birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
5hr ago
I'm actually being earnest in the post. The evolution of music composition is something I find fascinating.
I'm also never going to pass up a tasteless joke, though.
birb_cromble
9hr ago
Interestingly it hasn’t happened yet, although you never know.
What is your take on the (conspiracy) theory that Aum Shinrikyo tested a nuke in the Australian outback?
birb_cromble
9hr ago
An acquaintance is temporarily losing his band's bassist and has asked me to fill for several shows over the next two months. I said yes as a personal favor to him, and now I'm ass-deep in an entirely new repertoire which mostly consists of 1970s - 1980s rock and pop.
It's really interesting to see how musical composition has developed over the last 50 years.
Take Warren Zevon's "Splendid Isolation": it has a lot going on. The track contains harmonica, multi-voice vocals, guitar, bass, piano all in the same piece. Despite that, it feels noticeably more "open" and than a lot of modern music. Rather than anchoring the song on guitar riffs, Zevon anchors it on a simple backbeat and a repetitive bass riff on the bottom end. Once he establishes the groove, he uses the harmonica and piano sparingly on the high end, but leaves a space in the sonic environment for vocals that's big enough to drive a truck through.
It's not a style you really see anymore. Like a a few other things, Phil Spector killed it.
birb_cromble
9hr ago
I hired a human artist for a similar project once. It might be worth looking into, depending on the art style that you want and the size of the project. For simple projects, it can be cheaper, faster, and easier than you might think.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Reading that, it makes sense. He puts as much effort into running as I do into lifting.
birb_cromble
2d ago
a pretty bad 5k (16:49)
A sub 6:00 mile for the full 5k is bad?
The best mile I ever ran in my life was 5:58 and I literally spent the rest of the day coughing blood. How do you do it?
birb_cromble
2d ago
Spending is $2,267.27 lower than the same day last year.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Given that this is the culture war thread, I think it's in the interest of this forum to also mention the controversy over the topic.
A mathematician is alleging impropriety on the part of OpenAI. Please forgive the formatting. I'm pulling it straight from the pdf.
I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.
Two proposals were offered to me. The first was that we post our Euler result, and that OpenAI post its Navier-Stokes result the next day. The second was that, after posting Euler, I alone write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAI model had resolved it. Sebastien twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic. It was also said that if OpenAI posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the “closest humans to the problem”. I declined both offers.
I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
I'm not going to comment on the veracity of the claims, nor am I going to comment on the math itself.
I will say, however, that I will be meeting with a few other developers and a representative from our corporate risk team today to discuss contingencies if these allegations prove true.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I can't rule it out. By the time a company calls me, they're generally fucked to the point where they'll call me.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Thank you. I am glad that I'm now immortalized as "that guy who makes metaphors about testicles and office furniture" in the AAQC archive. I feel like that's how I want to be known around here.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I'm optimistic that over time the industry will develop better norms and understand how LLM tooling should and should not be used
Overall, I am less optimistic than you. It seems like the incentives are too broken for us to reach a new equilibrium any time soon. If we do get there, it'll be on the other side of a graveyard of companies that got too greedy.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I've seen it repeat at every scale, from legally-a-small-business to a fairly memorable consult at a Fortune 100 company.
I won't argue as to whether your group has some secret sauce or unusual competency, but I will say that what you have described is absolutely not the norm at the kinds of places that will contract me.
birb_cromble
4d ago
but as a whole I would agree that software engineering productivity has been meaningfully enhanced via AI.
I'm not sure if I would even go that far. I work at a software company, and I do some consulting on the side. I've been able to watch a lot of AI-coding initiatives from the sidelines due to that consulting, and I see the same pattern a lot.
First, management picks something they can measure. Lines of code, commits, and PRs merged are the most common ones. This causes a certain kind of climber who doesn't actually want to be a programmer to ruthlessly optimize for whatever the metric is. Management lauds that person as a "10x/100x/1000x developer" and they receive glowing performance reviews while spending their days giving presentations to their coworkers about how to avoid being Left Behind In the Permanent Underclass.
At the same time, the rest of the team ends up drowning in this person's "work". Their PRs are 30,000 line, codebase-spanning fever dreams that come with "helpful" documentation that doesn't make any sense. The "spec" is under-defined and the code fails to adhere to it. The tests are made up nonsense. Management softly forces to team to rubber stamp the Rockstar's work. Nobody knows what the hell is going on, defects rise, baffling production down events occur, and nobody can figure out why.
The net productivity for the organization doesn't actually change much. What the technology does do is shift perceived productivity into a small group of people who have offloaded all the work to everybody else.
The con man who job hops has been a rampant problem in this industry for decades. LLMs have just systematized and automated it.
birb_cromble
5d ago
It's heavily dependent on where you live and the local terrain.
If your property is:
- Flat
- Well-exposed to the sun
- Up to code with modern wiring
You might be a good candidate.
If possible, try to line the work up with additional major work around the roof or your wiring to save on scheduling headaches and labor.
At my house, for example, I have trees on two sides of my property and I live on a slope that obscures the sun even further. This is compounded by being a very overcast region in terms of weather. The cost of the installation would exceed any reasonable ROI until either the cost of the install dips by ~40% or I have to get rid of the trees for other reasons.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Youngstown isn't too far from Pittsburgh. He might have been a guest at the wedding Rov_scam crashed.
birb_cromble
5d ago
One thing I've noticed is that a lot of these mathematical breakthroughs involve lower bounds, upper bounds, or counter examples, and they usually involve the LLM interfacing with some kind of deterministic tooling.
Sometimes I wonder how much of this is the LLMs themselves, and how much is what happens when mathematicians finally get access to hundreds of billions of dollars in computing power, albeit through a weird interface.
Would we have 5% of these breakthroughs with equivalent computing power without LLMs? 50%? 90?
I don't know if I have a good answer, but I do wonder sometimes.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Note however, that the same growth will make oil cheaper to extract.
What is your thesis here? That LLMs will improve the efficiency of oil extraction and refining, or that increased demand will lower the cost rather than increase it due to energy companies actually building capacity?
birb_cromble
6d ago
Gas and diesel prices are setting records this labor day weekend.
Elevated fuel prices seem like they're here to stay, and with winter approaching, fuel oil will likely see similar price hikes. What do you expect to happen as a result of all of this?
I'm assuming the following:
- Consumer discretionary spending will drop as that money is rerouted to fuel.
- Prices for consumer staples will (continue to) rise due to increased costs for inputs and increased transport costs.
- Purchase patterns for vehicles remain stable for at least another year. Fleet vehicle contracts have a lot of inertia, and individual consumers seem to think the current prices are transitory.
- The healthcare sector may see a small slump. Heavy healthcare consumers are also frequently on a fixed income, and may defer elective care until spring.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Money laundering fronts make the best restaurants. They don't give a shit about food costs. There was a pizza joint near my a in college that charged $3.79 for an 18" cheese pizza, and it was loaded with cheese. Years later they got busted as a front.
birb_cromble
7d ago
The clippers thing is interesting. The story was broken back in September 2025 by a guy named Pablo Torre.
The league and sports media closed ranks and alternated between mocking and ignoring Torre, until it was too obvious to keep up the charade.
I feel like there's a lesson in there.
birb_cromble
9d ago
guaranteed income club
The what now?
birb_cromble
9d ago
My mortgage payment cleared a little earlier this month, so spending is only $196.14 lower than last year.
birb_cromble
10d ago
I used to think this was quite the hallowed award, as it is often used as clemency for more provocative posts receiving warnings not bans
I remain baffled by which of my own posts people consider to be "quality". So far the only consistent property that I can find between them is length. It's a little embarrassing for me, because that usually means I haven't taken the time to tighten up the prose.
birb_cromble
11d ago
This is actually why I was asking about the commodity futures fund in the other thread. There are an increasing number of things occuring these days that seem similar to the runup to the stagflation era. Commodities did well during that era, compared to the alternatives.
Kiss is unironically one of the best disco bands in history.
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