• 0 Posts
  • 479 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • I’d say countdown to programs that pretend to be webcams and display an AI video of the requested action has started but I bet at least someone has already done it. And then the arms race between actions to be requested and what AI can do will start until eventually passing the test will be a fail because the actions requested are either too difficult for humans to understand or too difficult for humans to perform, at which point AIs will be trained on knowing the physical limitations of humans.

    This will come in handy for when they get tired of our shit.


  • Personally, one of the reasons I mostly play solo video games is so that if I feel like taking a break, I can do so without affecting anyone else or needing to wait until everyone is ready for a break. Sometimes I think I want to play a game and then am just not feeling it a few mins in. Or I’ll be really into a game for months and then just drop it when that obsession passes.

    Playing together is a big commitment!



  • I’m one of those the fits in both categories. I’ve been blown away by what these AI agents are capable of. I’ve “written” a bunch of scripts that involve parsing and generating code for another tool to consume and it’s been able to take over the tedious parts, like writing a function to parse the parameters out of this code, then follow the code it goes into and extract the relationships between the parameters and recreate them another way. It’s something I could write the code for, but that code will be mostly undocumented, will contain “quick version that I’ll come back later and fix up (but I never get to it because if it works, there’s other more productive things to do)”, plus some debug code that I’m not sure if I’ll need again so it’s just there so I can uncomment it instead of writing it again. Not to mention all the typos and sloppy errors along the way that may or may not be easy to find later during compile and testing.

    I consider myself a competent coder. AI makes me better, more focused and less sloppy. But that said, my prompts reflect that. I understand that these models aren’t really programmers but just correlation engines that have been trained on a ton of programming material. It can tell you the traveling salesman problem is NP but won’t necessarily realize that the problem you’ve asked it to solve is equivalent to the traveling salesman problem. It will happily spit out an identical function to one it did before, just with name differences that are specific to the current thing it is doing rather than just calling the same function. It will pick the least efficient way to do some things. It’s not a problem solver, it’s a solution predictor, which sounds better but isn’t.

    So I consider them more like force multipliers rather than adders. If you have the skills, I believe you could use an LLM to make anything (as a development cycle, not “spits out perfect implementation first try”), but if you don’t have the skills, you’ll struggle a lot even on fairly basic shit simply because you don’t how to direct the LLM properly.

    But I still watch it produce code with a mixture of awe and fear. I don’t think the above will be true forever. Maybe not even for the rest of the 20s.






  • Can you elaborate a bit on how notepad following a link can result in running arbitrary code? Cause it sounds more like a second vulnerability is involved, because a text editor following a link still shouldn’t result in running whatever code is on the other side of the link.

    Though it is a privacy issue on its own, just like a tracking pixel or images in emails.

    I’m also curious what the actual use case is for having a link that notepad automatically follows on load in markdown. Or why they got rid of wordpad (their default rich text editor) and put it into notepad (their plain text editor), ruining one of the reliable things about notepad: it would just show you the actual bytes of the file, whether it was text or not, kinda like a poor man’s hex editor (just without the hex).

    Makes me wonder if eventually opening an html file in notepad will make it render it like a browser. “Back in my day, we edited html in notepad instead of browsed it!”




  • There’s a game I’ve played that was bad for this but I can’t remember which one it was. Like all options looked neutral and reasonable but would lead to the character doing wildly different things. Or ones that looked friendly would be the opposite. Like if you choose “Agree with them”, you might get “Yeah, you’re right, you fucking asshole.”

    Though it is a lot funnier describing it now than it was experiencing it, in the moment I was like “wait, no, wtf are you doing?”. Seems like a game designed more for people watching than the one playing.




  • Someone tipped me a tiny amount of some crypto coin on there, too. I did set up a wallet but then kinda forgot about it. Maybe I can pay off my place. Lol I remember it being one of the dumb ones, but tbh I thought they were all dumb. Still do, even if I did accidentally get rich lol.

    Oh wow, just checked it. It was about 0.15 BCH and yeah, it has gone up considerably since I got it. It was worth maybe a buck or two, apparently it’s worth almost $80 USD today! That’s like a downpayment on a stick of RAM!



  • In a central banking system, the central bank can create and destroy money from nothing. All banks can do it, though banks that aren’t the central bank need to hold on to a reserve portion which iirc is 10%, so they can loan out (effectively creating) 90% of deposits, which compounds (ie, if you deposit $100, the bank can lend out $90 of that, and if that borrower puts that $90 in their account, then the bank can loan another $81, meaning for the original deposit of $100, now $271 exists, and that $81 can be loaned against, too).

    Congress can borrow money from the central bank or other banks. It’s also possible that they could seize the central bank and then just say they have the money and use that, though that’s how Germany ended up with stories of people using a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a coffee or diners paying when they ordered because prices would have gone up by the time they finished eating.


  • My guess is the loud bass vibrates dust particles that might clog up pores loose, or maybe helps with nutrient flow inside the plant. Like it’s affected by sound not music.

    Though music might be generally better than most loud sounds because it’s one of the few cases where sound can be loud but isn’t also associated with something that adds more dust to the air, which might even give a net negative result.


  • You might get better results by going outside their channels and using legal options. Like not through the courts, but I think some jurisdictions have a law that you data must be deleted if a request is sent in writing or something like that. You might also be able to request they send you all the data they have (though this might cost money because they print it and mail it). I remember someone did that with their Tinder data for some article about how shitty Tinder is, though it depends on where you live.