokémon game? 19 hours ago:
I was so disappointed with b/w.
The premise was really great. The “Pokemon is just dogfighting for kids” argument is a long-standing argument, and I was so stoked that they took it on.
And then they just bait-and-switched it to “The team doesn’t actually want to stop dogfighting, they just want to be the only ones with dogs to fight everyone else”. It was the laziest cop-out possible.
- Comment on Too bad we can't have good public transportation 1 day ago:
If only that metric was included in the link above. Well, luckily it is. And guess what: When sorting by “je 100 000 motorisierte Fahrzeuge” (“per 100 000 motorized vehicles”), China ranks even much better.
Sorting by per inhabitants puts China as the 68th worst country, so 67 countries are worse. Sorting by per motorized vehicels puts China as 115th worst, so 114 countries are worse.
When looking at “per motorized vehicles” China is on par with Lettland.
If only there was a way to follow the link and look at actual numbers before spouting made-up misinformation.
- Comment on Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet 1 day ago:
If by “foreign adversary” you mean the US, that might even be true.
- Comment on If everyone spontaneously became the same race the world would realize that the rich are the real problem 2 days ago:
The discrimination is real, no question about it.
The thing that’s not “real” is that this is solely about skin color.
In the USA race is defined quite closely along the lines of “continent of origin” (or of origin of the ancestors), because the USA Is a country with worldwide immigration. Thus the groups are larger.
Compare that to Europe, where world-wide immigration only started picking up in the last two decades. Here people can discriminate just as easily within what would be considered the same race in the USA. For example, many people in Austria really hate Serbians. Many Serbians really hate Croatians. Many Croatians really hate Albanians and so on.
This is also visible in the meaning of the words “race” and “racism”. Before WW2 “race” was commonly used in Europe as in the “German race”, the “English race” or the “French race”. And while the term “race” fell out of use after WW2 and was subsequently re-imported from the USA with the USA-meaning, the original meaning lives on in the meaning of “racism”.
For example, if a French man hates all the English, this wouldn’t be racism in the USA (since both are from the same “race” by US-definition), it would totally be racism in most European languages.
The “social construct” part of the discrimination is along which lines discrimination happens. There’s nothing “natural” about discriminating along the lines of US-race. Discrimination can happen just as viciously along any other line.
And that certainly doesn’t mean people don’t suffer from it. But it also means that making sure everyone is as equal as possible (e.g. by eliminating US-race) won’t stop discrimination.
- Comment on North Korea sent me abroad to be a secret IT worker. My wages funded the regime 2 days ago:
No need for good computers to train agents. They don’t need to play crysis to train as hackers. Something on the level of a Pi (or more accurately of a 2010 laptop) is good enough.
- Comment on In the olden days, when people got married a lot younger, there were probably lots of grandparents in their thirties 3 days ago:
Yeah, a lot of people didn’t make it to the point of dieing of old age, but it wasn’t rare to see 80yo or even 90yo people.
People seem to think that a life expectancy of e.g. 45 years means that most people died at age 45, and that’s just plain wrong.
- Comment on If everyone spontaneously became the same race the world would realize that the rich are the real problem 3 days ago:
No, you don’t need genetic differences for racism.
In fact, in most European languages the words “race” and “racism” are talking more about nationalities than about genetically different population groups.
For example, if you read German articles from the 1920s, they often talk about the “German race”, the “French race” or the “English race”. In most European languages the word “race” fell out of use after WW2 and the American meaning of the word “race” was re-imported later on. But the meaning lives on in the meaning of “racism”.
For example, in German a white person from Germany who hates everyone from France irrespective of their skin color is still a racist, while in the USA that wouldn’t qualify as racism.
That’s because neither the word “race” nor “racism” have a clear definition. “Race” is used entirely to discriminate “them” vs “us”. So “race” determines whatever group people in a country want to discriminate against.
In the USA this was clearly a “we, the while ex-european people” vs “them, the black former slaves” and “them, the asians” and “them, the south americans”.
So what would happen if suddenly everyone had the same skin color? People would just shift to the next best thing to discriminate.
Instead of discriminating against black people, just do what has been done in Europe for millennia: Discriminate against slavic people. (The term “slave” comes from “slavic”, because it was so common to keep slavic people as slaves.)
And if nations, religions, languages and regions of origin would also disappear as things to discriminate against, then it would shift to the next thing: people who went to a different school, have a different education or best of all: other types of poor people.
The issue is that humans are heuristics-based beings. Prejudices the result of learning. I’ve had 5 crappy HP printers, so I conclude all HP printers suck. Some friends have had terrible experiences with Fiat cars, so I avoid Fiat cars. I read in the newspaper that Nestle is destroying the planet, so I eat something else.
The problem is that if this is applied to humans, they get unfairly judged for things that are often completely out of their control. The core mechanism that we humans function on happens to be severely destructive in this context. But that’s also why it’s hard to impossible to get rid of racism and similar forms of discrimination because they are so centrally embedded in how we humans function.
- Comment on In the olden days, when people got married a lot younger, there were probably lots of grandparents in their thirties 3 days ago:
That’s a bit of a misconception. Life expectancy doesn’t measure the age at which most people die, but the average life expectancy.
That means, a bunch of different values contribute to the life expectancy and they do so to a wildly different degree.
Let’s say that without any adverse effects everyone dies of old age at around age 90.
Someone dieing of pulmonia at age 80 only scratches off 10 years, but someone dieing at age 0 due some childhood illness, bad hygiene, malnutrition or other complications scratches off 90 years.
In fact, by far the strongest contributor to the average life expectancy is child mortality. In 1800 in the USA, child mortality was at 46.2%.
If you discount child mortality, most people actually died aged 65-90.
- Comment on Campaign's Interactive Tool Tracks How Much Trump and GOP Are Raising the Cost of Living 4 days ago:
For stuff like that I usually put the email address of my former boss.
- Comment on Chinese researchers suggest lasers and sabotage to counter Musk’s Starlink satellites 4 days ago:
I’m sure Satlink has been extensively trialled for that use too.
- Comment on Im an unworthy Fraud when it comes to Tech 4 days ago:
I use this FOSS keyboard: github.com/Dakkaron/Fairberry
It also doesn’t have emoji.
- Comment on Saw this on r*ddit, had to share with my people 6 days ago:
John Oliver
- Comment on Lemmy is a tech literate echo chamber 6 days ago:
Tbh, not even that is guaranteed. Lemmy (or the fediverse in general) are really not that privacy-focussed at all.
While the people running your instance might not be sifting through your data, nothing would stop anyone from doing so. Everything you post on Lemmy is public, and even if all major instances would somehow block scraping (which they don’t), a scraper would only need to create their own instance and ActivityPub would just deliver all of the data in a nice and easy to process way.
The big advantage of Lemmy is that it is not controlled by one large corporation (and instead by a bunch of faceless, unknown randos on the internet), not that posting stuff publically visible on the internet is somehow more private.
- Comment on Lemmy is a tech literate echo chamber 6 days ago:
Tbh, getting into lemmy is quite a bit more complex than e.g. into Instagram or other centralized social media platforms.
Compare this:
- Choose which social media platform to use and land on Instagram
- Download the instagram app from the default store of your phone’s OS
- Create an account
- Done
with:
- Choose which social media platform to use and land on Lemmy
- Choose which app to use. There’s like 20 of them, some great some not so, some active, some abandoned. There’s no guide or anything, so you’ll have to google and/or try 5 of them to find one you like.
- Choose which instance to use. There are literally hundreds of them and you don’t even know where to start. You have no information, but this choice is central to the kind of lemmy experience you will get.
- Google and find join-lemmy.org. Now you got a one-liner for each instance together with user count. So naively you sort by activity and land on lemmy.ml.
- Create an account
- Figure out what .ml stands for.
- Repeat step 3-5 because account transfers between instances don’t work.
- Repeat step 3-5 because you landed on the likes of lemmy.ee or feddit.de, and the instance closed down
- Done, until your instance closes down
Slight hyperbole here, but choosing an app and instance alone is complicated enough to scare away lots of people.
- Comment on Lemmy is a tech literate echo chamber 6 days ago:
Relevant xkcd: xkcd.com/2501/
- Comment on Too bad we can't have good public transportation 1 week ago:
Your fault that you weren’t born as an aircraft!
