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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • LLMs have a very predictable and consistent approach to grammar, punctuation, style and general cadence which is easily identifiable when compared to human written content. It’s kind of a watermark but it’s one the creators are aware of and are seeking to remove. That means if you want to use LLMs as a writing aid of any sort and want it to read somewhat naturally, you’ll have to either get it to generate bullet points and expand on them yourself, or get it to generate the content then rewrite it word for word in a style you’d write it in.



  • Oh yeah I absolutely agree with monopoly abuse being a bad thing with a huge caveat that it’s so much worse for essential services and not quite as bad for extras, like youtube. I personally can’t see any competition to youtube being able to provide a better service - it’s in a similar niche to Netflix where they were great until they got competition at which point the userbase and content fragmented, which meant they had to provide a worse service to make money as the content rights agreements made it into several small monopolies and so they were literally unable to compete, which is frankly worse



  • It’s normal for most afaik but that’s because manufacturers make a trimmed down phone to go on your wrist which means you have to charge it daily, without realising it’s on your wrist so it doesn’t need to be super slim with huge cuts to battery size to go in your pocket.

    My garmin has an always on display, heart rate, steps, blood oxygen, thermometer, barometer and whatever else and yet still manages a 4 week battery life, 3 weeks with normal use (1h gps per day, using the touchscreen and higher brightness) or even around 50-60h of GPS/more frequent heart rate/active maps activity tracking

    It’s on 7% now and is giving me an estimated battery life of >2 days, which just shows how abysmal many smart watch battery lives are




  • I’m saying I have no sympathy for Palestinians who can’t sympathise with other people who were forced from their homes, or Israelis who can’t do the same. They are free to dislike the IDF, but using them as an excuse to hate Jews and/or Israelis is no better than the people who hate all Palestinians and/or Arabs masking or justifying it with their hatred of Hamas.


  • It makes sense to support the Arabs who got displaced from their homes by Israeli settlers, as well as Jews who were forced out of theirs due to their religion and had nowhere else to go but Israel, but if you’re a member of one of those groups and can’t empathise with the other (eg Hamas, IDF and their supporters) then you should get no sympathy at all.


  • Thing is a conscience (and any emotions, and feelings in general) is just chemicals affecting electrical signals in the brain… If a ML model such as an LLM uses parameters to affect electrical signals through its nodes then is it on us to say it can’t have a conscience, or feel happy or sad, or even pain?

    Sure the inputs and outputs are different, but when you have “real” inputs it’s possible that the training data for “weather = rain” is more downbeat than “weather = sun” so is it reasonable to say that the model gets depressed when it’s raining?

    The weightings will change leading to a a change in the electrical signals, which emulates pretty closely what happens in our heads


  • You see humans everywhere you go

    I don’t know if it’s that unless you live in Nigeria, India, SEA etc.

    In high income countries, the cities have grown in population and there’s fewer people in rural areas, so sure you’re going to see people in cities in urban areas and in touristy rural areas during common vacation times, but that’s been the case for ages and for the rest of the time there’s still plenty of easily accessible places where you can get away from people.

    There’s also people capitalising on people wanting to be away from humans so they advertise “retreats” which are full of other humans, but just don’t go there and camp in the middle of nowhere instead and there won’t be humans for miles around


  • So personally I prefer Erlang to Elixir - the language feels more like it was designed around the programming paradigms it supports (message passing, everything’s one of about 6 types for efficient serialisation etc), whereas Elixir feels like “what if we made a language with syntax like Ruby that worked like (and with the backend of) Erlang?” - there are some aspects I like, such as how the vast majority of things, even def, are a function call, and the parameter lists, but it feels very much like there’s a lot of workarounds of the design principles of the language to get it to work

    I also prefer Gleam to Elixir - it brings much nicer functional programming than either Erlang or Elixir and of course typing, which feels very missing from Elixir but not from Erlang, which is far clearer that something is one of very few types and lets you handle multiple types in a very natural feeling way. It also feels more akin to modern “full featured” (as opposed to scripting) languages than either Erlang or Elixir does.

    Basically if you’re learning something for employability, learn Elixir. If you’re learning something for a potential business idea, use Gleam. If you’re learning something for personal projects, see if Erlang is intuitive for you - if it is, I can guarantee you’ll love it, if not, use Gleam.


  • Can code in without code completion or checking the docs: C, C#, Scala, F#, SQL (ms server), js/ts, Erlang, Elixir

    Have a general idea of but may need to check things about the standard library every so often: Kotlin, Python, OCaml, C++, prolog

    Have used in the past but would need to look up the syntax to use again: Go, Rust, Haskell, Java, Gleam

    I’m probably missing some from each category though




  • Wikipedia’s job isn’t free to be anti- or pro- anything, it’s to show facts free from bias, even if you and most other readers agree with that bias.

    Of course the facts can clearly show something to be almost objectively evil to anyone capable of understanding them, but it’s not for Wikipedia to perform any analysis of those facts - saying “Israel has killed X civilians in attacks which many of their allies claimed were completely avoidable [citation]” in an article featured on the front page is perfectly valid, however a big banner with a Palestinian flag is not as it’s a (fair) interpretation of the facts and not simply a presentation of them.