Curious_Canid
@Curious_Canid@lemmy.ca
I am owned by several dogs and cats. I have been playing non-computer roleplaying games for almost five decades. I am interested in all kinds of gadgets, particularly knives, flashlights, and pens.
- Comment on The technology to end traffic deaths exists. Why aren’t we using it? 1 week ago:
One of the many things I like about Subaru is that they seem to move useful features from optional to standard, once they’ve had a chance to prove themselves. I bought an Outback in 2016 and paid extra for the EyeSight safety system. Two years later that car was destroyed in an accident (I was T-boned and rolled over twice, without anyone being hurt). I bought another Outback to replace it, but by that time the EyeSight was a standard feature. Subaru now includes EyeSight on all their cars because it saves lives.
They had done similar things with other safety features. Four-wheel disc brakes, anti-lock braking, and all-wheel drive became standard on Sabarus relatively early.
It is also worth noting that the more intrusive EyeSight features, like lane assist, are easy to turn off. There’s a button on the steering wheel for that one. Even if you turn it off, the car will still warn you if you start to cross lanes without using your turn signals, but it will not adjust for you.
- Comment on The Copilot Delusion 1 week ago:
It amazes me how often I see the argument that people react this way to all tech. To some extent that’s true, but it assumes that all tech turns out to be useful. History is littered with technologies that either didn’t work or didn’t turn out to serve any real purpose. This is why we’re all riding around in giant mono-wheel vehicles and Segways.
- Comment on I have never met a woman named after her own mother 2 weeks ago:
My mother was named after her mother, although she used her middle name. My sister was named after her. We’re white midwesterners in the US.
- Comment on Why I don't use AI in 2025 4 weeks ago:
And a great many tools have a brief period of excitement before people realize they aren’t actually all that useful. (“The Segway will change the way everyone travels!”) There are aspects of limited AI that are quite useful. There are other aspects that are counter-productive at the current level of capability. Marketing hype is pushing anything with AI in the name, but it will all settle out eventually. When it does, a lot of people will have wasted a lot of time, and caused some real damage, by relying on the parts that are not yet practical.
- Comment on xkcd #3081: PhD Timeline 5 weeks ago:
That, and the fear that Trump will disappear them next.
- Comment on xkcd #3081: PhD Timeline 5 weeks ago:
It’s awesome to see people stepping up like this! Our current situation is NOT normal.
- Comment on ‘You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice’: Google Failures Highlight a Fundamental AI Flaw 1 month ago:
This is both hysterical and terrifying. Congratulations.
- Comment on ‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers. 1 month ago:
An LLM does not write code. It cobbles together bits and pieces of existing code. Some developers do that too, but the decent ones look at existing code to learn new principles and then apply them. An LLM can’t do that. If human developers have not already written code that solves your problem, an LLM cannot solve your problem.
The difference between a weak developer and an LLM is that the LLM can plagiarize from a much larger code base and do it much more quickly.
A lot of coding really is just rehashing existing solutions. LLMs could be useful for that, but a lot of what you get is going to contain errors. Worse yet, LLMs tend to “learn” how to cheat at their tasks. The code they generate often has lot of exception handling built in to hide the failures. That makes testing and debugging more difficult and time-consuming. And it gets really dangerous if you also rely on an LLM to generate your tests.
The software industry has already evolved to favor speed over quality. LLM generated code may be the next logical step. That does not make it a good one. Buggy software in many areas, such as banking and finance, can destroy lies. Buggy software in medical applications can kill people. It would be good if we could avoid that.
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 2 months ago:
If they have to do it a second time, they aren’t very good at it.
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 2 months ago:
I saw an article recently, I should remember where, about how modern “tech” seems to be focused on how to insert a profit-taking element between two existing components of a system that already works just fine without it.
- Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers 2 months ago:
This would be more impressive if Waymos were fully self-driving. They aren’t. They depend on remote “navigators” to make many of their most critical decisions. Those “navigators” may or may not be directly controlling the car, but things do not work without them.
When we have automated cars that do not actually rely on human being we will have something to talk about.
It’s also worth noting that the human “navigators” are almost always poorly paid workers in third-world countries. The system will only scale if there are enough desperate poor people. Otherwise it quickly become too expensive.
- Comment on Intel report says China aims to displace U.S. as top AI power by 2030. 2 months ago:
This may be the least important area in which China is displacing the US.
- Comment on Least terrible domain registrars 2 months ago:
Every time I think GoDaddy has hit bottom they find a way to dig deeper.
- Comment on Sergey Brin says AGI is within reach if Googlers work 60-hour weeks 2 months ago:
…and the horse he road in on.
- Comment on Watch: A real-life flying car takes to the skies 3 months ago:
I’ve seen kites that looked more convincing. There are now some real, functional flying cars, although they are still far too expensive to be practical. This is not one of them.
- Comment on China backs Trump's Ukraine peace bid at G20 as U.S. allies rally behind Zelenskyy 3 months ago:
We need to start saying “former US allies”. That damage is done.
- Comment on Amazon will remove the option to download/transfer Kindle e-books via USB by February 2025 3 months ago:
It is probably worth noting that I am removing the DRM so I can read them on devices that do not have Kindle apps.
- Comment on Amazon will remove the option to download/transfer Kindle e-books via USB by February 2025 3 months ago:
Nothing is certain, but it looks like you will still be able to download books into local memory so you can read them. As long as the apps still work that way, it will be possible to access the book files.
You do need a tool that can remove the DRM from the books files the Kindle uses. DeDRM used to do this nicely, but it has not been updated to handle the most recent version of Kindle DRM. It will not works on any books published since early 2024.
There are commercial options that can remove even the latest DRM from Kindle books. I use Epubor Ultimate. It was the first to handle the most recent Kindle DRM, but I’m sure there are other by now.
- Submitted 3 months ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on USA | NIH to cut billions from overheads in biomedical research 3 months ago:
The words “from overheads” do not belong in that sentence. They are slashing billions in biomedical research.
- Comment on Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to redefine open source so badly 3 months ago:
Well, they have almost always circumvented them instead, but that impacts the bottom line too.
- Comment on Current day America has proven beyond a doubt, humanity is the only animal that wouldn't jump out of a slowly boiling pot of water. 3 months ago:
The Scandanavian countries currently look the safest to me. I think Iceland would be nearly ideal, in a lot of ways. but I worry that they may be annexed by one of the larger powers as things get uglier.
- Comment on Will pilots-less airplanes happens first, or driver-less cars? Why? 5 months ago:
It is mostly semantics. I answered the way I did primarily because I was responding to “There are already self-driving cars, aren’t there?”. That seemed to be asking about functionality, not naming conventions.
- Comment on Will pilots-less airplanes happens first, or driver-less cars? Why? 5 months ago:
I understand your point, but I disagree. There are currently no cars that are considered fully self-driving as defined by the people who created them. Except for the ones that are really just remotely driven, they all come with warnings that a human the driver must be at the controls and paying attention.
Current self-driving cars are like a printer that works most of the time, but requires a human to read everything it produces and to occasionally write in a few things that it missed or got wrong.
- Comment on Will pilots-less airplanes happens first, or driver-less cars? Why? 5 months ago:
No, there really aren’t yet. Driverless taxis and delivery vehicles are all “monitored” remotely by people who effectively drive them when they get into situations the automation can’t handle. Individual self-driving cars all come with a lot of warnings (which many drivers ignore) that they require an active and aware driver for similar reasons.
And Tesla, who have been lying about their self-driving capabilities from day one, continue to run people down and smash into other vehicles on a regular basis.
The systems are good enough to handle 99% of the driving situations they encounter. That remaining 1% is still a long way from being solved. And “pretty good” is not acceptable when failures kill people.
- Comment on Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break 7 months ago:
Possibly, but life is full of risks.
- Comment on Where does a man get a proper shoe horn that will not break 7 months ago:
What you really need is a carbon fiber shoehorn. If you do manage to deform it the thing will go right back to its original shape.
- Comment on What kind of person am I if I decide to stay in a job, even if my supervisors work against me? 7 months ago:
I understand the desire to get even, but it isn’t likely to happen and it isn’t likely to be satisfying, even if you succeed. You should focus on things that will make your life better and not things that will make someone else’s life worse, even if they richly deserve it.
You are going to have to make some compromises. You are currently putting up with a situation you don’t like, in exchange for the salary, side benefits, and location. That’s isn’t necessarily a bad tradeoff, but it is not likely to be a good long-term situation. Once management decides they have a problem with you, things are going to get worse sooner or later. It will be better for you if you leave rather than being forced out.
You need to make some decisions about which of the things you like about your situation you would be willing to give up for a better job. That will tell you what to do next. Maybe the answer is to hold out for a better position within your current organization, although the chances don’t sound good. You may need to take a salary cut to find a local position that’s better for you. You may need to move. You may even need to change careers entirely.
The key is to make your own decisions and not allow others to force them on you. There are a lot of factors you can’t control. Focus on the ones you can. And don’t stay in a bad situation with the hope that everything will work out the way you want it to.
- Comment on Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta's Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers 7 months ago:
Exactly. The rich will be able to buy privacy, while the rest become ever easier to exploit.
- Comment on Amazon tech workers leaving for other jobs in response to return to office mandate 8 months ago:
I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.