Your friendly local programmer, uni student and *nix addict.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Chevy Suburban. I volunteered to drive for a university course field trip and it’s what I got stuck with.

    • Unresponsive fatass brick of a vehicle. I mean, come on, a minivan has more cargo space and the same passenger capacity without three light aircraft worth of inertia.
    • Dashboard sucked. It took me a solid three minutes to find the button shifts. (I know these can be done well - Honda does them right - but the PRNDL was fucking laid out in a thin row at the side of the dashboard. Huh?)
    • Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.



  • A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic.

    Tragically, this seems to be the minority viewpoint - at least among CS students. A lot of my peers seem to have convinced themselves that the hallucination machines are intelligent… even when it vomits unsound garbage into their lap.

    This is made worse by the fact that most of our work is simple and/or derivative enough for $MODEL to usually give the right answer, which reinforces the majority “thinking machine” viewpoint - while in reality, generating an implementation of & using only ~ and | is hardly an Earth-shattering accomplishment.

    And yes, it screws them academically. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots when the professor who encourages Copilot use has a sub-50% test average.





  • Too many people conflate the evils of corporatism and corruption with the general concept of “capitalism”/a market economy.

    Now, I’m hardly an advocate of laissez-faire economics. But I’m not a full-on socialist either. I think the majority of problems people attribute to modern market economies can be corrected with aggressive anti-trust and pro-consumer regulation.

    (The keyword here is majority. I’m sure it makes sense to socialize some things, but those details are best left to people smarter than me.)