post_below's recent activity

  1. Comment on Proposal to ban development of AI superintelligence by US Senator Bernie Sanders and US Representative Greg Casar in ~society

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    Literal quote. I think Bernie's great, but this proposed legislation, which seems to be an awareness campaign rather than a genuine attempt at lawmaking, is really misguided. Step 1) Halt US AI...

    But what happened next, nobody expected.

    Literal quote. I think Bernie's great, but this proposed legislation, which seems to be an awareness campaign rather than a genuine attempt at lawmaking, is really misguided.

    Step 1) Halt US AI development, likely crashing stock markets globally, but worse in US markets. Arguably OK, but if the goal is to tank financial markets through legislation, put that in the title. At the very least acknowledge that you understand that's what will happen!

    Step 2) Beg the rest of the world to stop too. Which they absolutely won't do, pure fantasy.

    Step 3) Watch from the sidelines as China becomes the leader in AI.

    I'm not saying that US tech bros are the right shepherds of this technology, but I don't think China is going to be any better.

    Bernie's populist message resonates with a lot of people, I agree wholeheartedly with his core platform. I don't understand the anti-AI pivot. Using AI as a proxy for wealth inequality isn't going to make any progress on the real problems.

    8 votes

  2. Comment on Share your favourite dal recipe! in ~food

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    I add the coconut milk just after the tomatoes (after they've had a moment to brown). But if you're not non-dairy you have to try cream at least once! Generally I like diced or strained better...

    1. I add the coconut milk just after the tomatoes (after they've had a moment to brown). But if you're not non-dairy you have to try cream at least once!

    2. Generally I like diced or strained better than paste but it's a personal taste thing. Fire roasted tomatoes would probably work great. I used a neutral marina once and it turned out fine. The tomato is sort of a background flavor, too much and it gets a chili vibe. Unless of course that's what you're after.

    Sometimes I use chipotle to give it a little smoke. Some traditional indian recipes use charcoal infused oil.

    If you're really into playing around with the nuances, try fresh grated ginger and fresh garlic instead of jarred/store bought paste. Make sure both are pretty well cooked before the wet ingredients go in, they don't always finish otherwise.

    Red kidney beans add some nice texture and flavor variety, I don't remember if the dishoom recipe used them.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on 1Password wades into a right-wing mess after funding a Linux project in ~tech

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    Also, all their desktop apps use Electron. Which is a huge download/install size and memory usage hit for an (otherwise) lightweight app like a password manager.

    Also, all their desktop apps use Electron. Which is a huge download/install size and memory usage hit for an (otherwise) lightweight app like a password manager.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on What are your "how on earth did I not learn this sooner" tech moments? in ~tech

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    For todays 1 in 10,000: CTRL/CMD + C to copy, CTRL/CMD + V to paste, CTRL/CMD + A to select all. Bonus if you have a multi function mouse wheel or extra buttons: Assign CTRL+C to left tilt, CTRL+V...

    For todays 1 in 10,000: CTRL/CMD + C to copy, CTRL/CMD + V to paste, CTRL/CMD + A to select all.

    Bonus if you have a multi function mouse wheel or extra buttons: Assign CTRL+C to left tilt, CTRL+V to right tilt

    9 votes

  5. Comment on What are your "how on earth did I not learn this sooner" tech moments? in ~tech

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    In addition to this, in most contexts double clicking selects the word, triple clicking selects the line. Double tap for word select even works on (some) mobile devices.

    In addition to this, in most contexts double clicking selects the word, triple clicking selects the line.

    Double tap for word select even works on (some) mobile devices.

    8 votes

  6. Comment on Post-tooth extraction diets! in ~food

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    Re: mulligatawny, just blend the hell out of it. It's not as good that way but it's something. I use an immersion blender. Here's the recipe I have bookmarked but I just use it for a rough idea of...

    Re: mulligatawny, just blend the hell out of it. It's not as good that way but it's something. I use an immersion blender. Here's the recipe I have bookmarked but I just use it for a rough idea of ratios when I haven't made it in a while.

    Mine was second molar on the lower right, if yours goes the same way mine did you'll be eating normal food and musing about how long 4 weeks actually is in no time.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on Post-tooth extraction diets! in ~food

  8. Comment on Post-tooth extraction diets! in ~food

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    Assuming it's not a first molar (or if it is and they sewed it up)... Just get through a handful of days until you're out of the woods with the clot. Then get some irrigation syringes, if they...

    Assuming it's not a first molar (or if it is and they sewed it up)... Just get through a handful of days until you're out of the woods with the clot. Then get some irrigation syringes, if they didn't give you any, to clear out anything that gets stuck.

    Sounds like you're over yogurt but frozen fruit + yogurt shakes got me through. Much better than just yogurt alone, you can get the texture pretty close to a milkshake. Raw egg or two for protein. Bonus points if you can find yogurt with a decent amount of protein per serving (greek, some brands of regular that have a lower water ratio).

    After you graduate from yogurt, there's real food that doesn't require much chewing (refried beans, dal, mulligatawny, soup). I didn't have any issues with warm food, but I suppose YMMV.

    After the first week I was eating normal food slowly, chewing on one side. It's amazing how much less satisfying that is.

    7 votes

  9. Comment on Operation Bluebird launches Twitter.now in ~tech

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    Not just the design, all of the copy, it's so AI generated it hurts. And this idea of it being a righteous "fight" that you can pay to join is just silly.

    Not just the design, all of the copy, it's so AI generated it hurts.

    And this idea of it being a righteous "fight" that you can pay to join is just silly.

    6 votes

  10. Comment on An AI researcher writes about his crisis of faith in ~tech

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    Less suffering definitely has potential downsides (rich kids). We'd have a lot to figure out. But I'll take the problems that come with basic needs universally met over the alternative...

    Less suffering definitely has potential downsides (rich kids). We'd have a lot to figure out. But I'll take the problems that come with basic needs universally met over the alternative nonetheless.

    Feels like fantasy in the near term in any case, the near term probably being the lifespan of everyone reading this. I think it's worth working towards though.

    3 votes

  11. Comment on An AI researcher writes about his crisis of faith in ~tech

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    If we imagine a post-scarcity future in good faith, an important contributor to human shittiness would be removed from the equation: scarcity. Children would grow up with their needs met, their...

    I've seen enough shitty humans to know that plenty of people will spend at least part of that time creating drama or deliberately hurting other people

    If we imagine a post-scarcity future in good faith, an important contributor to human shittiness would be removed from the equation: scarcity. Children would grow up with their needs met, their parents wouldn't be focused on survival and would be less exploitative and more exploratory. There is so much research about what a huge difference these things make in the kind of adults those kids would grow into. Smaller/less active amygdala, higher IQs, greater empathy and so on. Cultural values and expectations would shift as a result, resulting in a virtuous feedback loop.

    It wouldn't happen overnight, it would introduce new kinds of problems, and there will always be shitty people, but if people had more resources and time the world would undoubtedly be better.

    Note that I'm not saying AI will deliver this. Not doubt it can contribute, but we were already most of the way there pre-AI in theory. If a lower percentage of wealth was extracted by financial markets and the wealthy, we could already be living in a world where people worked dramatically less while having more resources.

    11 votes

  12. Comment on Amazon kept shutting down my tablet, so I spent $266 on four AI models to own it in ~tech

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    The price doesn't have to be that high, a $100 subscription with a top lab would have handled all of the devices the author tested with and dozens more before the month was out.

    The price doesn't have to be that high, a $100 subscription with a top lab would have handled all of the devices the author tested with and dozens more before the month was out.

    2 votes

  13. Comment on Git at any scale in ~comp

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    Or possibly GitHub was the next best option. Individual orgs don't need a 3rd party to host their git/repos, as you pointed out with Gitea, there are all sorts of good options that are easy to...

    Or possibly GitHub was the next best option. Individual orgs don't need a 3rd party to host their git/repos, as you pointed out with Gitea, there are all sorts of good options that are easy to self host. Not to mention 3rd party hosters that aren't owned by Elon Musk. The selling point of GitHub is as a platform for getting work out there and attracting contributors. And now with the torrent of AI generated projects flooding GitHub I wonder how long it will be the best place to put your work out there.

    It's already become too unreliable for professionals with the AI flood causing frequent outages.

    From memory, GitHub commit volume increased to around 1 billion a year by the end of 2025, which caused them to celebrate and commit to a huge capacity expansion plan. But then by April monthly commits were over 1 billion and have doubled to almost 3 billion as of now. With their clunky infrastructure it's hard to see how they'll keep up. They're getting DDoSed by AI commits.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on Git at any scale in ~comp

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    Cursor and daddy Musk want all that sweet coding data for themselves

    Cursor and daddy Musk want all that sweet coding data for themselves

    9 votes

  15. Comment on Older adults who typically had longer intervals between meals accumulated chronic diseases more rapidly over time than those with shorter intervals, according to study from Karolinska Institutet in ~health

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    Agreed, they picked strange numbers. And also: The study found no effect in people under 78 years old, and there are just way too many confounding factors for the result for 78 and above to mean...

    Agreed, they picked strange numbers. And also: The study found no effect in people under 78 years old, and there are just way too many confounding factors for the result for 78 and above to mean anything other than "more study needed". And of course the reason there are too many confounders is that they used an existing dataset, it's meta analysis rather than a study designed to test the impact of fasting.

    Which is ok, nothing wrong with meta analysis. But the bulk of available research shows that there are significant metabolic benefits from fasting, including on markers strongly correlated with disease.

    13 votes

  16. Comment on Young adults in the US are increasingly wary of AI, concerned it will take jobs in ~tech

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    I agree that AI will automate some jobs. And that it could be a profound number if the tech keeps improving at a steady rate. I don't think that's a foregone conclusion though. It all depends on...
    • Exemplary

    I agree that AI will automate some jobs. And that it could be a profound number if the tech keeps improving at a steady rate. I don't think that's a foregone conclusion though.

    It all depends on whether they can figure out how to get an ever increasing amount of quality training data. Fine tuning will continue to improve, harnesses will get better, but every significant capability leap so far has come with a size jump (excepting the introduction of tool use and reasoning fine tuning) and you need pre training data for a size jump.

    The reason the tech would need to keep improving, for some time, is that it can't fully automate the majority of jobs right now. In software engineering, sometimes cited as the field most in danger of replacement, agents can oneshot boilerplate and do an impressive job on more complex tasks. But you still need a human in the loop, and not just any human, a domain expert. Even the scarily smart models are dumb a non-negligible percentage of the time... And in increasingly hard to catch ways.

    There really aren't many fields where current tech is threatening many jobs. In knowledge work, they still hallucinate pretty often, no way you can rely on ouput without human direction and review. In writing they suck quite a lot. In health and law it's grossly irresponsible to trust agent output without expert review. Even in digital art, which seems particularly threatened, you still need a human artist if you don't want to put out slop and piss people off.

    So it's really about where the tech will be in X years, and right now there's no one who can make a credible prediction.

    I have no doubt though that LLM tech will change the world in all sorts of ways. I think of it as another chapter in the digital revolution following the internet and personal computers.

    But it's useful to offset the hype: Jobs might be replaced at some point, but so far it doesn't seem to be happening.

    30 votes

  17. Comment on Why your Amazon order confirmation emails have become so unhelpful in ~tech

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    Maybe their response to the coverage will be that it's meant to protect customer privacy

    Maybe their response to the coverage will be that it's meant to protect customer privacy

    2 votes

  18. Comment on Why your Amazon order confirmation emails have become so unhelpful in ~tech

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    Good point. But you're thinking like an engineer. If it's true that they nerfed confirmation emails globally to protect their metrics, that's a management or c-suite call. I doubt that was the...

    Good point. But you're thinking like an engineer. If it's true that they nerfed confirmation emails globally to protect their metrics, that's a management or c-suite call.

    I doubt that was the main motivation though, more likely they want to encourage clickthroughs into their walled garden. Probably motivated in part by a larger initiative to create more opportunities to expose people to their AI tools

    12 votes

  19. Comment on Virgin Galactic wants your help naming its new Delta class spaceship in ~space

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    Strange, none of the names mention Epstein

    Strange, none of the names mention Epstein

    2 votes

  20. Comment on I'm not ready to let this place go in ~tildes

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    I've never been to a forum inspired meetup, but I've seen plenty reportedly work out great over the years. I think maybe the only barrier is not everyone wants to tell internet strangers where...

    I've never been to a forum inspired meetup, but I've seen plenty reportedly work out great over the years.

    I think maybe the only barrier is not everyone wants to tell internet strangers where they are. Maybe an anonymous location only form would be a good way to test the waters? Then you'd know how many interested people are in a given area.