YES! I study AI, and this is exactly how I feel!

Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out “uh…emails and productivity and things.”

I see your point, but I still don’t think the scene works, but thinking about it like that makes it much more watchable. My point is that the scene is simultaneously poignant and a throw-away. It’s a “big deal” but also just one scene.

By the 32nd century, something like that should be such a non-issue for humans, that it would be like stating just another fact about yourself (amnesia and trust-issues aside), which lends itself to being a throw-away…but that defeats the purpose of the scene. Again, I am all about the message and Stamets’ reaction, but it felt very 21st century and on-the-nose.

I’d have preferred if Adira were just non-binary from the beginning and maybe have a quick correction of someone when they were misgendered. Or, let that scene be the reveal of something else, like the symbiont. With that change (I’d have to rewatch the season to see where this scene was in relation to the symbiont reveal), I think the scene would still work while tightening up the writing. I also think it’d get the message across, too.

Now, if the writers really wanted that scene to stay as-is, there are options. Make them an alien from a culture not as enlightened (which would cause other issues) or have this scene play into a bigger theme of Earth backsliding post-Burn (like a Dark Ages) to have mores closer to the 21st century and show the 23rd century crew as horrified by it and work to bring Earth and humanity back toward enlightenment.

This kinda sums up my main problem with Disco. There were great options on the table to realize a concept, but they just wrote it in an awkward way that is unsatisfying (at least to me). Sometimes, that awkwardness reads as performative/lazily progressive.

It’s not that Disco isn’t progressive; it’s just lazily progressive. Case in point: the scene that bothers me to this day is Adira coming out as non-binary, just beyond cringe-worthy and very 21st century. As a viewer, the scene read like Adira was waiting to be judged harshly for their identity, and it just totally took me out of the era. By the 32nd century, I’d expect that being judged harshly for one’s gender identity would be at least a millennium behind us, and the conversation should either have not happened or been so matter-of-fact that it was treated as nothing. I get what the writers were trying to do, and it fell so flat and felt so bluntly obvious. I’m all for the message, but the delivery was not great.

The saddest thing about Disco to me is that there were great ideas and great intentions, but the execution of those ideas was so poor. Really, it just shows that you can have great actors, great directors, and great concepts, but if the writers can’t make it work, it just all comes apart.

I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It’s not my daily driver, but it works well when I’m on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn’t want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won’t touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.

I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they’re floundering.

Except this is a state case. Unless he also has the Supreme Court Court of Appeals of the State of New York under his control…he’s going to have a rough road ahead I think.

The truly unfortunate part is that this may be the only conviction we get. The documents case is being destroyed by the judge, and SCOTUS is likely going to tank the January 6th case.

EDIT: Caught me! I’m not from New York and didn’t check 😅

However, the name “Arthur Grand Technologies” will always be synonymous to racism.

For now. This will be memory-holed in a couple weeks. A couple grand is nothing, maybe just a slightly down quarter. They should have been completely annihilated. Crimes like this shouldn’t be fixed dollar amounts; it should be percentages of average annual gross earnings, and in this case, something like 300% annual gross earnings. Let them sell everything off.

escooters which are terrible

That’s a bit of a stretch. They aren’t great, but they’re still better than a car, and a lot of the disadvantage is because of poor infrastructure and lack of courtesy by a lot of e-scooter riders. One of those is easier to fix than the other.

E-bikes are way better than e-scooters, though, and I’d say e-bikes are more versatile.

The original paper itself, for those who are interested.

Overall, this is really interesting research and a really good “first step.” I will be interested to see if this can be replicated on other models. One thing that really stood out, though, was that certain details are obfuscated because of Sonnet being proprietary. Hopefully follow-on work is done on one of the open source models to confirm the method.

One of the notable limitations is quantifying activation’s correlation to text meaning, which will make any sort of controls difficult. Sure, you can just massively increase or decrease a weight, and for some things that will be fine, but for real manual fine tuning, that will prove to be a difficulty.

I suspect this method is likely generalizable (maybe with some tweaks?), and I’d really be interested to see how this type of analysis could be done on other neural networks.

My thoughts exactly. Growth is a byproduct of quality. Similarly, if the Fediverse grows too much and quality starts to slip, we should also let it shrink until quality comes back. I think our aim should be quality, and anything else is just a side effect.

No lie, that actually sounds kinda good and I want to try it.

It’s not just convenient for them to do it; it’s how they are able to evade anti-trust action (not that the U.S. is great at it anyway but still). I also run my own mail server. It’s not impossible, and I wouldn’t even say it’s even hard. It’s just time consuming to set up (if it’s the first time), and there are a lot of hurdles to make it so impractical that it’s virtually impossible to the average person. Only the most patient or those who have a real desire to run their own mail server will even attempt it. Anyone can set up their own mail server, but most won’t because it’s not worth it compared to using something that just works from Google.

I think what they’re saying is that Americans don’t pay attention and forgot how terrible the Trump presidency was because it’s been a few years. Most people think that “we’re better now” and any major issues have abated without understanding that nothing has fundamentally changed. Because of all that, Trump will win the election. The DnD portion of the post is just what got OP to think about this.

Sad thing is that there’s merit to the argument. It’s the old trope of “Americans have short memories.”

This is a much better article. OP’s article just shows the author’s surface understanding of how coding works and how well an LLM can actually code. There’s way more that goes into a programming task than just coding.

I see LLMs as having the potential of being almost like a super library. I can prompt GPT, Claude, etc. to write me a custom function that I copy, paste, test, scrutinize, and almost certainly change. It’s a tool that will make someone a more productive programmer. It won’t completely subsume a human’s ability to be creative and put the pieces together.

At the absolute worst over the next decade, I could see programming changing from writing and debugging code to prompting, stitching together, and debugging.

Yeah, you’re right on a lot of chatbots just being paraphrased responses from the support database, but for a lot of people, that’s all they want or need. There are a great number of people who just don’t want to read the entire article to find their answer. For that, I don’t really mind chatbots because I get the use case. What I hate is when there isn’t an option to go to the next tier of support without going in circles forever with the stupid bot.

Exactly. I didn’t learn multiplication tables, but instead, my teachers taught what multiplication was and how to do it. Sure, after practicing how to do it I memorized a lot of basic math facts, but it was more important that I understand what I was doing rather than just knowing that 9×5=45. Then again, my parents saw the sorry state of public schools (both teachers) and made sure that I was sent to a decent private school after seeing the travesty of the local public school’s reading curriculum.