SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
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User ID: 225
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6hr ago
In common conversation, "book" refers to the text.
That's not true. In common conversation, "book" refers to the text as well as a given volume. You don't say "hey give me that volume of the text of Hamlet over there", you say "hey give me that book over there".
"Book", much like "length", is an overloaded word in the English language. That's why it's not accurate to pick on one particular definition and insist that it's the objectively correct one, the way Folamh did.
SubstantialFrivolity
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11hr ago
My man, this is the opposite of fun. This is horrifying. That poor family, they really have suffered something nobody should have to suffer. And it sounds like they had irreparable financial harm on top of it, just to pay for a lawyer for the guy.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
16hr ago
Yeah, nothing about stereotypes say they have to be false. In fact, stereotypes exist because they are largely true. Black people really do love fried chicken, white people really do love ranch dressing and hate spices, and so on. Every group has its members to whom the stereotypes don't apply (e.g. I'm a Midwestern white guy who loves spicy food), but they still have a lot of predictive power.
SubstantialFrivolity
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1d ago
Sure, that is fair. If someone thinks that what Trump says is ok, but denounces it as propaganda when not-Trump says it, that would certainly be hypocritical.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
How is it hypocritical? The hypothetical Trump supporter I've outlined has not violated any of his own principles. He is not criticizing Trump because he doesn't think anything wrong happened, and he is criticizing Biden on a separate issue where he does think something wrong happened. There's no hypocrisy in that. If hypothetical-Trump-supporter criticized Biden for supposedly repeating Russian propaganda while giving Trump a pass, that would be hypocritical. But it's not hypocritical to say "doing X is ok but doing Y is wrong", and to criticize people according to whether they have done X or Y.
SubstantialFrivolity
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1d ago
I'm a programmer too, and I'm perfectly willing to tell Google that their 20% code is garbage. Honestly you shouldn't put them on a pedestal in this day and age, we are long past the point where they are nothing but top tier engineers doing groundbreaking work. They are just another tech company at this point, and they sometimes do stupid things just like every other tech company does.
If you are willing to accept use of a tool which gives you code that doesn't even work 10% of the time, let alone solve the problem, that's your prerogative. I say that such a tool sucks at writing code, and we can simply agree to disagree on that value judgement.
SubstantialFrivolity
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1d ago
Welp, fair enough. I stand corrected on that point.
SubstantialFrivolity
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1d ago
I mean, I didn't say it was. Just saying everyone i know (women included) is well aware that young men spend crazy amounts of effort on catching the eye of young women. Whether it's sexual or not (it isn't always), young men are thirsty for female attention and chase it very, very hard.
SubstantialFrivolity
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1d ago
Do you have evidence that young men compete and distinguish themselves for access to me?
No disrespect intended, but this is common knowledge to the point that it defies belief that anyone would not know this (kind of like if you asked someone to provide evidence that people die if they stop breathing). If you're young enough you may not have realized it yet, I suppose. But young men spend vast quantities of effort to try to get attention (and especially sex) from women. It's the #1 thing on their minds, and a lot of things they do can be traced back to "showing off for the girls".
Or, as Chris Rock memorably put it: "Women are offered dick every day. Every [woman] gets offered dick at least three times a week. Three times a day, shit! That’s right, every time a man’s being nice to you … all he’s doing is offering dick. That’s all it is. ‘Can I get that for you? – How about some dick?’ ‘Could I help you with that? – Could I help you to some dick? – Do you need some dick?’" Yes he's a comedian and he's playing it for laughs, but it works because both he and the audience know how true it is.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
AI is a junior engineer.
It's actually far worse than that. LLMs are a junior engineer who cannot learn. The reason that we put up with junior engineers and invest effort into training them is because they will learn, stop making junior mistakes, and someday be productive enough that they pay off the effort of training them. But you can't do that with an LLM. Even after 2-3 years of development, they still suck at writing code. They still hallucinate things because they have no understanding of what they are doing. They still can't take on your feedback and improve for the next time you ask a question.
If LLMs were as capable as a junior engineer, that wouldn't be all bad. But they're actually less capable. Of course people aren't impressed.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
What I'm saying is that your thought process seems to be something like this:
- The things Trump says are Russian propaganda, fed to him by the Russian government in some way
- Trump supporters say "it's not a big deal"
- Therefore, Trump supporters think it's not a big deal that Trump repeats Russian propaganda
What I'm saying is that Trump supporters don't agree with point #1 to begin with, so reasoning as if they did is fatally flawed. I submit that what is actually happening in their minds is something like this:
- Trump says things that happen to line up with Russian propaganda
- Trump haters say he is just repeating propaganda, but he has good reasons for believing what he does. The fact that Russia agrees with him doesn't invalidate his reasoning
- Therefore, it's not a big deal that Trump says those things because nothing untoward is happening
I am not actually a Trump supporter, so I'm not claiming to perfectly represent their thoughts. Just trying to show how one might arrive at very different conclusions from you if they disagree with the idea that he is just repeating propaganda. And given that, it isn't necessarily hypocritical for them to be unbothered by Trump's behavior while vociferously criticizing Biden's behavior.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
Look, I want to have different perspectives around and I upvote you a lot even if I don't always agree, because you get dogpiled. But this is a pretty bad post and is really just waging the culture war. If you can point to a specific person who claims "Trump repeating Russian propaganda shouldn't be taken seriously", in those exact words, I will eat my hat. What I see people actually claim is that Trump is not actually repeating Russian propaganda, and that the claims he is should not be taken seriously. By all means disagree with that take if you wish. But you can't just go "I think what Trump said is Russian propaganda that was fed to him" -> "people say it's not a big deal" -> "people think Trump repeating Russian propaganda isn't a big deal". When people don't agree with your starting premises, you can't judge their actions based on the logical conclusions of your premises.
It's certainly true that there are people who do blow off everything Trump does while howling about things that Biden did. We have plenty of those people posting here. But while it's hypocritical, I don't really think the logic of it is something that's a struggle to understand. Some people are just plain partisan, and will overlook even the most egregious things their side does while bitterly complaining about even the most minor offenses from the other side. But it's important to remember that both the left and right do this with equal frequency. It's not a good thing, but it's not like Trump supporters have some kind of monopoly on this behavior either. People are real good at worrying about the speck in their brother's eye while ignoring the beam in their own eye.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
Sex with the same woman, even if I really like her, feels like eating my favorite meal for dinner every day. It’s always good but at some point I might just start craving a simple Chinese takeout for novelty’s sake.
I think that this might just come down to how wired one is for novelty. Eating my favorite meal for dinner every day sounds fucking awesome to me. Maybe I would get sick of it at some point, I've never tried. But it's difficult to imagine I would.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
I tend to buy used, though I would like to have a new car at some point. I was pretty impressed with the 2022 Mazda CX-30 my wife had. It seemed to me like Mazda has the right idea in that it was just... a well made car. Nothing fancy really, but I want a car that gets the basics right and doesn't try to be high tech. I will definitely consider a Mazda for whenever my Mustang bites the dust.
SubstantialFrivolity
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2d ago
Morality is not subject to game theory. "Two wrongs don't make a right" is a moral judgement, not a statement of what will be effective.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
I would venture to guess that @GBRK does not agree that soccer is terrible right now. I would also guess that he feels most soccer fans agree with him. Which honestly is fair enough - I don't like soccer, but if making it appealing to people like me ruins it for the existing fans, that doesn't seem very reasonable.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
Ok, but you surely can appreciate that is not a common use case. So the answer to your original question of "why isn't this commonplace" is "because almost nobody cares". As @Lizzardspawn said, what most people care about when they measure book length is to estimate time-to-read. And for that purpose, page count works just as well as word count.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3d ago
The length of a book can refer to physical length as well as how many words it contains. Your argument here is like if one was to insist that we can only use mass, not volume, to talk about how big an object is. Both are equally exact measures of bigness (or book length in our case), they just measure different aspects that the term can refer to.
And also, even if I were to concede the point for sake of argument, it doesn't really make sense to me that you are focusing so hard on just one measure as the legitimate one. You said you aren't trying to determine time-to-read, so what then is the purpose of knowing book length with exactitude? Just the aesthetic satisfaction of having a more objective measurement? It doesn't make sense to me to worry about how exact your measurement is when you don't actually gain anything by it.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3d ago
In that case, then I still don't see your objection. The page count is in fact an exact metric for how long the book is, just as word count is. It doesn't matter how the size of the type face, or how it's laid out, a given volume is by definition N pages long. You might prefer the metric of word length, but it seems like most others prefer the metric of number of pages. So we aren't going to be switching any time soon.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3d ago
What are you basing this assertion on?
Extensive personal experience.
It irritates me that we insist on using a proxy for the real metric when the real metric is so trivially accessible.
But that's exactly my point: your proposed metric is a proxy too! What you seem to want to measure is "how long will it take to read this book". But even for the same reader, two different books with the same word count can have a different time-to-read. Which brings us right back to: we already have a widely accepted proxy, and it is accurate enough that almost nobody cares about the margin of error. So what advantage do we gain from switching to a different proxy measurement? None that I can see, and we incur all the disadvantages that normally come from switching measurements. Doesn't seem very worth it to me.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3d ago
Yes, different books of similar size can take different levels of time/effort to read. But even so, extreme outliers are rare. Thus the metric is good enough for common use, thus there's no popular support pushing to have a different metric.
Also, even if we did use a different metric there are going to be outliers. You mentioned House Of Leaves, but that book took me longer to read than books with an equivalent word count. The footnotes are slower going, and the parts of the book where the text is in odd directions take longer because you have to physically turn the book. So if moving to a new metric will still have outliers, why bother?
SubstantialFrivolity
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5d ago
Obviously if one really cares about the output and not the craft itself, then it's different. But I don't feel like that is the central example of "I'm writing software for fun". But yes, if that's you (and @MathWizard), you might decide to hold off based on your personal evaluation of how quickly we will have AI tools available to do that for you.
I would say I'm not convinced that will be soon. Right now AI generated content sucks ass. I'm not reflexively against it (though you might not believe me), but it just is bad and not worth my time even if I want to Consoom (TM). And that's just talking about creative endeavors (not my area of expertise), where I can only really judge the output from a layman's perspective. If we are talking about programming (which is my area of expertise), AI is laughably bad. It's so bad at writing code that it's a drain on productivity, because you have to check everything it does to make sure it is correct. LLMs are a really neat party trick, but right now that's all they are. They still can't actually do anything useful.
Could it get better? Sure. But people have been saying "it's gonna get better in a year or two" for years now, and it still isn't there. At this point, there's not evidence to suggest that AI is going to be able to do these tasks competently within the next 5 years or so. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but I think that people predicting AI to do all these wonderful things (meaning no personal disrespect to you) are getting caught up in hype without any substance behind it at this time.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5d ago
As for the moral implications of making low-skilled people unemployed, like... if you don't do it, eventually someone else will, except you will get none of the benefits while still suffering all the possible downsides.
This is the argument people have used to rationalize all manner of immoral things since time immemorial. It doesn't really hold water, though. If something is immoral, then it doesn't matter that someone else will do the same thing. Morality is about your conduct, not what others do.
As it happens, I don't think that automating jobs is immoral. But I think that if one does, the "someone else will do it" argument doesn't fly.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
5d ago
I find it kind of hard to work on software projects for fun knowing AGI will make it significantly easier to work on if I wait a year before starting. In fact this might always be true.
This strikes me somewhat like saying "I don't want to work on learning to play an instrument because music recordings will make it a lot easier to have music in my home". That's true if all you care about is the end result. But if you were going to do this for fun to begin with, presumably you were going to do it because you enjoy the craft. So why wait for different tools? The enjoyment of the craft will be just as much today as it is a year from now.
No, definitely not. That's why you will frequently see people settle or otherwise cave when someone sues them - you are on the hook for your own legal fees, and unless you have deep pockets it can ruin you even if you win. That might be different in the case of a criminal trial, but I don't believe it is.
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