• 0 Posts
  • 83 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

help-circle





  • Considering the vast majority of people that walk around naked in the public locker room without an ounce of shame are people over 50 or over 60, I find this comment has got it backwards. There seems to be a universal constant that the older you get, the less you care about what other people think. I know I have experienced this myself, and most older people I ask tend to agree vehemently. It also explains why so many young people are embarrassed by their parents.

    My advice to teens and people in their early twenties: don’t worry what other people think of you. No one else is thinking about you much at all.




  • Sounds like neither of you watched the video. Fortunately, I did so here’s a quick summary. The thesis is that music is getting worse, for a few reasons. Author argues:

    • Auto tune and other modern digital sound production tools are overused to correct pitch and timing, making music too synthetic. Real music has imperfections that makes music just sound more artificial. Basically, taking the human element out of it.
    • Streaming has cheapened the value of a single song because of how easy it is to skip to another song. So arguably it is not technically just worse music, it’s our appreciation for it.

    The first point has been touched on by many other people. It’s a common trend in a lot of places outside of music too. People are replaced with machines and processes in a lot of settings especially in corporations and commerce, and while that’s great for efficiency and predictability, it creates a sterile landscape devoid of human expression. This is not to say all music has this. But mass market music is a chief culprit.

    The other point really resonates with me with videogames and videogame sales. You can get a dozen great steam games for the same price as a single Nintendo title, yet I probably put 10x the time into that one Nintendo title than all the other steam games combined. Had to get every bit of value out of that expensive Nintendo purchase. YMMV on this point though. I don’t stream music so I can’t say how it has affected me personally.



  • Are they? As the article OP shares suggests, these films quietly make us compare our lives to what is portrayed on screen. This is advertisement 101: display people in enviable positions to portray a sense of longing for a lifestyle that one would not normally seek. A food commercial isn’t selling you a product, it’s trying to make you hungry.

    If all you wanted out of these rom coms is the portrayal of a carefree life, you could just watch pharmaceutical, banking, or insurance ads.



  • The wording of the article implies an apples to apples comparison. So 1 Google search == 1 question successfully answered by an LLM. Remember a Google Search in layspeak is not the act of clicking on the search button, rather it’s the act of going to Google to find a website that has information you want. The equivalent with ChatGPT would be to start a “conversation” and getting information you want on a particular topic.

    How many search engine queries, or LLM prompts that involves, or how broad the topic, is a level of technical detail that one assumes the source for the number x25 has already controlled for (Feel free to ask the author for the source and share with us though!)

    Anyone who’s remotely used any kind of deep learning will know right away that deep learning uses an order of magnitude or two more power (and an order of magnitude or two more performance!) compared to algorithmic and rules based software, and a number like x25 for a similar effective outcome would not at all be surprising, if the approach used is unnecessarily complex.

    For example, I could write a neural network to compute 2+2, or I could use an arithmetic calculator. One requires a 500$ GPU consuming 300 watts, the other a 2$ pocket calculator running on 5 watts, returning the answer before the neural network is even done booting.





  • These freedoms are a strength indeed, but they are also a vulnerability that can be exploited by foreign powers. Freedoms remain free so long as the people exercising those freedoms do so responsibly. I think a lot of people in the US do not exercise this freedom responsibly. I think a lot of Americans are being manipulated into voting in autocracy. Ironically.

    Complete and total freedom is just anarchy, and anarchy collapses on itself and turns into autocracy.




  • It depends on the law really. There is no one rule.

    For example, owning lockpicks is in many places not illegal, but owning lockpicks with the intent of bypassing a lock is.

    Some laws are very specific about the severity or testability of a crime where as others are not. In that case a judge has to interpret the criteria for legal tests, either from previous case law or by building new case law.

    In any case, being charged for something or not is a completely separate issue. Things are no less illegal just because the state has no resource or will to execute the law.

    Also, being charged does not mean you broke the law either. Nor does judgment determine it (although it’s a very strong hint) since a latter appeal could acquit you of chargers.

    The determination of guilt is in the facts of what happened. And that’s the whole point of the legal system. Being charged, getting judgement, appealing. It’s all a process to determine guilt or not. It is not itself the mechanism of guilt.

    The idea of a “guilty conscience” enshrines this idea in expression.