asciimov

I have a nice garden going right now. TAM Jalapeños have taken the longest to flower, almost thought they wouldn’t. Sweet cherry peppers have been plentiful. Lost my zucchini crop to squash vine borers.

> What bugs me is the absolute tunnel vision of "for principled reasons I must find this thing completely and utterly bad, no matter what".

AI companies also only sell the public on the upside of these technologies. Behind closed doors they are investing hard on this with the hope to reduce or eliminate their labor cost with no regard to any damage to society.

Great, tell that to someone who spent years honing their skills that it's too bad the rug was pulled out from beneath you, time to start over from the bottom again.

Maybe there would be merit to this notion if society provided the necessary safety net for this person to start over.

Maybe we have a different Google AI down here in south Texas, but the Google search AI results I receive are laughably bad.

It has made up tags for cli functions, suggested nonexistent functions with usage instructions, it’s given me operations in the wrong order, and my personal favorite it gave me a code example in the wrong language (think replying Visual Basic for C).

For the past 10 years we have been telling everyone learn to code, now it’s learn to build AI prompts.

Before a poor kid with a computer access could learn to code nearly for free, but if it costs $1k just to get started with AI that poor kid will never have that opportunity.

It would only be interesting if the problem was truly novel. If the AI has already been trained on the problem it’ll just push out a solution.

Out of curiosity how much are you spending on AI?

How much do you believe a programmer needs to layout to “get good”?

How are those without that kind of scratch supposed to keep up with those that do?

Of course Sony was, because they own the patent for it.

The reason other labels, and most cd units, don’t use CD-Text is companies don’t want to pay for the license.

I’m all for a new design esthetic, even if they have to iterate it a few times to improve usability.

Can’t wait to be told, “You’re viewing it wrong.” /s

But yes, terrible visual usability. Otherwise it looks nice, better than flat.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I don't have to prove that the LLM can't reason. The claims that they can have yet to be proven.

I include a bag of assorted dice in my Catan set

My two house rules are:

1. 2 dice are pulled from the bag at random. If dice are too similar for the Cities and Knights expansion, pull another die.

2. First 7 is re-rolled until not a 7. I have found this can speed up the early phase of the game.

The dice deck has a perfect bell curve of dice rolls, this means the same number of 6’s and 8’s, 4’s and 10’s. If you go on a tear you can pull most of the 6’s from the deck in short order, a flood. Making it difficult or impossible to pull anymore till the deck is reshuffled, the drought. Meanwhile the odds of pulling other cards go up.

This is somewhat mitigated with cards that require you to reshuffle the deck. Even with shuffle cards included the numbers are too evenly distributed or balanced removing any feeling of randomness or luck from the game.

I’ve played a bunch of Catan. The included wooden dice are all terribly biased. Not in the same way, but enough that a sets owner knows, at least subconsciously, what numbers their set favors.

The best way I’ve found to mitigate this is to have a bag of assorted dice with the set. The various sizes and materials, with a swap out at every game, makes sure the dice bias isn’t predictable.

Regarding dice decks. I find they make the game sterile. A near perfect bell curve means you can anticipate number droughts or floods, aiding in robber strategy.

The cards are interesting, they include a card to force shuffle the deck in order to make sure there is some randomness in the outcomes.

Even with the forced shuffle cards, the outcomes fall too much in the bell curve and make the game feel sterile. Because if you get a flood of 5’s and 6’s you know a drought is soon upon you.

Likely a different edition, or reproduction.

One example is Office. Microsoft is going back to preloading office during Windows Boot so that you don't notice it loading. With the average system spec 25 years ago it made sense to preload office. But today, what is Office doing that it needs to offload its startup to running at boot?

> … no further silicon designs ever get manufactured

The problem wouldn’t be missing CPUs but infrastructure. Power would be the big one, generators, substations, those sorts of things. Then manufacturing, lot of chips go there. Then there is all of healthcare.

Lots of important chips everywhere that aren’t CPUs.

…and Father Brown.

2004 Lincoln Towncar. Recently replaced the intake manifold myself. Next is J-modding the transmission. Would like to replace gears with a different ratio for more power, but that will require taking it somewhere, not something I can do in my driveway.

Started my first garden this spring. Have several peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, and a few herbs.

Looking into internships and new opportunities. Been out of the profession for along while and need find my way back in.

To gauge how well the models "think" and what amount of slop they generate.

Keeping it secret because I don't want my answers trained into a model.

Think of it this way, FizzBuzz used to be a good test to weed out bad actors. It's simple enough that any first year programmer can do it and do it quickly. But now everybody knows to prep for FizzBuzz so you can't be sure if your candidate knows basic programming or just memorized a solution without understanding what it does.

That's an expensive mistake waiting to happen.

Nope, not doing this. Likely you shouldn't either. I don't want my few good prompts to get picked up by trainers.

In my area, charity shops have terrible selections tons of fad diet books from the 80s and 90s and religious related texts.

“Charity” shops in my area are for profit businesses. Sure someone is getting a small donation, but their board members pull large salaries. Never mind their free inventory and usually underpaid labor.

I’ve been told enough falsehoods from AI, that it hasn’t earned my trust yet.

On the other hand, Google search is starting to be useless without curating my queries. And their AI suggestions are full of lies.

Didn't you post this a few days ago?

I’ve had an MX Ergo for several years (and other thumb trackballs for 28 years), while I like the shape and like the ergonomics, some issues stand out

- Rechargeable battery lasts 4-6 weeks. The 1 AA in the M570 lasted 6-9 months.

- No on device indicator that battery is low or about to die, it just dies mid use.

- Rubberized coating under palm gets guncky over time.

It would be nice if cars came in Hot Wheels Spectraflame. I’m sure the greigification of automobiles is down to some spreadsheet somewhere showing them they save two nickels for offering one less color.