Notices by datarama (datarama@hachyderm.io), page 3

@mattly My last attack sent a stone through a bile duct where it did a bit of damage, causing a nasty infection that put me in the hospital for a few days. The attack itself lasted for about 8 hours and they couldn't control the pain with anything short of intravenous morphine.

0/5 would not wish on my worst enemy.

@mattly Good to hear!

I've been told that some develop digestive issues, but "avoid fatty food or you'll get diarrhea" is still better than "avoid fatty food or you'll be hospitalized in excruciating pain". :-P

@mattly I don't really worry about it - I'm pretty sure I'll be in good hands. :-)

(as long as the pain isn't as bad as an actual gallstone attack, I'll manage.)

Have you had any issues post-removal?

@mattly Also, what I hear from people is wildly variable! A family member of mine was out of work for two weeks (though she was a kindergarten teacher, which is quite a bit more physically demanding than being a computer toucher), and I also know someone who got knocked out for over three weeks.

A former colleague was on his bed for a month ... and another was fine after three days.

@mattly Laparoscopy if they can, but sometimes they have to make a larger incision (typically if there's a very large stone in there, or complications happen). I'm not terribly worried.

But I know from experience that I don't handle opioids very well.

I'm having my gallbladder removed tomorrow. I've been told that the procedure itself is pretty much routine, but also that I can expect to be in quite a bit of pain the next days and that I'll probably need morphine.

So I've stocked up on comic books / "graphical novels"; that's probably around the level my brain will be able to handle.

@mary It seems to me like the entirety of generative AI is about replacing creative work with managerial work.

This, perhaps, is why it is so polarizing: This appeals to a certain kind of personality, and deeply repels another.

@mcc That's also basically how LAION made the dataset for Stable Diffusion. They collected a bunch of links to images with descriptive alt-text.

(Are you taking time to write good alt-text because you respect disabled people? Congratulations, your good work is being exploited by the worst assholes in tech. Silicon Valley never lets a good deed go unpunished.)

@aral This is 2024 - they're thinking "I'll just put it in the training set for my ML system, and then the license goes away".

@jenniferplusplus @hrefna A very long time ago, I wrote a haiku generator in Prolog as a dumb little Sunday afternoon project.

After manually setting up a bunch of (word, word class, syllable count) triples, I decided to see if there was some neat way I could automate identifying and counting syllables. The first search results were actual PhD theses on it, so I figured "neat" was off the table and declared it out of scope.

BTW:
hot processor runs
wonderful byte of error
cold processor sleeps.

@mhoye I live in a country where kale has the status of "the thing your grandparents ate when they couldn't get anything better", the meme food kids hate being told to eat, and *the* staple green in pretty much all the dullest traditional dishes, in a region that has notoriously dull culinary traditions. The local name for the stuff literally translates to "green cabbage". Watching the rest of the world go nuts for it was pretty surreal.

@lachezar @thomasfuchs You're still interacting with anybody who ends up reading your code.

@cloudguy @thomasfuchs I spent the last ten years of my life in education (teaching CS, mostly the applied part, at my country's version of community college), and now I'm back in the trenches as an industrial embedded dev.

I like my job, but my general exhaustion with the "tech sector" as a whole is getting worse and worse. Reading tech news increasingly feels more like "which horrors are they about to unleash on us all now?", less "which neat things can we do now?".

@emilygorcenski (and i am a scorpio) ;-)

@emilygorcenski The one that ends us all isn't going to be named Skynet but Scorpio, isn't it?

@abucci @inthehands As I said, *right now* there are respectable academics writing papers about how AI will allow "energy saving" because GPT-4 consumes less energy while writing a page of bullshit than a human being needs (because human beings require food and shelter, and take longer time).

The thing *not* said in how this represents "saving" is chilling to consider.

@abucci @inthehands I agree (and a lot of the publications on AI and society on arXiv read more like speculative fiction than like serious social science papers!).

But it's terribly disturbing that actual academics are signing their names to that sort of thing.

(And seeing Sam Altman talk about how he wants to "replace the median human" ... well, shit. I don't think they're anywhere near actually being *able* to do that, but we have an entire section of the tech industry *cheering* dystopia.)

@abucci @inthehands I am a recovering academic myself! ;-)

As I've said elsewhere: I'm not worried that the robot cultists will actually build an electronic god, or fuck it up and accidentally build an electronic satan. I'm worried about all the collateral damage from an infinite firehose of corporate money pumping into robot cultists who *think* they're building an electronic god.

@abucci @inthehands I think the logical end point of where AI is currently heading (provided it keeps getting better) is that the neoliberal era *will* end. It will then be replaced by the neo-feudal era; a world of ultra-wealthy oligarchs presiding over hordes of desperate serfs competing for work where humans are still cheaper than robots.

*Right fucking now*, think tanks are talking about how an AI can generate content for less energy than a human, given that humans need food and shelter.

@inthehands The second is that music serves no purpose beyond whatever it evokes simply by existing (and before recording, it only existed in the moment). Software serves some purpose - whether that be presenting a game world to interact with, generating pictures, doing accounting work or whatnot. Programming is the act of making software exist, and if we can make software exist without programming, then programming deteriorates into meaninglessness to an extent that performing music doesn't.