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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • I think where it shines is in helping you write code you’ve never written before. I never touched Swift before and I made a fully functional iOS app in a week. Also, even with stuff I have done before, I can say “write me a function that does x” and it will and it usually works.

    Like just yesterday I asked it to write me a function that would generate and serve up an .ics file based on a selected date and extrapolate the date of a recurring monthly meeting based on the day of the week picked and its position (1st week, 2nd week, etc) within the month and then make the .ics file reflect all that. I could have generated that code myself by hand but it would have probably taken me an hour or two. It did it in about five seconds and it worked perfectly.

    Yeah, you have to know what you’re doing in general and there’s a lot of babysitting involved, but anyone who thinks it’s just useless is plain wrong. It’s fucking amazing.

    Edit: lol the article is referring to a study that was using GPT 3.5, which is all but useless for coding. 4.0 has been out for a year blowing everybody’s minds. Clickbait trash.








  • Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.

    Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.

    But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can’t link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren’t a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it’s not just Facebook.

    This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you’re searching for.

    And it’s another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.




  • But I don’t think they can grab that explorer fanbase again, they are just against procedural generation in general, they probably wanted Outer Worlds but bigger.

    I don’t think that’s true. Elite Dangerous is one of my favorite games and it’s procedurally generated. I think the issue is that that’s not exactly what Starfield is.

    When you “land” in Starfield (outside a handcrafted city or similar), you land in a procedurally generated box made just for you. It isn’t repeatable by anybody but you. Other people who “land” in the same spot will not see what you saw, they get their own procedurally generated box. The contents of the box are similar (the terrain is the right color, the flora and fauna are the same). If you were to see something particularly cool in your box (although I never did when I was playing the game) - ie: “unusually tall mountain range” or “unusually deep valley” - you can’t tell someone “hey go to coordinates x,y and check this out!” You CAN do this in Elite Dangerous. All worlds, all settlements - everything is the same for everyone, and if you explore through it all and you find something interesting, you can share it with people.

    In Starfield, your box always contains an uninteresting/unremarkable patch of terrain and magically, literally everywhere you land, there are structures and ships within walking distance - none of which anyone can get to but you.

    There is literally no WAY to explore. Everywhere you land, it’s just another box and it will always contain the same variation on the same things. That isn’t exploration. Exploration implies things that exist whether you are there or not and which can be found by someone if they look long enough.




  • This is going to sound like hyperbole, but this thing changed my life and I always love it when I get a chance to share it with somebody. It requires no electricity, it has no moving parts and in the 11 years I’ve been using one, it’s never broken. I give you: Omega Paw.

    It requires clumping cat litter, so if you use that you’re golden. When it’s time to clean, you roll it - and as you roll, the loose litter flows through a grate, but the clumps and waste stay on top of the grate. As you continue to roll it, the waste falls to the ceiling. When you roll it back, the waste all falls into the drawer, which you pull out and dump. Cleaning the litter box takes literally 10 seconds. It’s awesome.



  • Supervisor194@lemmy.worldtoFuck Cars@lemmy.mlinsane infrastructure needed
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    7 months ago

    Chick-Fil-A has been around more than my whole life. I remember going there as a kid in the mall. I remember going there as an adult in the mall.

    At no time eating at Chick-Fil-A do I once recall thinking to myself “goddamn, this is exceptional!” It’s a chicken sandwich. It’s not particularly good or bad, and I am not into waffle fries.

    At no time eating at Chick-Fil-A did I once think “this line is too long, I will eat elsewhere.” I don’t recall ever seeing a line at all.

    Long about 1986 they started making standalone locations, but I never saw any until the 2000s. I never went, because I had long since decided that mediocre chicken sandwiches weren’t really my thing. However, since I first noticed the standalone locations I have also noticed that their lines have consistently gotten longer and longer. It’s interesting that the growth of these lines seem to have coincided with the rise of social media, but I won’t get too tinfoil-hatty here.

    So anyway. One day, I decided I should give them a try - obviously, they’re getting something right, right? Let’s see what all the hype is about.

    Yeah no, it’s the exact same mediocre shit. It’s fine. It’s not great, it’s OK for fast food, maybe even slightly above average. But is it good enough to wait in a line like this that wraps around the building twice? No, thank you.

    So I guess what I am saying is, I’m with you. I have to figure it’s the power of marketing, because the only thing they’ve done that I can see is increase their marketing. Also their marketing - at least the public marketing (who knows what guerilla shit they do on social media to keep those lines growing) - is super weird. Cows exhorting you to eat chicken, because they don’t want to die. I suppose given that cows have no messiah, this is a perfectly reasonable position for them to hold in the eyes of the Chick-Fil-A Illuminati, but idk.

    Want a chicken sandwich? I can name half a dozen local shops that will hook you up with better. Is it fast? Jesus Christ, no. The apologists say yes, given the size of the lines, but I say no, given the size of the lines. I guess that’s a matter of perspective.

    What’s not disputable is that this is fast food that, like all fast food - you can honestly live better without.