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proser

17 karma · joined January 3, 2022

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proser··on OpenAI acquires Global Illumination
It also usually triggers a liquidity event, so the team gets paid (or their equity gets transferred to OpenAI) in a way that provides a bit of a bonus and incentive to stick around.
proser··on Following pushback, Zoom says it won't use customer data to train AI models
Given how easy it is to keep an average human from discerning reality (see the last decade of boomers/gen xers on Facebook as an example) and the massive potential to create slight variations with LLMs, I don't think a Stephenson-style misinformation propagation campaign is that far outside the bounds of possibility.

That's a lot of compute power to waste on it, but I would guess that that's what bot networks are going to be used for in the future (or already are, right now, if they're done mining bitcoin).

proser··on On why Markdown is not a good, or even a half-decent, markup language
Markdown is an authoring language (it's easy to write) rather than a publishing language (like XML, which is mostly replaces, which sucks to write in).
proser··on The last day of Constantinople
This has more in common with Austin, Texas. Everyone is grumpy about all the people moving there, but the vast, vast majority are moving there from other parts of Texas rather than out of state.
proser··on Google Groups has been left to die
Mentioned elsewhere, but Groups is a core part of their business offering. It's how lists and permissions get set up in lots of orgs using Google for enterprise email, docs, etc. View it as an extension of that and you can understand why consumer facing features seem stagnant.
proser··on Salesforce Lays Off 8k While Paying Matthew McConaughey $10M/Yr to Sit Around
That's not what marketing does. It doesn't influence the decision. Marketing makes sure your company is top of mind when the customer decides to make a decision.
proser··on OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit
If we had the answer to this question, most of the ideological debates of the past 150 would be solved.
proser··on The End of the English Major
I don't think the radically different contexts of a burgeoning nation in the 18th century and a highly developed nation in the 21st "destroys" this quote.
proser··on Play Counter Strike 1.6, with full multiplayer, in the browser
Naive feels like a much better word than innocent.
proser··on Why to start a startup in a bad economy (2008)
Keep in mind this article is 15 years old. It could get a driver's permit in most US states.
proser··on DHS announces extension of Real ID full enforcement deadline
It's worse than that. Birth certificates are issued at the country level.
proser··on We should have Markdown-rendered websites
This gets at the key difference between the two. Markdown is for authoring and HTML is for presentation.
proser··on Europe now has so much natural gas that prices just dipped below zero
European utilities are often public utilities that are nationalized in some way, not strictly corporate businesses.
proser··on Is engineering management bullshit?
I still think there's an issue here just from the phrasing. "Taking time away from the team" implies that the team has better things to be doing. A manager isn't stealing a team's time by aggregating information to share upstream. A good manager is keeping the team aligned and informed so that they're working on the right thing at the right time. If the manager isn't there, the team needs to do that work, or be potentially wasting their time.
proser··on The 1980s Media Panic over Dungeons and Dragons (2016)
My personal favorite Electric Wizard track has always been "Legalise Drugs & Murder." They have never been accused of being subtle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zNG63rf9LQ
proser··on Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games
There's a really interesting cross-over here with literary structure. You need to teach a model to recognize tone, theme, and setting in addition to world "facts."

What makes a world like Westeros different than the Shire isn't just facts like "seasons are really long" but elements of tension, political unrest, and the outlook of the people who inhabit it. To do this effectively, you need to be building simulations of literary works. There's always going to be an art to this, but instead of the manuscript, it's going to be about the parts of the model.