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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • It’s important to remember that Jones is a grifter first and foremost. He has never sincerely cared about anything in his life beyond his own enrichment, and I don’t think this is a sign of him starting now. That said, I think it may still be significant that even hardcore grifters like Jones and Fuentes are starting to publicly speak against Trump. Grifters are always going to follow the money, so if Trump’s ship is sinking so fast that even Alex Jones sees it to be more profitable to start to move away from him, maybe the MAGA cult of personality really is starting to finally fall apart…

    Granted, that’s all speculation, and Trump has managed to defy every previous prediction of the fall of his influence, so I don’t want to jump to any conclusions here, but after the Canadian elections, I feel like I have a bit more reason to afford myself a little optimism for the future…


  • jedibob5@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlBefore and after programming
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    7 months ago

    The whitespace doesn’t bother me. Any IDE worth a damn will manage that for you. As for the type system, yeah, I strongly prefer static typing, but for simpler projects I can see the convenience of it.

    My real issue with Python comes with managing a development environment when multiple developers are working on it. Dependency management in Python is a headache, and while in theory, virtual envs should help with synchronizing environments from machine to machine, I still find it endlessly fiddly with a bunch of things that can go wrong that are hard to diagnose.

    Python is great for small scripts, proofs-of-concept, and such, but I wouldn’t write anything more heavy-duty than that in it.



  • Reminds me of when they started doing that thing where they pretended to be helpful by having the GPS voice call out the name of a business on the corner where your turn is - “Turn left after ‘business’ on the left” - but in reality those businesses were paying to inject their name into your driving directions.

    When it started, I immediately suspected they were possibly paid sponsorships, which was all but confirmed when it told me to turn “after Bank of America, with drive-thru ATM, on the right.” Stealth advertising mid-navigation… insane.






  • I hate that the focus of AI/ML development has become so fixated on generative AI - images, video, sound, text, and whatnot. It’s kind of crazy to me that AI can generate output with the degree of accuracy that it does, but honestly, I think that generative AI is, in a sense, barking up the wrong tree in terms of where AI’s true strengths lie.

    AI can actually turn out to be really good at certain kinds of problem-solving, particularly when it comes to optimization problems. AI essentially “learns” by extremely rapid and complex trial-and-error, so when presented with a problem with many complex, interdependent variables in which an optimal solution needs to be found, a properly-trained AI model can achieve remarkably effective solutions far quicker than any human could, and could consider avenues of success that humans otherwise would miss. This is particularly applicable to a lot of engineering problems.

    Honestly, I’d be very intrigued to see an AI model trained on average traffic data for a section of a city’s street grid, taken by observations from a series of cameras set up to observe various traffic patterns over the course of a few months, taking measurements on average number of cars passing through across various times of day, their average speed, and other such patterns, and then set on the task of optimizing stoplight timings to maximize traffic flow and minimize the amount of time cars spend waiting at red lights. If the model is set up carefully enough (including a data-collection plan that’s meticulous enough to properly model average traffic patterns, outlier disincentives to keep cars at little-used cross streets from having to wait 10 minutes for a green light, etc.), I feel that this sort of thing would be the perfect kind of problem for an AI model to solve.

    AI should be used on complex, data-intensive problems that humans can’t solve on their own, or at least not without a huge amount of time and effort. Generative AI doesn’t actually solve any new problems. Why should we care if an AI can generate an image of an interracial couple or not? There are countless human artists who would happily take a commission to draw an interracial couple (or whatever else your heart desires) for you, without dealing with investing billions of dollars into developing increasingly complex models built on dubiously-sourced (at best) datasets that still don’t produce results as good as the real thing. Humans are already good at unscripted creativity, and computers are already good at massive volumes of complex calculations, so why force a square peg into a round hole?








  • As far as CEO takes go, it’s better than most, at least at face value. However, the idea that C-suites can learn how to get wage workers to “buy-in to the company’s mission” by “empathizing” with them is… suspect.

    The obvious conclusion of empathizing with one’s employees should be that said employees are best motivated by a fair, living wage, but I can just as easily see this kind of thing being used to justify those idiotic corporate culture initiatives that think the occasional pizza party is a valid substitute for proper pay because “we’re a family” or whatever.