gloomyday

Meta is not the Internet. It is a company.

Less powerful models are already extremely capable, so going for the best model is just like buying the most expensive hammer in the shop instead of the functional and well-priced one. Your experience is not representative of their usefulness.

You may be going through the same crisis that chess masters went through decades ago. But chess didn't die because engines were better, in fact there has never been more people interested in chess as today. Cheaters are annoying though.

This feels like a new phase for open source. I think screening people to join development efforts will become the norm, at least for resource-constrained projects. Trust will have to be earned.

I once had a very weird experience on LSD (of course), in which I perceived my brain and thinking as a bunch of separate entities working in synchrony. Only two of them were capable of speech, and some were very simple and reactive. The "me" part was just them agreeing on stuff. I will never forget the experience.

The battery concerns are just a ridiculous excuse. E-bikes are allowed in public transport.

I really wanted an e-scooter to help my shorter routes here in Germany, but the legislation is quite unfriendly to it now. I need insurance and can't carry it in public transport. Maybe a folding bike would be great.

Marketing has such a gigantic influence in our field. It is absolutely insane. It feels unavoidable, since IT is (was?) constantly filled with new blood that picks up where people left off.

In principle, they could make such responses part of their training data. I guess it is just easier to do it through prompting.

I think newer developers really need to learn that you can actually do production stuff using bare tools. It is not crazy, especially in the beginning, and it will save you a ton of money and time.

Society is lacking people that stand up for something. My efforts to consume less is seen as being cheap by my family, which I find so sad. I much prefer donating my money than exchanging superfluous gifts on Christmas.

A quick way to make me not respect someone's economic opinion is to mention the "Efficient Market Hypothesis." This should be buried 7 palms underground.

Microsoft products are decreasing in quality at an astounding rate. You can clearly see that sales people took over the whole company.

This is a fatalistic attitude, but I can totally get behind. It has become harder to associate my job with contributing with society.

I've heard once that Americans distrust their government and trust their corporations, while Europeans distrust their corporations and trust their government. I honestly think that governments already has a huge role in shaping people's understanding of the world, and that's GREAT on good democratic countries.

What I find really weird is that I am stopping believing in the whole idea of free press, considering how the mainstream media is being bought by oligarchs around the globe. I think this is a good example of the erosion of trust in institutions in general. This won't end well.

Your idea of letting it be run by a non-profit makes me believe that you also don't trust institutions anymore.

I remember my first programming class, where the exam required students to solve problems in Pascal on paper. I see no problems in this approach.

I still think pen and paper is king among students.

At the university, you are supposed to learn the foundational knowledge. If you let the LLM do the work, you are simply not learning. There are no shortcuts.

And learning how to use LLMs is pathetically easy. Really.

We have to train ourselves to not be pissed off at headlines. They are most of the time bait.

That's a tip I recommend people to try when they are using LLMs to solve stuff. Instead of asking "how to..", ask "what alternatives are there to...". A top-k answer is way better, and you get to engage more with whatever you are trying to learn/solve.

That reminds me of my father calling the mobile phone and laptop issued to him as the "dunce kit", so he could work at home as well. He used to say that since the 90s, ahaha.

Overall, I had a pretty bad experience with ALVR. I never managed to figure out the cause of stuttering on mine. I wished Meta would support Linux.

There are simply too many games, and many genres are underserved by AAA studios.

The only game I tried on Steam that didn't work was Slave Zero, a game from the 90s. Unfortunately, I still have to use Windows for VR games. It is too troublesome on Linux (at least for the Meta Quest 2).

OR it could be that we find the sweet spot because it's the spot we feel the best.

I moved to Europe years ago, and I am still baffled by how IT in general is perceived, even by some professionals. When I compare a project like Bevy running with a yearly budget of ~$200k with someone like this getting a budget of €20M, I feel like going back to bed.

One of the biggest problems in environmental education (imo) is the lack of notion regarding the footprint of products and services we consume daily; from the water and CO2 costs of a meal, of a heated pool, of a car, etc. It is eye-opening.

I first came across this type of info with the book "How Bad Are Bananas", from Mike Berners-Lee. I really enjoyed it, and I just saw that the new edition even includes stuff like hosting a World Cup, data centers, and space tourism!

It should give a good foundation to start talking about it.

I've been around long enough to see this saying that "As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore" in action many times.

It is almost infuriating how dismissive people are of such amazing technologies when they understand it. If anything, progress is often marked by having things becoming simpler rather than more complex. The SpaceX Raptor engine versions are such a cool example of that.

These "missions" cannot coexist with the single mission of every publicly traded company, which is to maximize shareholder value.

It is really depressing how corporations don't look like they are run by humans.

I think developers are drowning in tools to make things "easy", when in truth many problems are already easy with the most basic stuff in our tool belt (a compiler, some bash scripts, and some libraries). You can always build up from there.

This tooling fetish hurts both companies and developers.

This naming trend has been going for 8 years. Incredible.