• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • I’m not ragging on this particular post - this one’s obviously important - but I’ll be honest, I really wish I could spend less time hearing about what Trump is doing and more time hearing about what’s being done about it.

    Getting constant doom-o-grams about the current administration’s latest horror-show is particularly exhausting when you almost never hear about people working to fix it, and frankly I doubt I’m alone in that. It’s pretty counterproductive for us to be spending so much time fixating on what the fascists are doing. Helps them a lot more than us.

    I just wish this site had a healthier evil-to-good-news mix, you know? Prevents doomerism.



  • The fundamental issue is and has always been that automation is being used to replace people, when it should be used to free up their time. Productivity increases could’ve meant shorter work weeks. But that didn’t generate as much money for the shareholders, so it didn’t get pursued. And now we’ve got LLMs and generative AI, which could’ve been a (admittedly rather shitty and niche) tool, but for the same reasons as before, companies would rather throw people under the bus instead.

    Artists aren’t telling you that people washing dishes don’t matter. They’re telling you they might be getting fired just like those dishwashers were. If you care about either, I suggest standing up for the artists here. And once that’s done, they can stand up for everyone else right back. I think you’ll find they’d be happy to return the favor.








  • I was suggesting that no one else needs it explained to them either.

    You’d hope so! But alas, some idiots exist. And when a title like this appears, it becomes difficult to tell if such an idiot wrote it at first glance, and more to point, a title like that tends to create more idiots (and it’s also just kinda offensive). That’s why it’s important not to write headlines like this.

    Sidenote: If you want people to not take things personally, avoid personal pronouns. “Is that something that you need explained?” → “Is that something that people need explained?” It makes a world of difference and I’m confident I’ve avoided several arguments that could’ve spawned from my own posts thanks to making that kind of change. Not foolproof, sure – we are on the internet – but it helps.





  • You can read that from the article text, but a) the text doesn’t appear to actually suggest autistic people do have empathy, which is a problem since b) the title absolutely implies they don’t.

    At best, this is a terrible headline. But if I’m being honest, I don’t have much respect for an article that seems to be all too eager to tout the erstwhile benefits of an LLM, let alone one that is in all likelihood teaching people how to act more like an LLM. So I’m not inclined to take a charitable interpretation.


  • Everyone anti-AI I know (which is most of everyone I know who’s cognizant of AI) would respond by either finding a therapist who can promise they won’t do that, or else not get therapy at all.

    LLMs are not worth trusting for basically anything, and a lot of fields are quickly realizing this. I keep my finger on the pulse of programming and there’s a lot of negative sentiment there too—I’ve never used LLMs to code and I never will, but I know of a few folks who’ve explicitly said how much it screws things up, and I’ve seen studies that found it to be seriously lacking at best.


  • I am aware. […] Pathfinding, which is one element of that in video games (see literally any NPC that moves in a game), is purely algorithmic, and a lot of people who used “AI” to refer to ML would disagree that Dijkstra’s algorithm is “AI”.

    Yes, I know what Dijkstra’s is. I’ve spent plenty enough of my life in game development to know that. You don’t need to link it, and it wasn’t relevant to either of my points. I’m not, nor was I ever, arguing that people regularly called pathfinding algorithms “AI.”

    Anyway: I find it befuddling why you’d claim that AI is an “opaque term” equivalent to technobabble right after describing

    the common usage (the “AI” in a video game) meant something that could perform actions on behalf of a human

    …which would indicate that a great number of people would find the word perfectly understandable and useful. I wouldn’t expect it to fit the category of “common usage” otherwise. And I’d further find it strange to believe that a term having multiple meanings is somehow to its discredit, if that’s what your suggesting. “AI” had a solid place in language well before chatbots took off, as have many words describing broad categories.


  • The changelog lists 30 significant changes, of which the top new feature is integrating Whisper. This means whisper.cpp, which is Georgi Gerganov’s entirely local and offline version of OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition model. The bottom line is that FFmpeg can now automatically subtitle videos for you.

    Yeah hey, can anyone chime in if this is at all based off LLMs? Because my problems with the incorrect plagiarism machine don’t end just because it’s now the offline incorrect plagiarism machine. Making OpenAI’s garbage hockey open source doesn’t make it okay. Or should I just start calling this shit FOSSwashing?

    I dug around for a bit and couldn’t find much of anything, but judging by a look at the Github pages for both versions of Whisper, it’s looking very related. If that’s the case, fuck right off. I don’t want AI in FFmpeg, either.