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ASalazarMX

7,226 karmajoined 12 years ago
"AI, but verify" -- Winston Churchill (alternate universe)

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ASalazarMX
·3 days ago·discuss
I'd wonder instead if anyone still thinks of USA as the good guys of the world. In these days where information (and disinformation) happens fast, propaganda can only cover reality up to a point.
ASalazarMX
·4 days ago·discuss
I'm not buying that. We know vices are bad not because they're immoral, but because they are harmful to the self and others. Knowing what's harmful doesn't require imaginary superadults, just common sense.
ASalazarMX
·4 days ago·discuss
How does that even work in a democracy that has systemic flaws, where the elections boil down to which candidate had the most financial support? USA's democracy is beyond fixing, it needs a complete refactoring amd stronger checks before elections of both candidates and officials become meaningful for regular citizens.
ASalazarMX
·22 days ago·discuss
According to this widely cited comic strip, if you are over 30 and didn't know it, you should be ashamed.
ASalazarMX
·23 days ago·discuss
Becoming a "Linux power user" is a harder task than one might suspect, though. More so nowadays, where distros like Ubuntu just work, and you can use it as a daily driver without debugging issues.
ASalazarMX
·24 days ago·discuss
Fun fact: a tortilla, being made of cereal flour, is classified as a bread. That means tacos are sandwiches.

At least culinarily, but actually coded in law in Indiana.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandwich#Language
ASalazarMX
·24 days ago·discuss
Despite the downvotes, I'm with you in this hill. Kids are gullible because they instinctively trust adults, especially their parents. It's fine to prank them and teach them afterwards how not to be as credulous, it helps their growth. It's bad to abuse their trust for fun, specially long-term falsehoods. It stalls their growth.
ASalazarMX
·24 days ago·discuss
Also, culture changes, and treatening a little kid with psychological or physical harm isn't as funny as it was back then. You had to grow up in that era to appreciate it. Despite loving and being loved by their parents, Calvin is frequently terrified of them.

I think this implies that Calvin is not as unruly as it appears, and he was raised with good values, so he still obeys his parents most of the time because he knows they want the best for him.

If we still had Calvin and Hobbes nowadays, it wouldn't be as well received if it didn't change with the times. I can't picture them going to family theraphy, for example, although I haven't read all the strips.
ASalazarMX
·24 days ago·discuss
But the ones that repackage as part of improvement are the ones that usually stick. Repackaging as a lesser product only works if your brand strength is being cheap.
ASalazarMX
·25 days ago·discuss
Sincerely blows my mind to see someone recommend cryptography to generate pseudorandom numbers. It speaks volumes of how fast computers are now, and how used we are to waste that power.

Slay the Spyre is a rogue deck builder, the PRNG of Windows Freecell (3.11) would be good enough for it.

Edit: From https://github.com/joshuamkite/freecell

> Microsoft FreeCell RNG Algorithm: Uses seeded random number generator (seed = (seed * 214013 + 2531011) & 0x7FFFFFFF) for reproducible deals (games numbered 1-1,000,000)
ASalazarMX
·25 days ago·discuss
I'm still waiting for the new generations to rediscover screen savers.
ASalazarMX
·26 days ago·discuss
Counter example: The Internet

- Nerds build something nice

- They can't touch us here

- Stop touching us! I'm leaving!
ASalazarMX
·26 days ago·discuss
This is pretty insightful. You might or not become interested in spectating sports at a young age. Once you define yourself as a sports fan, or indifferent to sports, it's very hard to change attitude.
ASalazarMX
·26 days ago·discuss
It's even simpler than that IMO. There are still nerds creating things out of love for creating something useful and clean, but as soon as it becomes successful, the smell of (potential) money attracts parasites, and they will eventually enshittificate the clean and useful thing if they get the chance, as they do with everything else.

It's the equivalent of the cycle of life: birth, maturity, decay, and death.
ASalazarMX
·29 days ago·discuss
I feel a little pain seeing how big, fully-formed apps appear in GitHub, created in days, completely hollow of pull requests, issues, or discussions.. just imagining the chain of prompts.

"Make me a web app like Stellarium"

"Make it dark mode"

"Increase the resolution of the graphic assets"

"Oh, I'm out of credits for today. Where is my wallet?"

"..."

"Suggest me a catchy name that is not in use right now"

"What a productive weekend! I'll license this as MIT so other prompters can freely benefit from my prompts. I made this".

I'm probably being unfair, maybe this wasn't vibe coded in days, maybe the author worked more on it than it appears, was very careful Claude didn't use GPL code that can't be relicensed as MIT, etc. I can't know. I'm basing my opinion on what I can see.
ASalazarMX
·29 days ago·discuss
Neo wasn't an elightened being, he just escalated privileges.
ASalazarMX
·29 days ago·discuss
For the non British:

Twee: affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/twee
ASalazarMX
·last month·discuss
Getting in the flow means continuous, deep concentration and attention, at least in my experience. Prompting and checking is more like managing an underling, I couldn't get in the flow that way. It would be like a driver trying to get in the flow with a vehicle that randomly does unexpected things.
ASalazarMX
·last month·discuss
This has the same energy as people who don't care if controversial images in social media are AI generated, as long as they're engaging.

It makes a huge difference if the writing was manual or automated. LLMs generate verbose, generic writing, and ideas that could be concisely expressed in a sentence inflate to entire paragraphs. It's disrespectful to readers when the author saves a couple of hours by wasting thousands of their readers.
ASalazarMX
·last month·discuss
> ejected a complete idiot

Don't give us hope.