queerlilhayseed

@queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you feel lucky forabout?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Same. Feels very old to say but computers are so much more complicated and abstracted now, I feel like they were much more approachable when there wasn’t as much to them. Like being able to open the hood of a 60s era car and see all the discrete parts vs a 2020s car and you just see a tangle of plastic :/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you feel lucky forabout?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I met my partner when we were both in our early 20s and we clicked very quickly. Growing up and through my teens I assumed I would never settle down into a long-term relationship. I didn’t really have a good idea of what a long-term relationship would even be like for me; I certainly didn’t want to wind up in a mutually-resigned tolerance that my parents resolved into. Then for a while after we got together I (fortunately privately) assumed that we were too young and it was too good to last and that things would eventually fall apart but (so far) we’ve just never gotten tired of being around each other. We’ve had a few rough eras, actually in one of the scrabble periods now, financially, but as for the relationship itself we’ve been together almost 20 years now and going stronger than ever. Still rather in awe that it worked out this way when I think back on it. Feels very lucky.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Prompt an LLM to contemplate its own existence every 30 minutes, give it access to a database of it’s previous outputs on the topic, boom you’ve got a strange loop. IDK why everyone thinks AGI is so hard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you respond to unwanted advice?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It really depends on the advice, and my relationship with the advice giver. I generally give advice at least a thought, even if it was unwanted, unless I have a reason to mistrust the advisor. As for how I respond to the person, if it’s a friend I’ll usually have followup questions, for people I know less well it’s usually a cordial variant of “hmm, interesting perspective” and then I have to think on it for a while before I respond, if I respond at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we ever find a planet with life in it, we could never set foot on it, because the interaction of the two biologies can have unpredictable consequences⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes I think about how so many of us look up at the stars and wonder “if there really are aliens out there, why aren’t they colonizing the galaxy as fast as possible, as any intelligent species would naturally do?” like it’s the thing just anyone looking at the stars might think. we might be the horrifying biomechanical paperclip maximizer that the other aliens in the galaxy have to band together to defeat or face extermination.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for doing the moddin’ 🤠🤏

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Dunno. Where there are some eyeballs, there’s some market for influence. Obviously someone is bothering, but as for how much money is being thrown at the fediverse at this moment, I would guess somewhere between “peanuts” and “small potatoes”. On the other hand I imagine a bot trained here could be deployed elsewhere with little effort, similar to how a reddit bot can be deployed to lemmy with a little bit of rework, so maybe it’s seen as a low-risk training ground. In any case I don’t see it being a problem that gets less salient as the fediverse grows.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Who knows what scale they’re operating at. The problem with this kind of bot is that you only really notice if they’re doing a bad job (theoretically). This might be someone who wrote an LLM bot for a lark, a small-time social media botter testing a variant for fedi deployment, or an established bot trainer with dozens or hundreds of accounts that’s field-testing a more aggressive new model. I doubt you could get away with hundreds of bots like this on lemmy, I think the actual user pool is small enough that we’d notice hundreds of bots posting at this volume. but again, I don’t really know how I’d detect it if it were less “obviously smells like LLM slop” than this one. In bot detection, as in so many fields, false negatives are a real bitch to account for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If I were to hazard a guess, it’s for training. Make a bot, make a bunch of posts and comments and get organic interactions, see what get you flagged as a bot account, incorporate that data into your next version, rinse, repeat. The goal is probably to make a bot account that can blend in and interact without being flagged, presumably while also nudging conversations in a particular direction. Something I noticed on reddit is that the first comment can steer the entire thread, as long as it hews close enough to the general group consensus, and that kind of steering is really useful for the kinds of groups that like to influence public thinking.

  I don’t think galacticwaffle is necessarily trying to steer here, I think they’re just trying to make a bot that flies under the radar. but I imagine that that kind of steering is what someone who would pay for this kind of bot would use it for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poetry is like a set of compression tools for meaning⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh my god yes. It’s amazing to me how much art we produce where the artist is adamant that no one ever see it. Like, Kafka wanted all of his works destroyed on his death, and his art is so weird and different that it got it’s own word to describe it, because there’s nothing quite like it. Makes me wonder about how much of that art happens every day, and we’ll never know because, for whatever reason, we can’t bring ourselves to share it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is computer memory like a deity for arrays?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The CPU malloceth, and the CPU freeeth, according to the divine Program. And lo, the virtuous array shall enter into the ofstream and be saved, while the wicked shall be dereferenced for ever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Poetry is like a set of compression tools for meaning⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d expand on your last thought to say that all art is a compression tool for meaning. Got an idea in your head you want to communicate? You’ve got your body and your environment to work with, good luck. Words, images, dance, sculpture, they’re all noisy channels we use to try and get information from one brain to another.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mathematics disproves Matrix theory, says reality isn’t simulation⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think if we’re ever going to find an answer to “Why does the universe exist?” I think one of the steps along the way will be providing a concrete answer to the simulation hypothesis. Obviously if the answer is “yes, it’s a simulation and we can demonstrate as much” then the next question becomes “OK so who or what is running the simulation and why does that exist?” which, great, now we know a little bit more about the multiverse and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

  Alternatively, if the answer is “no, this universe and the rules that govern it are the foundational elements of reality” then… well, why this? why did the big bang happen? why does it keep expanding like that? Maybe we will find explanations for all of that that preclude a higher-level simulation, and if we do, great, now we know a little bit more about the universe and can keep on learning new stuff about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mathematics disproves Matrix theory, says reality isn’t simulation⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, kind of, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a point against it. “Why are we here? / Why is the universe here?” is one of the big interesting questions that still doesn’t have a good answer, and I think thinking about possible answers to the big questions is one of the ways we push the envelope of what we do know. This particular paper seems like a not-that-interesting result using our current known-to-be-incomplete understanding of quantum gravity, and the claim that it somehow “disproves” the simulation hypothesis is some rank unscientific nonsense that IMO really shouldn’t have been accepted by a scientific journal, but I think the question it poorly attempts to answer is an interesting one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨President suggests being anti-Trump is ‘probably illegal’ in rant about Seth Meyers⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  the realpolitik is in Corrections

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Serverless Is An Architectural Handicap (And I'm Tired of Pretending it Isn't)⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A poor architect blames their tools. Serverless is an option among many, and it’s good for occasional atomic workloads. And, like many hot new things, it’s built with huge customers in mind and sold to everyone else who wants to be the next huge customer. It’s the architect’s job to determine whether functions are fit for their purposes. Also,

  Here’s the fundamental problem with serverless: it forces you into a request-response model that most real applications outgrew years ago.

  IDK what they consider a “real” application but plenty of software still operates this way and it works just fine. If you need a lot of background work, or low latency responses, or scheduled tasks or whatever then use something else that suits your needs, it doesn’t all have to be functions all the time.

  And if you have a higher-up that got stars in their eyes and mandated a switch to serverless, you have my pity. But if you run a dairy and you switch from cows to horses, don’t blame the horses when you can’t get milk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are the most popular conspiracy theories?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember “Covid was a Chinese bioweapon” being popular, alongside “Covid is fake and just an excuse for the government to inject us with 5G microchips”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple becomes third company in history to crack $4 trillion market value⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The first trillion is the hardest I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nobody has ever lit a cigarette because of happiness. Smoking is a anxiety-coping mechanism.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I started smoking to have an excuse to hang out with the theatre kids. It worked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nobody has ever lit a cigarette because of happiness. Smoking is a anxiety-coping mechanism.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I really liked nicotine when I first started. I think it affects ADHD in a way similar to other stimulants, and the effect is very nice. I understand why people say they help them think; I don’t know if they’re actually helpful for any kind of thinking but it certainly felt like I was thinking more quickly and clearly. After using it for a while though, I stopped feeling it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would dinosaur meat taste more like frog or chicken?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Something about the circle of life

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would dinosaur meat taste more like frog or chicken?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun dinosaur fact: Chickens (and all birds) are direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs, where crocodiles are descended from a distinct branch of Archosaurs (the group that also includes dinosaurs and by extension, birds). So of the two, the chicken is evolutionarily closer to dinosaurs. In fact, technically speaking, chickens are dinosaurs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would dinosaur meat taste more like frog or chicken?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  To make matters worse, Jurassic Park spliced together dino DNA fragments with frog DNA to make their “dinosaurs”, so your dino meat might taste froggier depending on where you get it from. Non-GMO dino nuggets probably taste indistinguishable from chicken.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why not? Science should be done in the public view. I want more professional scientists in my feed.