Seven o’clock: Dukat makes a speech.
8:30: Cake and raktajino.
8:45: Execute the Ferengi!

  • 7 Posts
  • 103 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 23rd, 2024

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  • Editorialising headline:

    A new force of nature is reshaping the planet, study finds

    From the RSP opinion piece (not a study,) emphasis mine:

    However, this coupling of socially produced environmental challenges with disruptive social changes—the Anthropocene condition—is not new.

    Yes, we live in the Anthropocene. Yes, in geological terms human effects on the environment are new. But as the source also says, “new” in that context is still thousands of years old:

    Global climate change, biodiversity losses and other anthropogenic planetary changes all began long before the industrial age

    Plus, as is quoted in the OP:

    Human sociocultural capabilities to engineer ecosystems, from using fire to clear land, to propagating favoured species, to agriculture, to industrial food systems, have evolved and accumulated over millennia

    Anthroecology is the more novel concept here, and an interesting approach, too. But that is all it is — there is no “new force of nature” at play, only a recent framework to better understand and (hopefully) manage our detrimental effects on the world around us.











  • Yeah, I also put more faith in those 200 work hours than in the original, generated code which the guy completely rewrote before submission.

    consulting an LLM like a book

    Saw a news item the other day, reporting that a significant number of university students now use “AI” bots instead of course literature. One student replied, “Nah, I opened a book like once. Anyway, the literature can be just as flawed as AI because there’s new research being made all the time”…

    There is a significant overestimation of the factuality of “AI” responses at play there. And a lack of understanding of the entire chain of fact checking, verification, and review that goes into making a book, particularly for education.

    I know that is slightly OT, but I think the comparison is fair.





  • I understand the scepticism, it’s easy to be wary of assisted coding as a gut reaction these days. However, the programmer replied to his own merge request:

    I put roughly 200 hours into this (largely due to not being familiar with the codebase and technologies involved beforehand)

    …and I find it hard to believe a vibe coder would bother prompting his magic eightball for that long? Maybe that’s my personal prejudice against that particular set of (often wannabe) programmers showing.

    There’s also an “AI” disclosure in the original merge request that says:

    • None of the submitted code is AI generated. I wrote all of it myself (largely by copying existing code).

    • I used OpenAI Codex in the following ways:

      • I used it to generate a quick prototype to give me an idea of where to start. The prototype was MUCH more limited and I rewrote it from scratch (i.e. none of the code submitted here is from there).
      • I used it to help me with debugging/understanding some of the stuff new to me (e.g. how does a value get to QML, wayland protocols, understanding crashes, …).
      • I used it to review the code before submitting it (in addition to manually reviewing it myself). It caught a few minor issues.
      • I used it to write a “touchpad simulator” patch that I used for testing touchpad gestures (not submitted).

    YMMV on what side of vibe coding that usage falls.


  • Um, although I don’t want to cast aspersions based on my own ignorance — who the hell even is Anthony Martino? Is this his first shot at actually making money off his music, by suing a nonprofit?

    I will say I did the most basic research into the guy, and according to his wikipedia entry his songs have been featured in some TV shows. Wikipedia also notes that “It is proposed that this article be deleted because of the following concern:lack of notability. Tony seems to have created pages for himself and related projects”, so draw your own conclusions.