andrewrgross
@andrewrgross@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers 4 weeks ago:
Honestly, that’s the main thing I was thinking.
- Comment on 3D Printable Subaru Impreza 22B 4 weeks ago:
Damn, that’s rad as fuck
- Comment on NYCC exclusive new Lower Decks clip 4 weeks ago:
I’m sure whatever it is it’ll be very fun and funny. I’m looking forward to this.
- Comment on New "Lower Decks" poster 5 weeks ago:
This is very stupid in the best possible way
- Comment on New "Lower Decks" poster 5 weeks ago:
Hell yeah baby
- Comment on Why didn't the Discovery show-runners believe in the Federation? 5 weeks ago:
I think that as someone else pointed out, this is just a reflection of their tastes.
In a long running series like this, it’s not surprising that when every show is trying to find new conceptual territory, someone would go this way.
- Comment on Phonebooks 1 month ago:
Oh! Apologies, I just saw that someone else said something relevant and decided to post my comment as a reply to them instead of a top level comment. Sorry for the confusion!
- Comment on Phonebooks 1 month ago:
I’m from Pittsburgh. I think we ran a cross country meet in Hershey once.
The amusement park and factory tour are all quite charming. It’s hard to recommend one make a dedicated trip, but if anyone is ever on a road trip nearby, it’s worth the detour to stop by for a day.
Then again, my recommendation is 20 years old. It could be either better or worse now.
- Comment on Phonebooks 1 month ago:
They were starting by putting a finger in zero and then dragging to the number. And for zero they were dragging all the way to the stop.
You’re supposed to dial by putting a finger in each number hole and then dragging to the stop. So they dialed zero correctly, but only zero.
- Comment on Phonebooks 1 month ago:
I had one in my room! Such a good feel to it. Same with picking up and hanging up!
This was in the early 2000s, btw. They were already a relics, but landlines were still commonly used when I was in high school, so and it had such a handsome look to it and felt great to use. I have long thought that a product that would do incredibly well would be a cell phone charging dock where you put your phone in and while it’s charging it just acts like a landline rotary phone. The user experience is very, very gratifying, and if you’ve ever tried to hold a call while your phone is plugged into the wall you know how much better a solid headset with a coil wire would feel than that.
- Comment on Phonebooks 1 month ago:
I’m 38. I remember a few times when I was a kid needed to call a classmate urgently. Like, maybe i needed to know what math problems we were assigned as homework. For folks I knew well, I might have their number written down in a book in a desk drawer, but for anyone else I would have to look up their last name in the white pages and read down a list trying to find the right number.
Was their dad’s name Prescott? No, that’s not an ethnic match. Here’s a David. That sounds right. Oh! And it’s on Beacon! That’s the right neighborhood! That’s got to be it!
I think about it all the time. You could find your teacher’s house and just go drop off a fruit basket or something if you wanted. It was crazy! It was just assumed that if someone wanted to find your house it was probably for a sensible reason. Why otherwise? If you’re paranoid or a public figure then maybe you’d choose to be unlisted, but for anyone else there’s no point in it.
Simpler times, for sure. I’d still like to go back. I think it was worth it. The alternative doesn’t seem to work. We’re all getting constantly harassed with robo calls and stalked on line. At this point, the only people who don’t know where we live are the ones who might drop off a casserole. We’ve gained nothing.
- Comment on Stem cells reverse woman’s diabetes — a world first 1 month ago:
This is so exciting. I worked in a lab where we were trying to do this, and so I was very aware what a gold rush we were in. I’m so glad to see that it’s actually happening.
This is truly a watershed moment in science. This is going to mark a major turning point in cellular medicine from theory to commonplace. Eventually, this will end the pharma industry’s insulin cash cow.
But it’s even bigger than that. Because once we can engineer cells that produce a natural product, the next step is to engineer cells that produce synthetic medicines. Antidepressants, birth control, hormones, weight loss drugs, boner pills… The frontier is huge, lucrative, financially disruptive for pharma companies and life changing for patients. This is a big moment in history, and we all need to be fighting harder than ever to end for-profit healthcare. Otherwise we’re going to end up with subscription licenses to our own bodies.
- Comment on UK's first 'teacherless' AI classroom set to open in London 2 months ago:
This article doesn’t really answer most of my questions.
What subjects does the AI cover? Do they do all their learning independently? Does AI compose the entire lesson plan? What is the software platform? Who developed it? Is this just an LLM or is there more to it? How are students assessed? How long has the school been around, and what is their reputation? What is the fundamental goal of their approach?
Overall, this sounds quite dumb. Just incredibly and transparently stupid. Like, if they insisted that all learning would be done on the blockchain. I’m very open minded, but I don’t understand what the student’s experience will be. Maybe they’ll learn in the same way one could learn by browsing Wikipedia for 7 hours a day. But will they enjoy it? Will it help them find career fulfillment, or build confidence or learn social skills? It just sounds so much like that Willie Wonka experience scam but applied to an expensive private school instead of a pop-up attraction.
- Comment on Silicon Valley’s Very Online Ideologues are in Model Collapse 2 months ago:
I was trying to explain what AI alignment is to my mom, and I ended up using the behavior of companies like OpenAI, and how they’re distorted by profit motive as an example of a misaligned decision making system. And I realized that late stage capitalism is basically the paperclip maximizer made real.
This is a very good article. I think AI models have more to teach us about epistemology than people want to believe right now.
- Comment on A Prominent Accessibility Advocate Worked With Studios and Inspired Change. But She Never Actually Existed. 2 months ago:
Hard to really say, but I would venture that the best way to tell was from what he did with the attention.
I doubt it’s as simple as ‘He did it for the money’ or ‘He did it for the clicks’ etc. I’m guessing he did it for all the attention/money/influence it got him. I think as we confront a world where AI can be used to fabricate people with incredible ease, the lesson is that people need to occasionally meet in person if we want to guarantee that they have a physical personhood.
- Comment on Morphing spray-on gel gives buildings long-lasting wildfire protection 2 months ago:
That sounds like some very cool engineering. I hope it sees as little use as possible, but I’m glad you’re prepared.
- Comment on Morphing spray-on gel gives buildings long-lasting wildfire protection 2 months ago:
I’m concerned that this would require a continuous supply of water at a flow rate that might not be realistic.
- Comment on Lemmy votes ARE public, should they be anonymous? 2 months ago:
I will also add that I think in the long run, as we try to figure out how to differentiate between humans and machines, the only real reliably solution I see is to focus on elevating the individual. Having people with long histories validate their reality by living and documenting it.
I don’t upvote something that I’d be ashamed for someone to see I upvote. I might make an exception for pornographic content, but even with that, if it’s pseudononymous in that it’s not attached to my personal public life, I don’t mind if someone can trace through and see what a specific account I use for those purposes has liked and disliked.
- Comment on OpenAI warns people might become emotionally reliant on its ChatGPT voice mode 3 months ago:
I don’t think it’s secret. A lot of OpenAI’s business strategy is to warn of the danger of their own project as a means of hyping it.
OpenAI, despite having produced a pretty novel product, doesn’t really have a sound business model. LLMs are actually expensive to run. The energy and processing is not cheap, and it’s really not clear that they produce something of value. It’s a cool party trick, but a lot of the use cases just aren’t cost effective at this point. That makes their innovation hard to commercialize. So OpenAI promotes itself like online clickbait games.
You know the ones that are like, ‘WARNING: This game is so sexy it is ADDICTIVE! Do NOT play our game if you don’t want to CUM TOO HARD!’
That’s OpenAI’s marketing strategy.
- Comment on Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe says too many carmakers are copying Tesla 3 months ago:
They start at $70k. And they are actually still losing money on each sale.
- Comment on Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe says too many carmakers are copying Tesla 3 months ago:
It’s largely marketed as a recreation/sport vehicle. It’s for going camping and off-roading.
That isn’t too say that it can’t also get you to and from work, or even be used for constructive uses. But at the price and feature set, I think anyone would agree it’s designed to be a fun luxury first and foremost rather than a practical tool.
- Comment on Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe says too many carmakers are copying Tesla 3 months ago:
Whew. I’m glad he’s happy with his purchase. I can’t ever imagine having enough money that I could drop that kind of cash on a toy, no matter how neat I think it looks.
- Comment on Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe says too many carmakers are copying Tesla 3 months ago:
Haha a bike.
I hold out hope, actually, that as the right-to-repair movement continues to grow, eventually repairability and control will become more common consumer interests, in the same way that vehicle safety wasn’t something people thought about when buying a car before the 70s, and now it’s one of the main influences when buying a car.
Once people start caring – and again, I believe this is the direction we’re heading – it will become something manufacturers have to design for.
- Comment on Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe says too many carmakers are copying Tesla 3 months ago:
This is modestly interesting. My brother worked here before they had layoffs about two years ago, and had a generally favorable opinion of the company and leadership.
Fundamentally, while I think RJ seems like a sound businessman and technologist, and I like the company’s taste a bit, I will never be able to reconcile his views with mine. He very openly views cars as computers and software and services that happen to move you around, and I would like it to be a machine over which I have as minimal a relationship as possible with the manufacturer after I acquire the product.
Still, I wish them luck.
- Comment on Elon Musk says SpaceX HQ officially moving to Texas, blames new CA trans student privacy law 4 months ago:
This is actually a misrepresentation of the law.
The law bans school districts from requiring teachers to report of students start using different pronouns.
Teachers can still report this to parents. There is nothing barring them from doing so. The only change is that they aren’t policed by their school district.
Technically, this is actually the classically conservative position!
This whole thing is extremely stupid. Parents should take care of their own shit. You want to know what your kid is thinking? Talk to them. Demanding that the trusted adults in their lives who DO pay attention to them narc for you is a weak-ass move for parents who run to the nanny state to help them raise their kids because they don’t know how to manage their own damn family life.
- Comment on Is everyone here leftist? 4 months ago:
Why must we divide the tribe? I don’t know how leftist who can’t identify as such plans to exercise collective power. But you do you.
- Comment on Is everyone here leftist? 4 months ago:
That’s a leftist. You’re a leftist, buddy.
I relate a bit, though. I think it’s cringe when socialists call each other “comrade”.
- Comment on My first bookbinding project - a hardcopy of the Fully Automated! TTRPG Rulebook 4 months ago:
This is just nuts! I dig DIY guides, but bookbinding really is something special.
I can’t believe how effortless you make it look. It looks like you’ve done this a bunch of times!
- Comment on Now that scotus gave the president immunity Biden can legally assasinate all of the conservative justices 4 months ago:
Can we agree that he can definitely use his mouth to say “I endorse doing something”?
- Comment on Season 1 Of ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ Available For Free On YouTube In USA 4 months ago:
That’s great. I wish all this stuff was more accessible to watch.