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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Oh, I definitely get that the major appeal of excel is a close to non-existent barrier to entry. I mean, an elementary school kid can learn the basics(1) of using excel within a day. And yes, there are definitely programs out there that have excel as their only interface :/ I was really referring to the case where you have the option to do something “from scratch”, i.e. not relying on previously developed programs in the excel sheet.

    (1) I’m aware that you can do complex stuff in excel, the point is that the barrier to entry is ridiculously low, which is a compliment.



  • You are neglecting the cost-benefit of temporarily jumping to the wrong conclusion while waiting for more conclusive evidence though. Not doing anything because evidence that this is bad is too thin, and being wrong, can have severe long-term consequences. Restricting tiktok and later finding out that it has no detrimental effects has essentially zero negative consequences. We have a word for this principle in my native language - that if you are in doubt about whether something can have severe negative consequences, you are cautious about it until you can conclude with relative certainty that it is safe, rather than the other way around, which would be what you are suggesting: Treating something as safe until you have conclusive evidence that it is not, at which point a lot of damage may already be done.





  • We tried the “trade your skills for something you need”. In every surviving society it eventually lead to the development of a currency (not hard to see why), which requires/leads to regulation, which requires enforcement, aaaand you’re back at a modern society. I’m all for more regulation to reduce economic and social differences in society, but the people that are talking about abolishing governments and currencies need to pick up a history book and follow their ideas to their natural conclusion.

    “Controlling speech” is a hallmark of authoritarian governments, be they far-left or far-right, there are plenty of historical examples of both.


  • Looking at a half circle and guessing that the “missing part” is a full circle is as much of a blind guess as you can get. You have exactly zero evidence that there is another half circle present. The missing part could be anything, from nothing to any shape that incorporates a half circle. And you would be guessing without any evidence whatsoever as to which of those things it is. That’s blind guessing.

    Extrapolating into regions without prior data with a non-predictive model is blind guessing. If it wasn’t, the model would be predictive, which generative AI is not, is not intended to be, and has not been claimed to be.



  • No computer algorithm can accurately reconstruct data that was never there in the first place.

    What you are showing is (presumably) a modified visualisation of existing data. That is: given a photo which known lighting and lens distortion, we can use math to display the data (lighting, lens distortion, and input registered by the camera) in a plethora of different ways. You can invert all the colours if you like. It’s still the same underlying data. Modifying how strongly certain hues are shown, or correcting for known distortion are just techniques to visualise the data in a clearer way.

    “Generative AI” is essentially just non-predictive extrapolation based on some data set, which is a completely different ball game, as you’re essentially making a blind guess at what could be there, based on an existing data set.


  • Hehe, I absolutely agree… for reference, High Sierra is v10.13, released in 2017. I’m now running v13, released 2022. They moved from v10.15 to v11 in 2020, when the arm chips were released.

    My old MacBook could probably run 10.15 just fine, but I don’t have any good reason to update it, as it’s only purpose now is to compile distributables for other old machines.

    Also: I really dislike that they’ve been pushing non-backwards compatible major releases so hard since 2020. I’m not updating my OS because I can’t be bothered to break shit, it shouldn’t be like that…



  • Theres plenty of cases where I would like to do some large calculation that can potentially give a NaN at many intermediate steps. I prefer to check for the NaN at the end of the calculation, rather than have a bunch of checks in every intermediate step.

    How I handle the failed calculation is rarely dependent on which intermediate step gave a NaN.

    This feels like people want to take away a tool that makes development in the engineering world a whole lot easier because “null bad”, or because they can’t see the use of multiplying 1e27 with 1e-30.