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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The term, “enshitification” is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn’t you like a stepping stone.

    Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that’s not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.


  • My argument is thus:

    LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They’re good at rephrasing things so that they’re easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she’s rockin’.

    I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, “type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!”

    But if you’re using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you’re going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.





  • Same here. I’ve been trying to immerse myself in Spanish. My grandparents were from there and they were always disappointed that none of their grandchildren became fluent.

    Now I go back once per year as a sort of pilgrimage. Hopefully I’ll be able to hold conversations soon.

    It’s difficult, but I never want to be that American who refuses to make even a token effort to learn the basics of the language when they’re travelling abroad.








  • I still go to Reddit for American politics, my cities sub, and /r/nfl.

    But I haven’t made a single comment and treat it more as a news aggregator than a proper community. And even that is happening less and less as I get more comfortable with the pacing of the community here.

    On Reddit you can make a clever comment at the right time and get thousands of upvotes and sidebar conversations. It’s great for a shot of that sweet, sweet dopamine.

    On Lemmy, I rarely get more than 5-10 upvotes, but the conversations are meaningful and nuanced.

    People are realizing that Lemmy is not a 1:1 drop-in replacement and are adjusting their expectations and behavior accordingly. Hopefully we’ll hit a critical mass soon.






  • Once I made the mistake of looking up how to change the oil on my Kawasaki Vulcan without being in incognito. Now half of my recommendations are how to perform maintenance on motorcycles that I’ll never own. And ads for Harley Davidson. A company whose business model is converting gasoline into noise.

    I just use youtube-dl now and have it go to my NAS. It’s not easier then going to the website, per se. But now the video lives on my storage and it won’t go away after a corporation’s billionth DMCA claim that hour.

    Genuinely wish I had done this a decade ago on my favorite articles. Link rot is getting worse and worse and YouTube is the absolute worst.