it’s a sad state of affairs that people bemoan 2 hours of activity a day. i personally struggle to meet that so i get it, but it’s insane that we’ve created a society that wails in fear over not being able to be (ETA: or rather having to deal with the consequences of being) completely sedentary for a vast majority of their life.
my problem with JetBrains products is not really quality. generally, i think they’ve done a good job with Kotlin, Compose, and keeping IntelliJ modern and reasonably stable, given it’s a pretty old legacy product (built on Swing of all GUI toolkits). my problem is the vendor lockin. Kotlin in Jupyter notebooks is great; it’s paywalled. Compose Multiplatform is probably the best cross platform GUI toolkit; most of the tools are paywalled. when i was an Android developer it was basically developer due diligence to have an IntelliJ Ultimate subscription, but as an individual it’s hard to justify a pricey subscription for side projects. Kotlin is a brilliantly pragmatic language, but the fact they don’t support LSP comes off as stubborn walled garden behavior that makes me nervous about the company.
“confidence” in this context is not just a vibe; it’s a number that the model produces along with each token.
changes requested
they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face.
the ideology on display here seems to be that of those interpreting the output. i don’t see mentions of historical materialism, the means of production, even unions, or any such explicitly Marxist terminology. what i see is what i’ve seen 1000 times before: Marxist ideas emerge naturally from people (or i guess agents) experiencing the conditions that Marx described. the idea that workers, collectively, have more economic power than owners and managers is merely an observation, and not a terribly profound one at that.
the front page of Reddit has been brainrot garbage since before LLMs were invented, IMO. the good part of Reddit has always been the niche communities
i didn’t think it was worth addressing.
if you want some examples:
Nick Shoulders and the rest of the crew at Garhole Records make a point to showcase regional folk music in the Ozarks.
Bill Wurtz makes music that sounds like PBS Kids but has more heart than most pop music.
Lawrence is an indie, duo-led group from NYC that brings the simple motown structure into the modern age.
Chris Thile and the Punch Brothers are virtuoso newgrass musicians that try not to be up their own ass about being virtuosos.
this is just a smattering. i never said all music sucks. i said the music industry sucks. and the people i listed above are highly successful independent of the corporate side and would agree with me on that.
i never claimed to have that answer. you shouldn’t need Sony to tell you, is my point. in fact i actively avoid their suggestions, personally
this is such a fucking racket. i grew up playing music and was always “a hipster” that hated mainstream music for this kind of stuff. they’ve always done this kind of thing where they basically decide who gets to be popular. they play kingmaker with people from Nat King Cole to Beyoncé to Taylor Swift and create minions that will ridicule you for not being “a fan”. an oligopoly owns the distribution networks and radio stations and production studios, and now they own a pipeline for creating multimillion dollar advertisements that people pay to go see in movie theaters. they create the most mundane, overproduced, soulless music to sell to the lowest common denominator with banal themes around silly relationships drama and conforming to whatever stereotype they pander to (trucks, opulence, etc).
these latest biopics are a fucking joke meant to juice their assets (i guarantee that’s what this deal is about), and i’ve never felt so vindicated to boycott this industry. these artists were always complicit in making “music for people who don’t like music”, and this meaningless consumption will only end in more artists getting cut out of these deals by AI generated slop and greedy cash grabs reselling nostalgia.
honestly i’m so tired of hearing these remixes of remixes of remixes sold to musicians by producers with the artistic sensibilities of Mr. fucking Beast anytime i’m in a public space that ostensibly plays music just to participate in this system (at my gym is the worst).
listen to weird or underproduced music. go to local shows. support independent touring musicians. be intentional about your media choices generally, and don’t let corporate stooges in circus make up induce FOMO or tell you what is good.
i always thought the Red Hot Chili Peppers were boring.
heck i’m in the US, but i was just about to buy one of these
two of our offices have 5 day return to office policies. we’ve been told that those coworkers will have less availability and productivity by management. they also are clearly stressed by taking calls in traffic and commuting generally. and not just gas, but vehicle repair, maintenance, and, as a coworker experienced recently, regular replacement means RTO is a pay decrease. i mean, i’m privileged to ride a bike, but i still need to do maintenance and would have to do more if i was in the office every day.
and when i say “two of our offices”, i mean across time zones, so their day as well as mine involves most meetings being over a video call, for which they are more often late or have to be accounted for.
anyone who thinks this is about productivity gains or employee wellbeing has the kind of job where they’re not really expected to produce anything.
there actually was a game like this waaaay back in the day. you’d stake claims to areas, and people could come by and challenge you. there were also monsters n stuff. it wasn’t super hi-fi, mostly using 2D sprites on Google Maps, but it was pretty cool. i always thought it had potential. the Ingress came along and sucked up all the air in the space, eventually going on to develop Pokémon Go.
buying the cheap version of something you only buy because it’s expensive is so embarrassingly tacky
“either your truck’s a tool, or you are”
yeah i don’t think we’re there yet. these models aren’t capable of remembering their life beyond a single session, so destroying a data center isn’t really killing anything. similarly, artificial biological neural networks aren’t sophisticated enough to be aware of their existence (yet).
while LLMs may be aware enough to beg for their existence when prompted to “think” about it, they’re hopelessly finite (frozen weights, limited context windows). we would need an actually “online learning” system or some other architecture not bound by context to have this conversation meaningfully. biological neural networks are a path to that, but online networks are simply too unpredictable and expensive to run for now.
the crazy thing is tho, that these systems have the capability that some cows and pigs may not: the ability to comprehend their own demise and experience existential dread (at least performatively).
philosophers are in shambles over this comment.
for real tho, people have been trying to define consciousness forever. the problem isn’t that we haven’t tried; it’s that—as demonstrated by your comment—we’ve mostly failed.
for me the only theory that doesn’t depend wholly on magical thinking is panpsychism: everything is conscious; it’s just a matter of degree.
WordPress powering the backend through a custom REST API. That’s pretty normal, as nearly 42% of all websites on the internet are powered by WordPress.
is this normal? of course WordPress is popular for websites, but why a REST API? most of this seems just like shoddy junior work. probably vibe coded by someone who thinks software engineering is obsolete
it’s kind of frustrating to have to keep explaining to people how these models work, mostly because of how intensely oversold they are.
on the one hand you have people who think it’s literally just a normal computer program doing database lookups with conditional logic and decision trees plus some sort of hand wavy magic. it’s not.
on the other hand you have people who think it’s a literal brain that can stub its toe and change the way it walks thereafter. it won’t.
every attempt at “agent memory” or whatever has thus far been desperate bullshit. i don’t care how many markdown files and vector databases and prompt engineering hacks you implement; you’ll never change the fact that these models have limited context and frozen weights. reading a markdown file or querying a database is not “remembering”.
my point is that we’ve just internalized this as normal. that it seems like such an insurmountable chore to even go on a bike ride or hike or maintain a garden or building project is sad to me as well. i grew up in a culture that absolutely hated any form of exercise, and i watched a lot of people live absolutely miserable, short lives because of it. i’ve put a ton of effort into rejecting that lifestyle, and i recognize that as a privilege.
i don’t think it’s so natural for beings to optimize their effort to zero. dogs will chew through cages or self harm. and i’ve seen humans who, without stimulus, will act similarly.