birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
16hr ago
That's an astounding number. I can do a set of 5 400lb deadlifts.
At multiple points in my life, I have been able to run a sub-seven mile.
There is absolutely no way in hell I'd ever be able to do both of those things in succession, much less multiple miles at that pace.
birb_cromble
16hr ago
...what?
birb_cromble
18hr ago
That makes sense. I've been strength training for about that long and it's a lot easier than running.
birb_cromble
23hr ago
How long did it take you to train for a marathon? I was pretty proud of myself for even making it to the end of a 10k last year.
birb_cromble
1d ago
After all the medical expenses and surprise home repairs have settled, spending is $1,039.65 higher than it was at the same point last year.
It's a little frustrating. I've cut my discretionary spending pretty deeply, and I can't seem to get ahead compared to last year.
- I've significantly cut down on eating out.
- No major entertainment purchases (eg: I don't need a new speaker cabinet)
- Groceries are basically just Aldi and Sam's club now.
- I'm traveling less overall.
Unfortunately:
- I've had a few big "block" expenses in the form of medical bills and home repairs.
- The traveling I am doing tends to be long distance, and gas prices are high right now.
I guess all I can really do for now is keep it up and hope I don't get any more big surprises this year, so my attempts at frugality overtake those expenses.
birb_cromble
1d ago
I sometimes wonder if Franklin Roosevelt didn't do more damage to the US than any other president. In some ways he was a proto-Trump. He saw problems, and rather than try to fix the system, bulldozed through it and made up justifications, then the rest of the government had to rationalize things post-hoc to maintain the veneer of a Republic.
birb_cromble
2d ago
That's fascinating. Can you elaborate on how and why that's the case?
birb_cromble
3d ago
I'm not going to go into detail, but the basic gist of it is that exchange ticker symbols tend to be short strings with a lot of overlap. Despite the textual overlap, each one has a distinct identity and they are not interchangeable. While some LLMs deal with that kind of thing better than others, they all tend to have problems that get worse as the context window fills up, and compaction tends to cause problems as well.
As a toy example that isn't much of a problem anymore, BND and BNDW are not the same thing. They have different holdings, different rates of return, and different tax implications. That little W at the end means a lot, but next token prediction can have a hard time with it.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I was always fond of The Secret World.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Successful assassins use sniper rifles
Most successful ones seem to be in conversational distance.
- Sirhan Sirhan: within arm's reach
- Charles Guiteau: inside a subway stop
- John Wilkes Booth: inside a theater box
- Jack Ruby: about six feet away
- Dan White: inside an office
- Gavrilo Princip: inside a car
- Mark Chapman: on the same sidewalk
- Vance Boelter: inside a house
- Carl Weiss: less than six feet away
- Luigi Mangione: on the same sidewalk
birb_cromble
3d ago
It's been a while, but my recollection is that only really happens for characters who are disillusioned by the culture and want to leave it.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I have only read two novels by Atwood, but the thing that seems to run through both of them is that she combines the subtlety of a pulp writer with the pretentions of a literary fiction author. It's a bizarre combination.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Opus 4.7 seems to handle the stock ticker tests I do better than 4.6. I assume it's the new tokenizer. Otherwise the only difference I notice is that it's more expensive to run on the same thinking level
birb_cromble
3d ago
You mean other than changing the core premise?
If forced to work in the framework as it stands, I'd probably need to see a mix of human agency (possibly by resurrecting the early and largely abandoned concept of Referrers), and introducing more AI entities that are less... smarmily dickish? The only AI character who seems to genuinely care about biologicals on a personal and moral level is Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, who other AI consider to be psychotic.
birb_cromble
3d ago
What are the laws on what constitutes a firearm? I've seen that some Scandinavian countries consider the barrel to be the primary serialized part, because it's pressure bearing and harder to manufacture than a receiver.
birb_cromble
3d ago
The best way I can explain it is that it feels like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream with better PR.
You have vast inscrutable non-human intelligences that run every aspect of society. It's ok though - they're really looking out for you (as long as you weren't one of the 851.4 billion). Don't worry about the fact that your body was manipulated before your birth to alter things as fundamental as your sexual preferences (which has frequently been a horror trope), or that it wil change your emotions by reflexively pumping drugs into your bloodstream. It's all for your own good. Trust us. You live in a perfectly free society. Agents of the inscrutable beings would never do things like engage in naked blackmail. That would be gauche. Even if they did do it, it's really for the best. Nothing to worry about.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. --CS Lewis
birb_cromble
3d ago
The amount of money they pay for the privilege is eye-watering, so it works out.
birb_cromble
3d ago
When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When attempting to judge the political fallout of an American assassin's attempt on an American president's American life on American soil, do as the Americans do.
birb_cromble
3d ago
At $1.99 before Valve takes its cut, that's not going to pay for many billable hours from a lawyer.
birb_cromble
3d ago
For those of you who have read the culture novels - do you consider them to be utopian or dystopian?
I was discussing them with a friend recently and he views them as profoundly utopian. On the other hand, I view them as one of the best examples of a soft dystopia that I've ever read.
birb_cromble
4d ago
I think we recently had to have a stern-yet-loving talk with a customer who was still resisting an upgrade after eleven years.
I deal with this shit all the time. My day job involves maintaining a very old application that has seen continuous upgrades and maintenance over a two decade timeline, but some vestigial bits haven't been touched since the application's inception due to manpower constraints. We all assumed ai would help us deal with the backlog of "not quite important enough to move forward to the top of the stack" items that cause a drag on developer productivity, but always get sidelined by more pressing concerns.
Unfortunately, our codebase takes every AI product we've tried and sends it spiraling down a garden path of schizophrenic recursion.
Before I continue, let me get the usual reflexive responses out of the way:
- We have tried multiple times, with multiple LLMs, including whatever the zeitgeist considered to the SotA at the time. No, I am not going to go back and retest because Opus-4.8-thinking-xhigh-ultra-planner-with-cheese is truly a revolutionary improvement.
- If you claim we are Prompting It Wrong, I will personally figure out how to send you to at least four of the eighteen Chinese hells. Seven different people on my team have tried, all with varying backgrounds and writing styles. Two of us are published authors. One is literally a technical writer who writes concise, complete, and detailed prose for a living.
- No, I'm not going to take a two million line, twenty year old application that runs in regulated environments and rewrite it in Go-lang, even if Claude is really good at it.
The problem is that one single fix or feature can easily involve traveling through over a decade of code-strata, and the LLMs invariably over index on the idioms that they encounter first. The end result is that even a detailed plan on how to replace a deprecated method from a library with a documented replacement tends to make it imagine that it has to do things it doesn't.
I'm going to be vague here, but I'm going to share a personal story from work.
Due to our support contracts, we occasionally have to release security patches for very old releases of our product. We recently had an issue where one of our very old releases was using library $FOO on version N. Version N of $FOO had a very hard to exploit but potentially real security issue that could cause an information disclosure. Normally we'd just tell people to upgrade, but one of our clients operates in a regulated environment and can't do a major upgrade in less than 12 months for anything short of a nuclear bomb going off. Given that, we'd normally upgrade the library and move on with our lives. However $FOO has officially EOLed version N, so no more updates.
We had to do a manual mitigation, and I'm the guy who catches that kind of work, so I got started. A co-worker said "hey, this is high priority, and I think I can get it done in 15 minutes if I use AI". Since it was high priority, the boss told us both to get to work and whatever made it through all our automated tests and reviews first would go in.
I did my fix by integrating with some functionality provided by $FOO that allowed me to catch invalid data before it made it to the offending code. I missed an edge case that got caught by the automated tests, but either way, the PR landed in the codebase with half an hour to spare before the end of the day.
I decided to see where my coworker was, and the answer was "nowhere close to a working solution ". I could only see his draft PRs and not the prompts, but it looked like the LLM tried two different approaches and shit the bed both times. The first time, it looks like he/the LLM tried to catch invalid data at every single entry point into the system - the top of the funnel, rather than the bottom. The problem is, we have thousands of entry points. The code got completely out of control and eventually the LLM started over fitting and trying to apply the mitigation to things that didn't even make sense. Thr second approach involved manipulating JVM bytecode to try and hot-patch the offending class. That didn't even compile, but it looks suspiciously like an old stack overflow post about a different problem with the library.
The other guy is pretty sharp, and in some areas I think he's genuinely more talented than I am. But looking at the work he did that day, you'd assume he was fresh out of a boot camp and in way over his head.
I'm not really sure what to make of it.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Does anyone have any pointers for getting a smooth, even finish with nitrocellulose lacquer?
I'm doing test coats and keep getting tiny bubbles.
birb_cromble
7d ago
Read a book that you've already read before. You already know where the plot leads, so your mind can relax a little and take the body with it.
My 55% serious solution is to redistrict via random parameters every six years, without any human input.
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