Recent submissions

Comment · 1 day ago
I like how you're advocating for theft, but can't even prompt an LLM yourself and want someone else to do it.
Comment · 1 day ago
The history of typography is full of decorative elements like fleurons and elaborate drop initials.
Comment · 2 months ago
> Corporations are legally required to maximize shareholder's value.

This is a myth.

Comment · 8 months ago
I liked the article for its brief foray into aviation history, something I wasn't too familiar with myself past the standard Wright Brothers factoids, and for making me appreciate the smooth rides I've luckily had, especially compared to that poor Singapore Airlines flight. The author is also good at conveying the visual feelings associated with turbulence despite only using words. Though I do feel more photographs wouldn't have hurt: like of the glider, NCAR's buildings, the Boeing hangar, visualizations of Cornman's software, and the turbulence simulator.

The article is a good reminder why politics matter and why we can't keep on seeing climate change as some far-off issue that future generations will just bear the brunt of.

> and there was talk of dismantling NCAR altogether. Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, had called the research center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”

Comment · 8 months ago
Not to mention these patterns didn't come out of thin air. The LLMs are statistically regurgitating language from its training set, which researchers probably tuned more towards journalistic sources like the one we're reading.
Comment · 8 months ago
It also feels very shoehorned. You have "conversations" where there's only one party, testimony, memos, and interviews presented as casual conversation, entire messages that are actually "[editorial commentary]", no profile pictures, a useless reply button, everyone's status is "online", etc.

I guess someone saw the recent project for viewing the Epstein emails and needed a way to differentiate...

Comment · 8 months ago
> Obviously the implementation was botched in this case

The long wait times could easily have been fixed by staggering employee start times. You could even optimize it per building/floor. Sadly, a lot of bureaucrats lack the imagination to do simple stuff like this. (Anyone with a desperate need to have 9 am meetings would just have to suck it up)

Comment · 8 months ago
Comment · 8 months ago
In this case, we can chalk it up to malicious stupidity. Someone posting a reference aimed at learners, especially with Microsoft's reach and name recognition, has a responsibility to check the quality and accuracy of the materials. Using an AI tool doesn't absolve that responsibility one bit.
Comment · 8 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Nintendo games have consistently disappointed me with their lack of depth in their stories. Breath of the Wild had an amazing open world, but the characters came off as two-dimensional and the final boss was completely disappointing. (there's something especially uncanny about having a protagonist who doesn't utter a word, even if it's meant to help players self-insert) Mario Odyssey was even more pitiful in how it retread the same surface level cartoonish villainy of Bowser kidnapping the princess. Nintendo certainly makes games that are fun to play, but as an adult, I've come to expect more from art, and plenty of the games on Steam actually respect the capability of their audience to not turn off their brains.
Comment · 1 year ago
We used to have such a thing: it was called HTML. Sites were supposed to have their content in the HTML, and if JS wasn't enabled, you'd still get the semantic hypertext. A vast majority of web pages are text and images, and don't actually require fancy CSS/JS. But the ship of progressive enhancement has long sailed,[0] and tons of static sites have JS, and all the hundreds of APIs that entails, baked into their functionality. Hell, there are many sites nowadays that will use JS to stream the HTML to your device for some reason.

[0]: JQuery/AJAX were probably the beginning of the end. But even without those, you had developers doing things like putting main images in CSS using the background property, overloading text with icon fonts, loading videos using "blob:" crap, or other abuse of semantics. Once it became possible to push more state to the browser instead of the server, the floodgates opened. I remember in the dial-up days, you could take a browser offline, and webpages would function perfectly, yet now, even hitting the back button can be a gamble. Now, hitting File > Save fails 95% of the time for me.

Comment · 2 years ago
I found it interesting that he wasn't allowed to read the obits themselves, so wouldn't even know if the subject was a human or dog. One might argue some distancing helps for these kinds of moderation jobs, but also sounds dehumanizing to not have any context at all.

Also of note is that he spent a lot of time keeping the comments "safe and sugarcoated", even deleting comments referencing "family fallouts and estrangement". There's such a strange culture around sanitizing people's images after their death and pretending they were angels. Some people were legitimate pieces of shit in life, and silencing those harmed by them in the interest of being politically correct sounds unfair to me. Caring only about letting their supporters grieve without having to think about the deceased's complexities, while for example, preventing those who were abused by them from voicing their thoughts seems to want to preserve order by sweeping anything unseemly under the rug.

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago

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