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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • You can train it on all the source code, meta data for that source code, and documentation you want but it will never understand programming. It’s a text predictor that was trained on both sides of a bunch of debates. Contradictions mean nothing to it, but it usually only predicts what one side of the debate will say to champion its side, which means it will use confident and absolute language to “sell” whatever side of the debate it looks like the previous tokens are headed towards.

    It is impressive what it can output sometimes and it makes a decent debate/exploration partner, but it will always have a chance at predicting a useless series of tokens or contradicting the previous thing it just said because a) its training data only trains it to predict tokens from statistics, and b) its training data includes some of those contradictions directly.

    I have lost count of the times I’ve been “thinking out loud” about something with an LLM and realize something about what I’m thinking about that contradicts what it is currently saying, then I’ll add my new perspective and it agrees entirely, despite the contradiction. Sometimes it tries to resolve the contradiction, sometimes it just abandons what it said previously entirely, sometimes it adds more to the perspective that I hadn’t considered.

    That’s fine for just shooting the shit about some random topic but horrible for a tool intended to provide expertise and reliability, when the response matters because it feeds into something else and you want to automate it. Should a tool just inject “are you sure?” after each response? What if it makes it second guess something that was correct? What if it’s one of those debates and it will endlessly switch sides when it faces any opposition? That’s a waste of resources and time.

    Funny thing is I’m expecting this to eventually go back to scripting for automation. An LLM has a higher chance of outputting a script that does what you want (depending on the task) while you hold its hand than it does of consistently giving the correct output when it is thrown into an automated system directly. But you get “goodish” results much quicker just trying putting the LLMs everywhere, even if there’s some selection bias on the results (“didn’t work, didn’t work, oh it worked, great!”).


  • For someone fluent in all involved languages, sure.

    But from the sounds of it, OP’s company outsources the translation but doesn’t fully trust the output they get back. They’re back to square one for verifying it, because if they knew both languages enough to verify, they could do the translations themselves.

    The problem AI is trying to solve is “how do I access a skill I don’t have cheaply?” It’s only because it’s bad at that problem that it has shifted to “how can we use AI to get more production out of the skilled workers we still need to babysit the AI that is unreliable at everything?”




  • They could drop the priest celibacy rule, seeing as now there’s a system in place to prevent priests from passing on land to their heirs instead of to the church (because they never take ownership of the church land like they did in older times). Then the priests could have relationships with equals (if that’s even possible with the cult aspect, though still better if it’s with adults rather than kids) to address their hormones and loneliness.

    The church administration owes both the priests and communities an apology over that BS, all done in the first place because of institutional greed and lust for power. Though that might require admitting that they just make shit up on the religion side to justify policies made for the business side.

    Note that saying the priests are owed an apology doesn’t shift any blame for the actions that some of them did. It’s placing extra blame for the system itself on the church, which also caused suffering for the priests that didn’t decide to do fucked up things to kids they had power over.


  • It’s kinda like the push to return to office. It was driven by corps having invested in the “can’t fail (ignoring the last previous crash)” real estate market and buying their offices. If everyone suddenly works from home instead of in the office, then those investments go bad because demand for office space is way down. So they tell people to go back to the office, hoping to return to that “every business needs offices!” status quo and save their investments. Though the demand is false (especially combined with layoffs), so it won’t necessarily cause any new corp to want that office space. If they don’t have the sunk cost, then they don’t need to accept the rest of the fallacy.

    With AI, it’s the same but just replace building investment with R&D as well as data centre investment. A lot of the companies really pushing AI are the ones that will profit from people going along with that. They really want to build a dependence amongst users as well as a good reputation for execs so they can get a return on the investment. Then there’s also the True Believers (who think LLMs are brilliant AIs that can solve anything if given the right prompts) and the FOMOs (who don’t know much about it but see the world moving towards it and don’t want to miss it because if it was a real AI, missing it could be a massive mistake). There’s also some people who just don’t have various skills and want the AI agents to fill those gaps (and probably don’t have a very good idea about what the LLMs are actually doing in those gaps).

    At this point, I think it’s a mistake to go all in on this tech. LLMs aren’t reliable, and their ability to “perform” is more about their flexibility than being well-suited for any task. They’ll go directly from saying things that seem “insightful” (they have no insight) to making the dumbest “mistake” (a mistake requires intent, which they lack, they just predict tokens). But there’s all kinds of false and true (albeit misguided IMO) demand right now and it’s still in early pricing mode (remember the intent is to make that investment money back).

    Oh and there’s also China which has been making more efficient models and open sourcing some of them. If they continue to do this, there’s a decent chance those investments will never give the desired returns, at least not to those who are trying to sell tokens. Or those who depend on those selling tokens, like any hardware companies selling hardware under the assumption that it will then make the money to pay for itself (which I believe both nVidia and AMD have done).

    It’s mirroring the dotcom bubble with that last bit because network cable companies started loaning the money to pay for their cables to ISPs, expecting returns that never came.





  • A different thread for ways I like to cook eggs that aren’t just scrambled:

    Poached/boiled out of shell: Just bring a pot of water (plus some salt and vinegar) to a boil and crack the eggs into it. Use a slotted spoon to make sure they all move in the pot, or it might stick to the bottom. Technically, poaching is done at a temperature below a simmer (so like 70-80 °C), but personally I prefer the texture you get from simmering/boiling them. Everything ends up firmer. There’s an art/science to getting the yolk right; IMO perfect is catching it right as it transitions from runny to hard, so it’s still kinda gooey but won’t just spill out of your sandwich as soon as you break the yolk. Even if you want to keep it at a boil, reduce the heat from max or it will bubble over. You get an egg that is soft but firm, burning is pretty much impossible.

    Fried: Heat a pan, add a bit of oil, let it heat up to the point that it evaporates water on contact and add the eggs. Don’t stir them or anything. They’ll stick to the pan at first, but after they cook for a bit, the bottom should harden up and come loose. If not, just scrape it with a spatula (assuming you aren’t using some kind of teflon pan; if you are and have eggs sticking, it’s probably a good idea to throw that pan out before you consume any more of that coating that has been coming off into your food). If you add other things to the eggs while they are liquid, they get cooked into the eggs, like solid scrambled eggs. You can cover the pan to help cook the top part quicker, or try flipping the eggs at your own risk. Sunny side up is when you don’t flip it (I think?).

    Hard boiled: Easy method is to use an electric burner (any other will affect the timing). Put the eggs into a single layer in a pot, then add cold water until the eggs are covered. Add some vinegar to make the shells easier to hable. Then heat to a boil on high heat. Once the pot reaches a rapid boil, turn off the heat and remove the pot from the heat. Set a timer for 15 minutes and once that has passed, move the eggs to an ice bath to stop the cooking. If you do this right (and your local conditions are close enough to mine), you end up with perfectly cooked hard boiled eggs (great for deviled eggs, though I might let it cook a bit longer for egg salad), where the yolk is right at the transition. Stop sooner if you want soft boiled with a runny yolk.

    Omlette: whisk eggs with milk, then add to a preheated and oiled wide pan with shallow sides. Then, as it cooks, push back the rim of the egg mixture towards the centre, with the goal of letting all the liquid run to the edges and come in contact with the pan so it cooks. Then, once all the liquid has run to the sides, the hard part: you gotta flip the omelette. Make sure you have enough space vertically, the trick is to swing the pan such that the omelette slides off the back side, though obviously moving mostly vertically. That sliding off is what gives it a bit of torque to flip. But many an omelette has become scrambled eggs at this point. If the flip is successful, add toppings while it cooks, then fold over and serve.

    Other tricks:

    • You can often just add an egg to whatever you’re cooking. It might affect the texture, but eggs cook very easily, do don’t be too concerned about the food safety. I’ll poach an egg with ramen I’m cooking (like boiled raman, not the “just add hot water” ones) or add it when I fry it at the end (adds some texture to the noodles).
    • Use (metal) cookie cutters while frying eggs to give them fun or convenient shapes. Like egg mcmuffins use round ones so they easily fit on a sandwich.
    • don’t forget to season your eggs. If you’re frying them, you can do so as they cook, but poached eggs need it when they are served, otherwise the water just washes it away.

  • Breaking: I just realized I have no idea what “over easy” refers to with cooking eggs. I’m curious, but admit that my starting point is “this sounds like a stupid name for a cooking method”, so there might be a bit of bias to work with or against if you want to discourage or encourage favour, respectively. Updates will be posted here, should anyone decide this is sufficiently interesting to allow to develop.


  • Personally, I think a bigger “fuck you” to the browsers that implement parts of standards that give websites more control than users (regarding blocking usual actions). Like with websites, I kinda get it; they don’t want you to do something you normally can do for whatever reasons. But when the browser goes along with it, it is a betrayal because the browser was supposed to be on my side, not some asshole web dev’s.


  • The wire part of that isn’t trivial. They were pulling wires in the middle ages for holding armor together, but high volume and specialization didn’t come until the Renaissance. Good insulation pretty much requires plastics. Wax could be used before that but it’s not as good. Your early motors will have shorts that reduce power or kill it entirely.