syntheticnature

Joined 13 years ago

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1,978
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649
Member since
Dec 5
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Comment · 19 days ago
Comment · 19 days ago
I think this is why consider the willingness to say "I don't know" a trust signal
Comment · 19 days ago
Exactly. I'd rather have a quick "I don't know" than wait for them to generate a reply that is likely to be wrong because I already asked the same models myself before consulting a human. If they generate a reply, I get to tell them exactly how the response is wrong, since the core content is usually the same. Only then do I get the "I don't know."

There are a few people I can tell are better at prompting than I am. Them, I'll tolerate this from, though most of them do more than function as an AI proxy anyhow and usually will say "I don't know, I'll check X" first.

Comment · 24 days ago
Seems like an even worse time investment; warn people about the fabulist, yes, but never expect there will be some change of behavior like you might get in a children's show.
Comment · 24 days ago
(2020)

I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.

There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.

They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.

Comment · 1 month ago
It's a full-up Android phone, they want to make sure no one complains versus Their Favorite App not having enough RAM.
Comment · 1 month ago
I know some of that found its way to http://textfiles.com/ whose owner is associated with the Archive Team -- though it's focused on text rather than executables, of course.
Comment · 2 months ago
Huh, looks she has an entire food line. Wonder if this is planned to be an income stream for some of her charities, similar to Newman's Own.
Comment · 2 months ago
Hey Slack, how about making workflows less of a pain in the neck to use? In them there is no ability to have branches rejoin to a common path. Worse, an item isn't found in a list it just throws an exception instead of giving me a null item, which oddly I can test for in an if even though it will never happen?
Comment · 2 months ago
I think I spent more time figuring out how the character save files worked in the original Bard's Tale CRPG than actually playing the game; I certainly made more progress with doing so!
Comment · 2 months ago
As a kid I modified DONKEY.BAS for my younger brother who wanted to play as a donkey avoiding cars. It was a clumsy modification, I didn't account for the differing size of the pseudo-sprites, but it made him happy.
Comment · 2 months ago
They'll clean up instances that aren't doing enough for them to notice, even -- I used to run an XMPP server on one, used daily but not with many users, and they kept shutting it down at random multi-day intervals with little warning. Stopped using it.
Comment · 2 months ago
It confused me at the time, mainly because I had a class with written-out C and one with written-out Pascal in the same semester. The Pascal prof wouldn't mark off for C syntax but the C one would would mark off for Pascal syntax.
Comment · 3 months ago
Yes, this is extremely common, both as a continuity means and/or as a localized password manager. Know someone who uses a Rolodex for hers, which is funny and yet it works.

Doesn't work well in office environments, but at home the local threat model is largely fine with this.

Comment · 3 months ago
In the end everything is delayed trash. Some trash is recyclable/compostable/etc.

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