Notices by Kevin Riggle (kevinriggle@ioc.exchange)

@skinnylatte I am told that the way one gives a penguin an MRI is one puts it in a traffic cone

@futurebird @psentee @wroong We’ve spent billions of dollars and finally made computers worse at math

@skinnylatte there’s a really awesome biriyani place in Santa Clara. Golkonda.

@inthehands @dpiponi Oh that is in fact the book on my bookshelf which I had been meaning to get to, well then

@inthehands @dpiponi it occurs to me that some of the L-systems playing I’ve wanted to do might be easier in a turtle framework

"What I'm asking [us] to do is build a better world for [ourselves], for everyone around us, and for all other life on the planet—and as a SIDE EFFECT we will deal with #climate change! And as a SIDE EFFECT we will deal with physical pollution!" –@debcha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8riA6Mk5gU

@whitequark Russia

@lzg @igb i mean, it’s probably lying, the little shit, but man I would love to know how much classified-looking information you can get out of it

@skinnylatte Honestly every time people were like, how do you live in SoMa, I’m like sure too many of my neighbors live in tents on my sidewalk but we take care of each other

@skinnylatte It turns out most people are great, actually. (The world works, I say, because most people want it to work.)

“Why does all software require a subscription now” well you connected all the computers to the internet and now shit like this happens you dingdong

https://fosstodon.org/@libreoffice/113709550379921425

@Bronwyn And yeah it fucking sucks that my neighbors don’t know where they’re going to sleep tonight, maybe let’s build a lot more fucking housing and stop whining about our property values okay

@Bronwyn I lived there four years. It was fine. I had fourteen housemates and in the whole time we had only one time there was anything remotely threatening to any of us (attempted mugging). The guy living in a tent on the sidewalk outside the house rescued my road atlas when my car window got busted in and gave it back to me. It’s purely aesthetics and lies that people are mad about it

@Bronwyn BUILD HOUSING AND STOP WHINING 2028

@Bronwyn the fact that Bay Area homeowners seem to be fine with the idea that their children are priced out but not connect that to why people coming from elsewhere need to be accommodated is the purest form of evil to me. The people I grew up around did evil in many other ways but if you went to them and were like “also your kids can’t live here” they’d be like excuse me what

@Bronwyn ❤️

If you hypothetically were into dinosaurs as a kid in the 80’s and wanted to understand what’s happened since, where would you start? Books/movies/TV etc. Mostly nonfiction. Let’s take Jurassic Park and Prehistoric Planet as read

@inthehands One could imagine using a fixed set of model weights and not retraining, using a fixed random seed, and keeping the model temperature relatively low. I'm imagining on some level basically the programming-language-generating version of Nvidia's DLSS tech here. But that's not what people are doing and I'm not convinced if we did that it would be useful

@inthehands Another bull-case argument about LLMs is that they are a form of autonomation (autonomy + automation), in the sense that the Toyota Production System uses it, the classic example being the automated loom which has a tension sensor and will stop if one of the warp yarns break. But we already have many such systems in software, made out of normal non-LLM parts, and also that's ... not really what's going on here, at least the way they're currently being used.

@inthehands Yes! Yes. This is it exactly.

One can imagine a version of these systems where all the "source code" is English-language text describing a software system, and the Makefile first runs that through an LLM to generate C or Python or whatever before handing it off to a regular complier, which would in some sense be more abstraction, but this is like keeping the .o files around and making the programmers debug the assembly with a hex editor.