aaronbaugher

11 maanden geledendiscuss

If it were highly effective, it already would have replaced importing the workers, since it's cheaper to hire them over there. But I've seen multiple companies go big on offshoring and then scrap it after a few years and hire domestic again because it went poorly. There may be a new surge of interest in it if importing people gets harder, but I don't suppose it will go much better than it did before.

aaronbaugher

11 maanden geledendiscuss

In fact, the petty criminal may benefit the regime, if his crimes damage those the regime sees as a greater threat to itself and its goals.

aaronbaugher

11 maanden geledendiscuss

How many minutes do you think it takes to pick an apple?

The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true. Labor is a portion of the wholescale cost of food, which is a portion of the retail cost. A lot goes to shipping, packaging, processing, marketing, etc. If all migrant workers were replaced by Americans being paid a competitive wage, food prices would go up a little, but you wouldn't pay double for apples, let alone several times more. Highly-processed foods like cereal and pasta wouldn't change noticeably.

aaronbaugher

11 maanden geledendiscuss

Some of the most irrational people I've met were those who claimed to make all their decisions rationally, based on facts and logic. They're just very good at rationalizing, and since they've pre-defined their beliefs as rational, they never have to examine where else they might come from. The rest of us at least have a chance of thinking, "Wait, am I fooling myself here?"

aaronbaugher

11 maanden geledendiscuss

Probably. Whatever method I use, physical or digital, it tends to fade into the background after a while and I stop noticing it. My best bet might be to switch to a new method every few weeks, in which case it's probably best to keep them simple and cheap. Maybe a whiteboard for a while, then a notebook, then a text file, and so on looping through a few basic methods.

aaronbaugher

11 maanden geledendiscuss

Maybe virtual tasks need better organization or reminders than physical tasks. I rarely forget to wash my dishes because the dishes are right there. I don't forget to go gather the eggs because I have to shut up the chickens every night and check their food and water, or living creatures could die. There are physical consequences and reminders of those things.

The need to update a piece of software doesn't give me any physical cues, and if I have a couple dozen tasks like that waiting on me, I'm never going to remember them all unless they're all popping into my head throughout the day. That pretty much is how I used to try to do it, and it wasn't good.

aaronbaugher

11 maanden geledendiscuss

I'll be borrowing "tech bro reductionism." That's the perfect term for something that's a scourge these days.

aaronbaugher

11 maanden geledendiscuss

Ditto. Being broke has always been existential, and pretty damn scary even if you had family and other resources you could lean on. Nothing's changed about that, though particular industries/regions may get better or worse.

aaronbaugher

vorig jaardiscuss

It kind of surprises me that they never confuse "it's" and "its" and common mistakes like that, when it seems like most human writers today swap them randomly. I suppose that's thanks to a lot of the text in the training data predating the collapse of English education.

I'm not sure why em dashes are so popular, though. I don't think I've ever seen human writing that had as many em dashes as LLMs use.

aaronbaugher

vorig jaardiscuss

True. We've gotten used to searching the web being like this: Type in "how long to cook a frozen 20-pound turkey," scroll past a few ads, and then either spot the direct answer in the blurb of one of the results, or see a promising-looking one and click through.

There's a lot of skimming and scanning that we've come to expect as part of the process in locating a piece of information, and we do it quickly with practice, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way.

aaronbaugher

vorig jaardiscuss

It's tough, because even within real friend circles there can be a lot of junk. I have a friend who constantly posts "What does your favorite color say about your personality?" type of stuff. I don't want to hide her posts because I don't want to miss anything actually important that happens in her life. But there's no clear line between that and the cruft that you can solve with a rule.

So either we train all our friends to use it sensibly -- and convince them to agree with us on what's sensible -- or we sort through cruft to find the value.

aaronbaugher

vorig jaardiscuss

After smoking in bars was banned, my brother and I noted how run-down and dreary the places we hung out looked. We just hadn't been able to see it before through the haze.

I always hated the smoke and the way your hair and clothes would still reek of it the next morning. Now, on the rare occasions I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke, it's nostalgic and almost smells good.

aaronbaugher

vorig jaardiscuss

True. The other day I was wondering whether I should buy a new PC, then realized I was only thinking that way out of old habit. It's 5+ years old, and that used to be when a PC would really start struggling to keep up with the software. Now there's kinda no point. If I did build a new one, it wouldn't be significantly more powerful than my current one, so I'd really just be trading older parts for newer ones from fear of parts wearing out.

aaronbaugher

vorig jaardiscuss

Even better, Usenet, which is what the web-based forums were a poor replacement for.

aaronbaugher

vorig jaardiscuss

When my girlfriend told me on our first date that she doesn't use social media, I nearly proposed on the spot.

And even she does some doom-scrolling though news sites. She claims to know it's mostly nonsense, and then says she has to do it to know what's going on. I try not to point out the contradiction too much, because she does limit it pretty well.

aaronbaugher

vorig jaardiscuss

Along with don't check your threads, don't check your votes. I'm always struck by people saying "I don't know why I was downvoted for such-and-such." Where do they find the time to go back and check the votes on comments they made? I say the things I say and move on.

aaronbaugher

vorig jaardiscuss

The biggest problem on reddit is having both up- and down-votes. That allows the majority to effectively eliminate dissenting opinions on any topic it cares about by down-voting them to oblivion, and then pat itself on the back for the fact that everyone apparently agrees with it. Since it's possible to do that, some see it as an obligation and go at it with gusto, making it hard to have a conversation that strays outside the current-year party line.

Systems which only have up-votes/likes have their own issues, but at least not that one.

aaronbaugher

vorig jaardiscuss

I've tinkered with LLMs, because I keep thinking it'd be cool to have an "assistant" that could research and boil down information for me. The problem is coming up with a question that is A) too complicated to be answered in a single web search that I can do myself as fast as asking the question, and B) not too complicated or important for me to accept the answer without redoing the research myself to verify the answers are correct.

For simple questions (How long does the moon take to orbit the earth), a search engine will give the answer right in the results; I don't even have to click through to a page. An LLM can't save me any time there, so I'd only be using it to be using "AI" (which is what I see people around me doing).

For difficult or currently controversial questions (What's the best hosting service for my new subscription site, taking into account price, reliability, location, and hardware support?) there's no way I could trust it not to be making shit up. By the time I checked all its work, I might as well have done it myself.

So I'd like to usefully use it, but I can't figure out how to use it as more than a curious toy.