i80and

If you have unusual self-discipline and mental rigor, yes, you can use LLMs as a rubber duck that way. I would be severely skeptical of the value over a diary. But humans are, in an astonishing twist, wired to assume that if they're being replied to, there's a mind like theirs behind those replies.

The more subjective the topic, the more volatile the user's state of mind, the more likely they are to gaze too deep into that face on the other side of their funhouse mirror and think it actually is their friend, and that it "thinks" like they do.

I'm not even anti-LLM as an underlying technology, but the way chatbot companies are operating in practice is kind of a novel attack on our social brains and it behooves a warning!

Users would hate a simple deny list, even if it may be a good idea. That means the safeguards, to the extent they currently exist at all, have to be complicated and stochastic and not interfere with growing metrics.

The industry has known it's a problem from the get-go, but they never want to do anything to lower engagement. So they rationalize and hrm and haw and gravely shake their heads as their commercialized pied pipers lead people to their graves

There's something very dark about a machine accessible in everybody's pocket that roleplays whatever role they happen to fall into: the ultimate bad friend, the terminal yes-and-er. No belief, no inner desires, just pure sycophancy.

I see people on here pretty regularly talk about using ChatGPT for therapy, and I can't imagine a faster way to cook your own brain unless you have truly remarkable self-discipline. At which point, why are you turning to the black box for help?

The user of the code may plausibly want to make a different tradeoff than the author, without wanting to rewrite the project from scratch.

You almost had me for a moment.

Most garbage collectors are precise, if possible.

It is also true that making attackers spend time and resources has value. Just because you're trapped in a Red Queen race doesn't mean you should stop running

Like, this thing is nightmare fuel. They're making up nightmare stories because this uncanny valley horror practically invites the brain to do so.

Please be doing a bit

It's not atomic even with the GIL, though: another thread can run in between the bytecode's load and increment, right?

The GIL's guarantees didn't extend to this.

No experts think this. You are consuming extremely bad information.

You asked the question, but don't want to hear the answer.

Advancements are more often logarithmic than geometric: a brief flurry of progress as easy barriers are overcome, followed by a long unsexy slog of incrementalism.

Bitcoin may well be broken someday, but the time scale is on decades, which is well beyond the horizon for high-volatility markets like Bitcoin

A functioning democratic republic is not, in fact, predicated on voting every couple years and shutting up in between elections.

Additionally, checks and balances abdicating their duties to uphold laws does not mean that no laws are being broken and all is well: it's a symptom of the system as a whole grinding itself apart under the internal contradictions.

The extent to which media and the public both blame Biden for events prior to his administration's start is deeply concerning.

Unfortunately, it's just a paraphrasing of unironic sentences I see daily.

> job portals auto-trash applications w/o a job history (1st time job seekers).

It rather feels lately like civilization is the project of putting up as many catch-22's as we can.

A very very minor contribution to my choice to buy a VW ID.4 is that a number of people reported that pulling the modem's (user-accessible) fuse is fine, and just disables remote connectivity as you'd expect.

(I haven't actually done that, but I abstractly like the option being available)

FSAs are insane, conceptually.

"Guess how much money you're spending in a year on healthcare! But beee caaareful: if you guess too high, YOU LOSE IT"

I still used mine while I still had access to one, but it was grumpy-making and was usually almost more trouble than it was worth.

The engineers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should

I really want to know what's going on inside the military.

Of course I'm not naive enough to expect anybody outside of a few noble souls to actually disobey orders when push comes to shove, but for years people in and around the military have assured me that officers do training to prepare for rejecting illegal orders, and so I shouldn't worry.

And these orders seem pretty prima facie blatantly illegal.

This would make a number of great artists of history "tasteless".

As a good friend of a restaurant owner I have personal experience with this and you're friends with the people, not the company.

Restaurant owner friend transferred his company to new ownership, and I would never ask for the kinds of goodies the previous owner gave me. Because it was the owner, not the company, with which I had a relationship.

This is an exceedingly strange comment -- you made up a silly thing to get upset about, and are making fun of people who aren't upset about the thing, because you think it's the sort of thing they would be upset about, even though it isn't and you say as much?

This feels like a whole new category of straw man.

I basically entirely gave up trying to see an ophthalmologist in the US. Wait times 6+ months out.

It's not better here. Just seeing my GP takes weeks, and he's overwhelmed.

> When I want open hardware, I have many options.

Do you? Because respectfully it seems to me, looking at the phone market at least, that you're the party being exclusively catered to, and you're complaining bitterly that anybody else could be given a choice at all.

I was there, Gandalf, 15 years ago. I think the last virus I saw in person was closer to 25 years ago, but I've done my time in the trenches.

Locked-down app stores certainly have significant utility and even should maybe be the default depending on the device, but calling people "assholes" for asking for an escape hatch is extremely odd.

+1 for Qobuz -- it's been where I buy my mainstream music for years now

(They used to have a really nice tarball option for downloading albums, but they axed that so now you have to download songs individually. Massive downgrade in QoL)

I actually went out of my way to watch The Hobbit at theaters with the 48fps copy because I thought it was incredible despite the wrerched 3D it was paired with. 24fps has always seemed choppy and confusing to me with any kind of action, and The Hobbit was a breath of fresh air

I consider it a genuine shame there's no way to release the 48fps cut on home media.

People told me this about the DMAchoice website the FTC links to.

$6 later, and I receive exactly the same amount of junk mail as before.

A little surprised that the linked systemd file-hierarchy(7) manpage makes no mention of /opt