yt comment:

> Remember: The dumbest person you know is being told 'you are absolutely right' by a LLM right now.

There are limits, and if I can buy two bottles of vodka from the grocery store for the price of a single cocktail, I'm going to opt to not have that cocktail most of the time

CC: @Edent@mastodon.social

Today I learned that Michaelangelo's first paid commission was a snowman during a rare snowfall in Florence, and I'm not quite sure how to incorporate that into my understanding of the world.

Somebody once asked David Gilmour how he got through the solo for "Comfortably Numb" and whether he always played it live the same way.

And he said he couldn't. He didn't know how. He just played it as he felt it should be played each time. He couldn't recreate the original solo verbatim if he tried.

But he mentioned seeing a Youtube video of a 13-year-old girl playing the solo, and he said, "But she could! So you should ask her. She's pretty good."

New music service, tell me what you think: a guaranteed advert free playlist of around an hour of a particular artist's works, carefully curated and mixed by the artist themself. It gets better: pay one flat fee up-front for unlimited replays, even when offline!

...you've probably spotted that I'm just describing albums, but it increasingly sounds like a really good deal, doesn't it?

Context: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.office.core.msotristate

Note that there are actually 5 values, not three. Also True is -1, and the value that equals 1 isn't supported.

@lritter @catsalad “illegal operation” and “this incident will be reported” have caused so many completely avoidable panic attacks

2. If it is "nuts" to dismiss this experience, then it would be "nuts" to dismiss mine: I have seen many, many high profile people in tech, who I have respect for, take *absolutely unhinged* risks with LLM technology that they have never, in decades-long careers, taken with any other tool or technology. It reads like a kind of cognitive decline. It's scary. And many of these people are *leaders* who use their influence to steamroll objections to these tools because they're "obviously" so good

The most amazing thing about the tech industry is that the state of software development across the board is so unbelievably bad that you can't even tell that the computers we are on are 15x faster than the ones we were on a decade ago because they feel the same.

Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.

Print Floyd

Alt...

A spoof of the cover of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album but with a Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key/Black color model, commonly used in commercial printing, instead of the original rainbow prism colors.

@NanoRaptor about the same age that I started to refuse to burn myself

there's this article about knuth and literate programming and word count with early unix shell tools which is echoing very much my sentiment or the article about "hello here's my awk script and it's 135 times faster than your hadoop cluster" and instead of really taking a deep look "what do you REALLY need" people are always "that never works in a PROFESSIONAL environment" and then you look at established companies and it's all dusty perl (or equivalent) in a dark corner running the business

Nobody on LinkedIn has ever had a bad day. Every setback is a "growth opportunity." Every firing is a "new chapter." Every complete professional disaster is framed as "excited to announce." These people would describe the Titanic as "a bold pivot to submarine operations."

[dark, intense industrial music playing]

It is now safe to turn off your web browser.

Removing physical buttons from hardware was one of the worst product design decisions in history and everyone involved should be publicly shamed.