SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10hr ago
it's a high cost:high reward thing
It doesn't even have to be that high cost.
When I bought mine I was lucky that a local magazine (well regarded for their comparative tests) had done a large comparative review just a year or two earlier. The top two were fancy high end beds costing 5000e or more. The third winner was the highest end model Ikea sold (for around 1000e back then). No points for guessing which one I bought and have been happy with since.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
my experience on reddit is that most of the time someone gets called a bot or a shill, the accused is really an actual human who simply dared to deviate 0.01% from hivemind-approved window of opinions
My experience has been the exact opposite. The calls are about obvious giveaways in how the accused comments / writes the post and how all their replies are the exact same non-committal bullshit that LLMs are prone to generating.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
The police do not issue you the ID card or the driver's license, that is done by different agents of the state that are not empowered with its monopoly on violence.
Here the police are the ones that issue me the ID, not any other agents of the state. IOW, the police have multiple duties, some which aren't in any way related to their monopoly on violence.
The claim was notably about the police / law enforcement being definitionally violent, ie. police anywhere and everywhere is always violent which is very easy to find counterexamples for that invalidate the claim.
What jobs done by the police do you think are non-violent?
Granting that (entirely optional) national ID card for one. Another is acting as a witness in various situations (eg. someone hits your car and you or they call the police to take written statements and observations on the spot so that it isn't just your vs the other guy's claims two months later in court about who has to pay damages). Guiding traffic (as opposed to observing or giving tickets) in case of major disruptions (eg. an accident requires redirecting traffic to prevent further casualties). Taking criminal complaints. Handling lost and found goods (a typical example would be finding some person's lost wallet and taking it to the police station).
Yes, one of police's duties is to enforce the state's monopoly on violence but that's far from the only thing they do. It may be that it's the only thing they do in some places but that's not part of the definition of police, just a feature of policing in that specific place (the way police behave in US vs Europe differs massively and unless I'm severely mistaken even the difference between the police in US vs Canada is striking).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
for not having a permit or not having an ID card, it granting people these things is still a violent act.
Ah, but here's the important bit: said ID card is entirely optional (around here). It's one way to identify yourself but not even the most common one. There are no negative consequences to not having one (in fact mine is past its validity date by a year or two). Nonetheless the police are the ones that grant it (because they have the means and existing infrastructure to verify the person's identity securely). If you claim that asking for an ID is an act of violence, does that mean the delivery guy who wanted to see my ID before giving me the parcel was violent? I don't think anyone reasonable would support that.
A claim that police is definitionally violent and that "every single thing the police do is something being done against the will of the person it is being done to", is like trying to prove a negative. Any counterexample invalidates it. In the case of an ID card, the thing being done is verifying that I am in fact me and it is done at my behest, not against my will. Likewise if I were to end up in a minor traffic accident, I'd call the police to witness the situation so that the other party can't make outrageous claims. They are not there in the capacity of violence (nobody is going to get arrested) but to act as impartial witnesses.
It may be that the police in US has degenerated so much that they are only capable of violence but that's a peculiarity of that particular style of policing, not a definitional feature of the concept of "the police".
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
Nonetheless, the act of granting a drivers license is not remotely ”definitionally violent” and to even suggest that granting an ID card (for those rare situations where a drivers license isn’t accepted as an ID) is violent is completely ridiculous. The claim was that ”every single thing the police do is something being done against the person it’s being done to”.
Police do many things, some of which are violent, but police in the US leaning so heavily on that side does not mean that police is definitionally violent.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
I wasn’t aware that having my passport and ID card renewed or being granted a drivers license was ”definitionally violent”…
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
I remember when blue hair was associated mostly with anime
Was that ever really a thing outside extremely online / fan circles?
I live in a place that luckily isn't excessively contaminated with anime culture and I'd say that before "purple haired girl" became a known concept, people would have pattern matched it to punk-adjacent weirdos. Ie. definitely not politically neutral.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
probably to advance a devious scheme of human gene theft
I assume this is conducted by organic means to minimize suspicions?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
I recently binged on This Magical Girl Is Mine on Royal Road and it has awakened a monster in me. I figured I can't be the only degenerate in this wretched hive of scum and villainy of ours, so...
Y'all got any more of them Yuri romances?
No, I don't mean lame hentai. I'm looking for the really filthy stuff, with hand holding and kisses and pining for her true love and other such sugary lewdness that's definitely not fit for polite society (although I gotta admit I probably wouldn't say no to good hentai either). Cute stories where the boy girl gets the girl and they hopefully live happily ever after. None of that eternal "will they or won't they"-bullshit and the less said about "disabled autistic BIPOC social outcast" awards bait the better. Cute girls doing things such that just reading about them probably risks giving you diabetes. Doesn't matter if it's slice of life or if they have to save the world from evil as a side quest (but horror, litrpg and traditional super hero stories aren't my cup of tea).
On a more serious note, that story is actually quite good if you're fine with the twist on magical girls (it's rather more complicated than it first appears) and the main character being willing to sacrifice everything for her unrequited love (not-so-plot-twist: things evolve). Generally well written except the author can't seem to decide exactly how to write the love interest's name (is it Sophia or Sophie?)
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
The UK
The UK has a different legal tradition to Continental Europe and of course rather notably isn't part of EU. They are in general not representative of the rest of Europe in anything when it comes to laws (anyone using UK as an example of European laws almost certainly has an agenda to grind and isn't participating in good faith).
Here in Finland there was a notable case involving a blog post (written as and literally titled "a bait to the chief prosecutor") which in the end lead to a trivial fine and the author getting voted into the parliament and eventually becoming the leader of the then second largest party in the parliament (because of the resulting large publicity). A rather different outcome from "throwing natives in jail over tweets".
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
Five - the advocates deal mostly or even exclusively with trivial codebases and have invested so much of their self worth into "being good at prompting" that they insist anyone who doesn't deal with similar boilerplate easy-mode tasks "is just using LLMs wrong".
The secret is a highly detailed claude.md file, having a code base which is hyper standardized from the beginning with standards for function naming, variable names, types etc and having a code base that is somewhat repetitive. [...] Claude breaks down when features get more complex, when there are edge cases and when the business requirements are complex.
Which is a fancier way of saying that Claude works for simple repetitive standardized boilerplate (a fact that's not very controversial).
What makes me despise LLM advocates is their persistent gaslighting that anyone whose job doesn't involve writing such code that is inherently easy mode for LLMs "is using them wrong", as if you were only ever allowed to write code where the requirements neatly fit into such narrow box.
TypeScript [...] Java and Csharp [...] python
Yeah. I don't use any of those languages other than sometimes Python when I need to fix tools where you need a true human+ level AGI to decipher WTF the inherited / third party code is even supposed to do (and no, it doesn't involve APIs or stack overflow snippet friendly code).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
9d ago
If any album can be said to have birthed an entire new music genre, it would have to be Paranoid. Black Sabbath were fairly unique in that they could have played their 50 year old material at any modern metal festival without sounding one bit stylistically dated or "oldies".
But how many properties remain really popular longer than fifty years?
In music we've recently had blockbuster biopics of Queen and Elton John and Black Sabbath's farewell gig last summer was the highest grossing benefit concert of all time (third highest when adjusted for inflation), so I'd say quite a few. The Rolling Stones's tour two years ago also grossed $235 million but that might be considered too "oldies" to really count as popular.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
9d ago
But is it really helpful to their cause to (apparently) give everyone the impression that they are a bunch of unhinged lunatics?
Wait, are you talking about anti-ICE people or ICE officers?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
9d ago
Instead I'm thinking of that gulf of time between then and now, how much has happened and yet how clearly I still remember nodding along to j9461701 and BarnabyCajones, engrossed in mcjunker's stories, or bemusedly seething at darwin2500 and HlynkaCG.
Bring back TrannyPornO!
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10d ago
It's too bad it's been already 15 years since the 80s ended and music died.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10d ago
the thumbnails, specifically, have become terrible even on god channels, I assume for SEO reasons.
This is because such thumbnails generate significantly more clicks even on quality channels. I blame mobile users who can only see a tiny thumbnail so anything "surprising" sticks out.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
11d ago
That's fair, although I'll caveat that assuming university degrees are good designation of skill and that a skilled user with AI ends up "roughly the equivalent of a third year university student", that's still praising with faint damns.
The joke is of course that DSP is typically introduced in the third year (or at least was around here). Ie. Linus (widely regarded a brilliant programmer and with a masters degree in CS) managed roughly as well as a student after an introduction to DSP course. I don't think he actually used AI for the C code, or at least it wouldn't make any sense given how there's a dearth of good training material (*) and the programming part itself is incredibly easy for any competent C or C++ programmer who doesn't need particularly optimal code (as Linus outright mentions in the repo). The trick is knowing what DSP algorithms to use and how and why the textbook ones are flawed (or outright bad in many cases).
*: There's a site called musicdsp.org which is a somewhat prominent site with pseudo- and sourcecode snippets of all sorts of audio DSP algorithms. They are also almost all from subtly flawed to horribly bad and and a layman (ie. someone who hasn't studied DSP theory) will have a hard time understanding how and where. Thus it's quite ironically almost exactly what you'd get if someone time traveled into the early 2000s and established a site specifically dedicated to poisoning future AI training on that subtopic (with a fair bit of success, I'd say given how the alternatives are either bits here and there or actual books / papers with math instead of code that can be copy pasted). Way back in the day I went from "Hmm, this looks kinda nifty" to "OMG, everyone there is a goddamn moron" in the course of just one year when I started DSP studies.
University degree by itself is no guarantee (as I found out to my pain during a couple of group work sessions when I had to do everything myself when everybody else was so incompetent) but there are many hard science / engineering fields where more or less everyone competent has a degree in a closely related subject, a maths / physics degree with significant self study or are polymaths with near genius level intellect. So in practise a university degree is a requirement to be any good at them. Programming just happens to be a very notorious exception to that (case in point, I only took a handful of programming classes in university and have been making my living for the last 25 years mostly as a C++ programmer in either DSP or embedded systems).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
11d ago
In Finland in the mid 90s.
Of course that was by far the most useless thing they ever taught in high school math here (and in fact one of the few useless things).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
11d ago
Or as if the fact that a handful of related universities in one single country were based on an idea two hundred years ago somehow makes that idea The One True Fundamental Truth globally today.
The US used to have an order of magnitude larger presence there during the earlier decades of cold war. The old agreements are still in place and nobody would have complained if they'd have simply founded a bunch of new bases there.
But of course with Trump it's much more about The King getting what the king thinks he needs to feel kingly than it is about any actual usefulness.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org
Assuming Torvalds hasn't been paid to advertise, that's a bit of a feather in the cap for AI codegen.
Don't read too much into Torvalds' endorsement. The vibe coded python visualizer he talks about is a small helper tool, not the actual project. It's pretty much equivalent to using vibe coding to write scripts and such (where I don't think anyone has disputed that LLMs can be useful).
As a domain expert in that subfield I find it amusing that for all his "programming guruness", the actual meat and potatoes of that project is a combination of what you'd have learnt on a masters level DSP course in the late 70s / early 80s (including the same mistakes students typically do) combined with imitating the state of the art 50 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventide,_Inc#H910_Harmonizer) on much better hardware. Or to put it another way, when Torvalds is taken out of his comfort zone and field of expertise, he's roughly the equivalent of a third year university student. This is why I think anyone claiming universities are useless is full of shit. "Thinking really hard" (to paraphrase Yud) won't give you the necessary theoretical underpinnings that are required to even realize what you're missing, nevermind do something useful in a whole lot of fields.
Incidentally if someone wants to make an actually decently performing pitch shifter, you could do worse than start with this paper which has a rather good explanation of the basic method as well as some significant improvements to quality compared to most earlier publications that are easy to find and read (it'll still sound warbly on polyphonic input but good sounding realtime polyphonic pitch shifting has to this date been accomplished by only three manufacturers that I know of).
Not sure if it's the absolute best but it sure is bang for buck: A good led headlamp bought directly from the Chinese specialist manufacturer. Much better quality than almost anything sold in Western stores for a much cheaper price (I paid 50e because I wanted fancy red light mode and high CRI but you can get good ones for just 30e). I hadn't realized just how useful it would be for everything from tinkering with small things to reading tiny text to trying to see the notes in the low contrast sheet music my guitar teacher had given me and how much more pleasant a good one is to use.
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