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kombookcha

951 karma · joined July 28, 2023

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kombookcha··on AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
Personally I strongly doubt it. Since the nature of LLM's does not allow them semantic content or context, I believe it is inherently a tool unsuited for this task. As far as I can tell, it's a limitation of the technology itself, not of the amount of power behind it.

Either way, being able to generate or compress loads of text very quickly with no understanding of the contents simply is not the bottleneck of information transfer between human beings.

kombookcha··on AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
This is one of my major concerns about people trying to use these tools for 'efficiency'. The only plausible value in somebody writing a huge report and somebody else reading it is information transfer. LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high, and you will be worse off reading the summary than if you skimmed the first and last pages. In fact, you will be worse off than if you did nothing at all.

Using AI to output noise and learn nothing at breakneck speeds is worse than simply looking out the window, because you now have a false sense of security about your understanding of the material.

Relatedly, I think people get the sense that 'getting better at prompting' is purely a one-way issue of training the robot to give better outputs. But you are also training yourself to only ask the sorts of questions that it can answer well. Those questions that it will no longer occur to you to ask (not just of the robot, but of yourself) might be the most pertinent ones!

kombookcha··on I swear the UFO is coming any minute
Thank you, that was great.

(And what a beautiful little page - click the white spots on the map in the header, more trees and houses spring up)

kombookcha··on I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology
Very clever to introduce it to kids as purely a puzzle game! I'll keep that in mind.

When my girlfriend and I play, we sometimes give unofficial bonus points as compensation for suboptimal plays that fill out unseemly gaps that would otherwise stay open. Makes for a nice, aesthetic endstate board without handwringing over your score :b

kombookcha··on I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology
Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) is a boardgame award that notably favors family-friendly accessibility. If you're seeing the award on the box, you can be confident that even if the strategy can potentially get really deep, you can still break this out to have a fun time with both grandma and your 12 year old cousin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiel_des_Jahres

kombookcha··on I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology
+1 for Root!

For a nice entry game for a group setting, I recommend Carcassonne. It has a simple and engaging basic gameplay with a surprising amount of depth, that can easily be scaled up and down in complexity depending on your group's preference and experience level by simply adding more pieces/mechanics.

kombookcha··on Why does aluminum foil have one shiny side and one with a matte finish?
For you mindwarriors out there who like to go on the offence, leave a removable fold over your third eye so you can quickly flip it open and be ready to engage in PSI-combat on the astral plane or realspace as the situation requires.
kombookcha··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...
kombookcha··on Eight more months of agents
We are all constantly being gaslit. People have insane amounts of money and prestige riding on this thing paying off in such a comically huge way that it can absolutely not deliver on it in the foreseeable future. Creating a constant pressing sentiment that actually You Are Being Left Behind Get On Now Now Now is the only way they can keep inflating the balloon.

If this stuff was self-evidently as useful as it's being made out to be, there would be no point in constantly trying to pressure, coax and cajole people into it. You don't need to spook people into using things that are useful, they'll do it when it makes sense.

The actual use-case of LLMs is dwarfed by the massive investment bubble it has become, and it's all riding on future gains that are so hugely inflated they will leave a crater that makes the dotcom bubble look like a pothole.

kombookcha··on Eight more months of agents
>The problem with this that after doing this hard work someone can just copy easily your hard work and UI/UX taste.

Or indeed, somebody might steal and launder your work by scooping them up into a training set for their model and letting it spit out sloppy versions of your thing.

kombookcha··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
In a good 'niche forums and quirky local cultures' type of way, or in the annoying epic bacon kind of way?
kombookcha··on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
That was certainly my experience. I got rid of the app and only used reddit in browser mode to read without participating. The noticeable quality drop after the migration, as well as all the artificial hurdles they put up to force you back on the app eventually made me stop using it entirely.
kombookcha··on Khalid Sheldrake: The East Dulwich man who would be King
Yeah, very curious about how there is this calibre of high stakes drama and intrigue among 1920s elephant keepers.
kombookcha··on Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 along with Faulkner, Hemingway
My pitch to American readers is that Mortadelo & Filemon is like raunchy Spy VS Spy with Tom & Jerry characteristics.

In fact, if you liked the old British TV sitcom Bottom, you'll likely enjoy M&F.

kombookcha··on US lawmakers tell Apple, Google to be ready to remove TikTok from stores Jan. 19
The Hayes Code exists to have a standardized industry guideline in response to individual states issuing dozens of differing film censorship bills. So while it is not a law, it is a guideline for how to be compliant with a rapidly proliferating number of censorship laws.
kombookcha··on Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why
There used to be a care for the craftsmanship, I tell you! :b
kombookcha··on Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why
Bonzi Buddy Reloaded
kombookcha··on AI company that made robots for children went bust and now the robots are dying
Also check out the lovely novel Klara And The Sun, about a solar powered AI robot friend, gifted to a sickly child.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klara_and_the_Sun

kombookcha··on What we know about CEO shooting suspect
Making Civ VI playable locks in the folk hero status
kombookcha··on What we know about CEO shooting suspect
Yeah, the way I read it, it was some elderly customer at the McDonald's who tipped off the cops.
kombookcha··on Itch.io Taken Down by Funko
Exactly this, if you give a hoot about actual useful applications for AI, there is a great need to clear out all the grifters and scammers attracted by the initial hype cycle.
kombookcha··on Rapid colonization of a space-returned Ryugu sample by terrestrial microorganism
I suppose the much more bothersome scenario is finding a microbe that is ambiguously novel, and doesn't neatly fit any particular family of Earth microbes, but also isn't radically different enough to be confidently classified alien.

Like did we accidentally discover an eccentric and rare Earth microorganism that thrives in this unusual environment, or is it an honest to god extraterrestrial and life in both spheres just happens to converge along certain lines by evolutionary convenience or chemical necesssity? How would we tell?

kombookcha··on The Many Faces of the Kingdom of Shu
Ah, that makes sense - thank you for clarifying!
kombookcha··on The Many Faces of the Kingdom of Shu
But isn't Zhang Daoling (AD 34-156) born too late to have brough Taoism into Shu (1046BC-316BC)? That's why I am asking about inner cultivation - like are we talking precursor practices that would become relevant to taoism arising in Shu, or do you just mean Shu fits the general area in which Taoism would later show up?
kombookcha··on The Many Faces of the Kingdom of Shu
What's the connection with taoism - are we talking early inner cultivation type stuff?
kombookcha··on Surrealism, cafes and lots of cats: why Japanese fiction is booming
>Western comics are also incredibly hostile towards new readers

I agree with this if we are talking American superhero comics, but the European scene is decidedly different. Franco-Belgian comics are usually very pick-up-and-go, as are a great many of the homegrown UK ones. I think we're coming off a decade-ish where the massive investment in Marvel/DC 'verses have been eating up all the oxygen in the room for large comic book adaptions. Or just for general public consciousness attention for comics.

I am pretty confident that it's gonna turn around, but it might take a while on the large scale projects.

kombookcha··on Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unreal Tournament Forever
Man. Facing Worlds, low gravity, instagib CTF - might be my favourite map/mode combination in any shooter ever. That was so much fun.
kombookcha··on Rats learned to drive
I believe there is also a very interesting project that uses trained rats to detect and mark landmines for clearing. The rats can apparently smell even very old explosives under the dirt, and unlike their handlers are too light to set them off :)
kombookcha··on Daisy, an AI granny wasting scammers' time
>I'd like to find a way to help them roll over on their bosses

They're unlikely to do this, because scam call centers are typically a branch of local organized crime syndicates. There is nowhere for them to roll, because their boss' boss also pays a bunch of crooked cops and whatnot.

The bottom rung guys doing the actual calling aren't gangsters, but further up the organization they are, so attempting to fuck with the organization from the bottom will not end well for you if you live in that area and lack protection.

kombookcha··on Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to Lead Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
It's very funny that the very first thing anybody knows about the department of efficiency is that it has two bosses.
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