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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • In that way I’m like a professional cook that spent all day cooking for others, so when they get home they just don’t have the energy to put all that effort into themselves.

    Funny that, I’m a Linux admin. I actually run my own servers for everything. I’m a firm believer in whoever owns the hardware owns the data. It’s just like work but with tools that I like. I like knowing where it is, and it’s not going to end the world if it’s offline for a time.

    I did windows admin for about 5 years though up to 2008r2, and I have to say I do like AD and ntfs ACLs (except when they break). Those times do contribute to my aversion.

    I too know a thing or two about developing, back in the day I did C, pascal, C++. I remember how much easier delphi was than mfc. I got out of developing when they started dumbing down the tools further (why didn’t you die, java… C#, etc.) Electron can’t die in a dumpster fire fast enough.

    Don’t start me on teams. I’d say the same for o365 though. Hard to believe these products make me want work to go back to lotus notes, domino, sametime…


  • That’s really the biggest problem I think Linux has, unfortunately it’s also one of Linux’s best features - it’s not a uniform experience. Yours won’t be the same as mine, etc.

    Some things that should be simple aren’t, and sometimes getting things going can be frustrating, and you will without question at some point have to troubleshoot and fix something.

    I’m fortunate that I have a lot of background and experience in the industry, and I can understand people don’t want to go to that trouble, just like people don’t want to learn to cook.

    Most things in Linux I find these days do plug and play to some degree, but there is absolutely missing effort and/or openness from the hardware vendors. Like not being able to configure macro keys/extra mouse buttons without a windows vm.

    Having said that, I found the way windows was going, adding crap into the os that I don’t want, and constantly changing where settings are etc. Changing my defaults, and so on. There’s just too much I don’t like about the way it’s managed. Also, winsecure.



  • Try lots of therapists until you find the right one, don’t waste your time on ones that don’t (e: help) - you might as well talk to a wall.

    Reality: therapy is expensive, wait lists are long. And half the reason you’re feeling like this in the first place is because of how much harder it’s getting to keep ourselves fed, clothed and sheltered.






  • I’m going to take the time to illustrate here, how I can see LLMs affecting human speech through existing applications and technologies that are (or could) be made both available and popular enough to achieve this. We’re far enough down the comment chain I can reply to myself now right?

    So, we can all agree that people are increasingly using LLMs in the form of chatgpt and the like, to acquire knowledge/information. The same way as they would use a search engine to follow a link to that knowledge.

    Speech-to-text has been a thing for at least 3 decades (yeah it was pretty hopeless once, but not so much now). So let’s not argue about speech vs text. People already talk to Google and siri and whoever else to this end, llms. Pale have their responses read out via tts.

    I remember being blown away watching a blind sysadmin interacting with a Linux shell via tts at rates I couldn’t even understand the words in 1998. How far we’ve come. I digress, so.

    We’ve all experienced trouble getting the information we’re looking for even with all these tools. Because there’s so much information, and it can be very difficult to find the needle in the haystack. So we constantly have to refine our queries either to be more specific, or exclude relationships to other information.

    This in turn, causes us to think about the words we were using to get the results we want, more frequently because otherwise we spend too much time on recursion.

    In turn, the more we do this, and are trained to do this, the more it will bleed into human communication.

    Now look, there is absolutely a lot of hopium smoking going on here, but damn, this could have everlasting impact on verbal communication. If technology can train people - through inaccurate/incorrect results to think about the communication going out when they speak, we could drastically reduce the amount of miscommunication between people by that alone.

    Imagine:

    get me a chair

    wheels out an office chair from the study

    no I meant a chair for at the kitchen table

    Vs

    get me a chair for at the kitchen table

    You can apply the same thing to human prompted image generation and video generation.

    Now… We don’t need llms to do this, or know this. But we are never going to achieve this without a third party - the “llm”, and whatever it’s plugged into - because the human recipient will usually be more capable of translating these variances, or employ other contexts not as accessible via a single output as speech or text.

    But if machines train us to communicate out better (more accurately, precisely and/or concisely), that is an effect I can’t welcome enough.

    Realistically, the machines will learn to deal with us being dumb, before we adapt.

    e: formatting.


  • This is interesting and thought provoking discussion, ty.

    You’re absolutely right, I was looking for the dead end - plugging LLM into a solution.

    I’m more thinking LLMs used in conjunction with other tech will have these effects on our communicating. LLMs, or whatever replaces them to do that interpretation, are necessary to facilitate that.

    When we come up with something better, to do the same job better, then of course, LLMs will be redundant. If that happens, great.

    We are already seeing a boom in popularity of LLMs outside of professional use. Global ubiquity for anything is never going to happen, unless we can fix communication, which we probably can’t. We certainly can’t alone. It’s very much a chicken an egg problem, that we can only gain from by progressing towards.

    Imagining vocallising using programming languages gave me a chuckle. I have been known to do things like use s/x/y/ to correct in written chats though.

    Programming languages allow us to talk to and listen to machines. LLMs will hopefully allow machines to listen and talk to/between us.