chonglibloodsport
@chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
- Comment on AI Slop Is Ruining Reddit for Everyone 21 hours ago:
I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.
I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.
- Comment on Scheduling is hard 2 days ago:
Part of the reason I included the link to Connections was to illustrate just how many people are involved in maintaining our critical infrastructure. But of course the show can only highlight a tiny fraction of them.
You might think “oh, we don’t need insurance companies so we could eliminate all those jobs” but even if we did eliminate the insurance industry we’d have to replace a lot of the work that people at insurance companies do.
Take health insurance for example. You might say “we should get rid of health insurance and give everyone free, public health care!” Well, I live in Canada and we have free public health care. Guess what? We still have a health insurance company: the government. They do all the same jobs: receive and process health care claims, decide which treatments to cover and which to reject, and send payments to health care providers once the treatment is approved and the work has been completed. The only difference is that there’s no profit in the government system. Otherwise they’re still doing the same amount of work, so we still need all those people doing those jobs.
You might go on to say “why don’t we just eliminate the approval process and pay for every single treatment?” but that line of thinking shouldn’t get you very far. We don’t have unlimited doctors or unlimited hospital beds. There will always be far more possible treatments to give people than should be given. In the case of older people with terminal illnesses, you can spend essentially unlimited money on treatments in a desperate attempt to prolong their life… and prolong their suffering in the process.
- Comment on Scheduling is hard 3 days ago:
That environment of our evolution, like the_ Garden of Eden_, no longer exists. We’ve created a new environment in which sitting around and vibing is no longer sufficient to thrive. Without the economic output we all die. See this first episode of Connections for details.
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 5 days ago:
Just get Maxwell’s demon to separate the plasma into positive and negative charges, effectively creating a capacitor, then discharge it directly over some HVDC lines!
- Comment on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out 6 days ago:
Yes exactly. What they really want to offer is an AI employee replacement service. If they could replace one of your employees who makes $40k/year then they could easily charge $30k/year for the service and you (the business owner and AI customer) could add $10k to your profits.
The fact is that they can’t do that. They can’t even make money charging thousands of dollars a year for basic LLM service that people use to write emails and the like.
- Comment on Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out 1 week ago:
The fact that they’re pivoting to full enshittification is the strongest signal yet that the AI bubble is collapsing. There won’t be an AI-driven mass-unemployment revolution this time around. OpenAI has given up on trying to build that.
- Comment on YSK that giving kids a laptop doesn't improve their academic performance. 1 week ago:
Academic performance is about performing well on closed book written exams covering narrow subjects. The whole system is designed for 19th century teaching and testing. Using a computer does not help with that whatsoever and may in some cases hurt (by distracting someone who should be studying).
I tutor high school kids as a volunteer (next year will be my 10th year doing so). Over that time period I have noticed a sharp decline in a lot of basic academic skills: mental arithmetic (without a calculator), spelling, grammar, handwriting. These are the very skills one needs to master to perform well on closed book exams. Your ability to research a topic or get help from Google (incl. spellcheck and grammar check in Google Docs) or ChatGPT is of no benefit whatsoever when all you’ve got is a pencil and a piece of paper in front of you.
- Comment on Paradox Takes the Blame for Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 Sales Flop, Announces $37 Million Write-Down 1 week ago:
I love VtM:B but I never had high hopes for this one. Direct sequels made by unrelated developers rarely work out.
- Comment on Windows 11's adoption is much slower compared to Windows 10, claims Dell 1 week ago:
I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?
I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.
A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.
- Comment on I dunno 1 week ago:
But that’s a specific optimization where you can no longer read the numbers left to right, the original intent of RPN.
- Comment on I dunno 1 week ago:
Actually:
2 <enter> 5 <enter> 8 <enter> 5 - x +
10 keystrokes
I use RPN on my phone calculator for fun but it can also be annoying sometimes.
On my CASIO FX-260 Solar II calculator (super cheap, really nice and simple but also powerful) that would be:
2 + 5 ( 8 - 5 ) =
9 keystrokes
- Comment on Insulin 1 week ago:
I really should just put a full block on lemmy.ml. Thanks for the reminder!
- Comment on Insulin 1 week ago:
If you can eat well for $1 then it is definitely a poor country relative to the US. Differences in purchasing power are a direct result of differences in wealth.
- Comment on Microsoft Open Sources Zork I, II And III 2 weeks ago:
Sure, though interpreters have already been written for the bytecode language that this source code compiles to. It shouldn’t be too difficult for the community to write a compiler when the back-end interpreter is already there and usable for testing.
- Comment on Why isn't it considered vegan to harvest animals who die naturally? 2 weeks ago:
They’re not just random examples for some people though. For some indigenous peoples these items are a foundational part of their cultural practices.
- Comment on Why isn't it considered vegan to harvest animals who die naturally? 2 weeks ago:
How about using birds’ discarded feathers for decorations? Discarded seashells? Pearls from clams that died naturally?
- Comment on What is your favorite Metroidvania? 2 weeks ago:
You don’t have to have nostalgia for the game to appreciate how wonderfully crafted and expansive it is. It has one of the best soundtracks of any game, period. It has a ton of secrets (including one MAJOR secret) and a couple of extra game modes that enhance the replayability.
I would say the game seems to get better every time I play it. Is that nostalgia or something else? There are a lot of games I played before I had ever seen SOTN, yet I don’t feel the same desire to keep replaying them. I think it’s like a piece of classical music or a great movie. The more you replay it, the more details you come to appreciate. The original Deus Ex is like that for me as well.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Yes and no. There was a period of time where they were particularly bad. If you go back to some earlier eras (like the 1970s and even earlier) you can find many capacitors that are still good.
It also depends on the materials. Electrolytic capacitors naturally dry out and then fail. Many kinds of ceramic capacitors should last an extremely long time if they’re kept within a reasonable temperature range.
- Comment on YSK How to cook a perfect (hard) boiled egg 3 weeks ago:
The temperature of boiling water depends on your altitude. Water boils at 212F (100C) Miami but only 202F (94C) in Denver. This makes a big difference when boiling eggs. It’s why specific times for boiling eggs are so unreliable for people from different altitudes.
- Comment on What are your favorite games from a worldbuilding standpoint? 4 weeks ago:
This one is it for me. The game really does so much with so little. The reality of the game is that it is a roughly linear sequence of closed levels (with some hub levels thrown in) that feels like a cohesive, connected world. It’s absolutely incredible!
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 4 weeks ago:
We have lots of wind turbines in the country near here. Sometimes it actually gets too windy for them (risking damage by pushing them above design speed limit)!
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 4 weeks ago:
High quality pasture isn’t just grass. It’s a mixture of grasses and legumes such as clover and alfalfa. The pasture should be slow to bolt and mature at different times throughout the season, providing the cattle with a good forage regardless of the temperatures.
I’m aware of plants getting sunburn. I’ve seen it first hand as a gardener bringing seeds started indoors outside.
- Comment on If video games actually determined our real world behavior, we wouldn't be violent we would be obsessed with powerwashing and all have CDLs. 4 weeks ago:
Oh nice! I’ll check that out too! Thanks!
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 4 weeks ago:
Oh yeah, I’m an avid gardener. I grow stuff in the shade on purpose. It’s usually in the shade of a tree though. I would imagine a giant array of solar panels that always rotate to face the sun would cast much deeper, more solid shadows than trees do.
- Comment on If video games actually determined our real world behavior, we wouldn't be violent we would be obsessed with powerwashing and all have CDLs. 4 weeks ago:
That’s pretty amazing. I’ve never played the game but it looks pretty chill.
Sometimes I really get in the mood for chill games like Stardew Valley or NetHack! Maybe I’ll check out ETS2 sometime!
- Comment on If video games actually determined our real world behavior, we wouldn't be violent we would be obsessed with powerwashing and all have CDLs. 4 weeks ago:
Commercial driver’s licenses?
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 4 weeks ago:
Oh yeah that makes perfect sense. I’m thinking from my area’s perspective which is the opposite: barely any sunlight at all and tons of rain/snow.
- Comment on Can Cows and Solar Power Coexist? We’re About to Find Out 4 weeks ago:
How are you supposed to grow high quality, high protein pasture in the shade?
- Comment on xkcd #3161: Airspeed 5 weeks ago:
No. The comic is talking about airspeed: speed relative to the wind.
- Comment on xkcd #3161: Airspeed 5 weeks ago:
It records an air speed of 0. Isn’t that working exactly as intended?