Carnelian

I almost never encounter it anymore because I habitually just open a new tab for everything. A habit I started doing because encountering it made me so angry I almost swore off computers altogether Super niche adjacent rage but shoutout to max-for-live developers who implement their Ableton plugins as a series of user actions so that the instant you touch the plugin it detonates your entire undo history

Thank you! It is a privilege and a joy to have made such a remarkable improvement to your life!

Sadly the sum of all natural numbers is not actually -1/12. It’s a divergent sum. You could call it infinity. There’s a little parlor trick that maths teachers like to perform where they do algebraic manipulation on a simple formula, eventually cancelling out the variables and arriving at some absurd statement like 1=2. The game is for the students to figure out what went wrong. The trick is always that at some point, snuck into the progression, you ended up dividing something by “(X-X)” before moving on, seemingly without violating any algebraic rules. Very astute students (or ones who were warned by students from earlier classes haha) will notice that right at that point in time, you are in fact attempting to divide by zero, which is not possible. So the reason you ended up with 1=2 is because you applied rules to something which they definitionally cannot apply to. At that point, the equation became *undefined*. …the funny thing though, is you *were* able to just…continue. And get *something* to come out. Now, in this case, that thing was utter nonsense. An amusement for children to help teach them of various pitfalls they might fall into when playing with numbers. But what if you were one of the most brilliant mathematicians who ever lived, and you were concerning yourself with questions such as, “What would happen if I took [1 + 2 + 3 + 4+ 5….], and subtracted [1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5…]” Now, those are both divergent sums. So we could just call them both infinity. But the second infinity just kind of…*feels* smaller, doesn’t it? It feels like you *should* be able to just…perform some type of operation and get…*something* to come out. It wouldn’t be “correct” to do so, but this is basically what Ramanujan did. Illegal math. With a nonsense output of negative -1/12. The funny thing though is that this “nonsense output” is actually now a cornerstone of quantum mechanics. It turns out we subtract diverging infinites from each other literally all the time, even just by walking around, and that pesky little -1/12 trick has proven to be consistently useful. Astonishing. He died a preventable death at 32. Imagine what the world might have looked like today if only he could have dreamed a little longer, asked more impossible questions, and broken more rules. Specifically he died after a bout of dysentery, in case anyone is confused why they’re reading all this in the shit posting community

I’ve done several assessments of the output of popular llms in my field of expertise. I generally conclude that they are “worse than worthless”, because they actively try to persuade you of false information. Your whole thesis about people whose output is “lesser” than llms is totally misguided. Yes there is a systemic research and comprehension issue. No, the AI doesn’t help people with it. What I’ve observed is that people don’t really ever defer to the AI if it coincidently contradicts their beliefs, they just coax it until it says whatever they want, then end up problematically overconfident because “the ai told them so” I could keep replying in regards to the unmotivated school children and the inappropriate reformatted analogy but what’s the point if you’re just gonna be a broken record? We all understand that you think most people are morons and that you and your buddies have deep talks about AI in which you’ve concluded that nobody can really “know” anything well enough to comment on their capabilities, but in spite of this you personally are able to not just “know” what it is capable of but even how it stacks up against against different types of humans. The line of reasoning is totally absurd

Do you think you’re helping the situation in any way by cobbling together random unrelated memories from a decade ago with unsubstantiated proclamations about the state of the modern industry? Bro literally just said computers do not possess cognition or the ability to perform research, and you retorted with a list of qualifications implying that educated people believe the opposite. But instead of actually furthering your position you’re just making broad statements about how nobody can possibly understand the technology, or the brain itself, because they are too complicated. Buddy. Nobody understands the complexities of physics enough to fully explain the myriad of processes and byproducts responsible for and resulting from the combustion of gasoline. Yet here we live all the same, in defiance of our ignorance, with working cars and shady car salesmen making specific false marketing claims about their vehicles. Literally it’s the same as if someone said cars don’t have full self driving and you retorted by saying you worked at Toyota (leaving out how you left that job ten years ago) and furthermore nobody even understands how humans make driving decisions. Then calling everyone else out for their “uninformed assumptions” as if you didn’t just perform the conversational equivalent of crashing your vehicle into a parked car

Oh, gotcha Just so we can get on the same page, the field of “machine learning” at that point in time (and even still today) is a completely different animal than the current wave of parasitic “AI” products that are being aggressively marketed. We need to be extremely clear when differentiating the two and understanding the thru-line, because the marketeers are intentionally trying to obfuscate the difference. For instance when you reply to someone who is talking about the capabilities of LLMs, you should be very clear when you start referring to the discussions machine learning experts used to have a decade ago. A lot has happened in that time

I worked for the largest AI researcher in the world

Wow the rhetoric coming directly from investor-bait think tanks characterizes the technology in a positive light? Tell me more

Hence the book!

Can do whatever you want really, it’s your time after all! For one example, I prefer trail running but if conditions don’t permit it I just hit the treadmill with an audiobook. We could probably make a whole separate post for this! Ask people if they’re night owls or morning maniacs, and what they like to do with that time

The key is not to give the best hours of your life to your employer. If that’s the first 2-3 hours after you wake up, then wake up rebelliously early and rock out before work. Way to tell is you normally find yourself coming home from work and basically collapsing and not being able to fully engage with the things you love. If that’s you, it’s worth giving the early bird thing a fair chance. Of course, if you know in your bones that that just ain’t you and life begins at 9pm, then get your groove on then and don’t worry about what the morning people are saying. In a different life the two of you would have just taken different shifts keeping watch to defend the village from wolves and stuff. Important thing is just finding what works best for you

In that situation it would be a kindness for you to take the specialized sources you’ve found and add them to articles, to save the next person a little trouble

Wow a whole year of being cuddled and fed spaghetti??

Dead in 20 minutes tops

The fact we can see the kid at all is actually pretty impressive for american trucks

Almost a full kg of sugar if the display case had 48 bars

Did she ever come back around on you? If only we could explain things to them haha

I was gonna say 9 as well, but I only remember the Coheed and Cambria trailer

Genuinely, is this rage bait? $100, non replaceable battery, does absolutely nothing besides stream audio recordings to an llm on your phone that is 100% guaranteed to produce a worthless error ridden transcript, and my personal favorite, Unlike recording notes with a phone or smartwatch, you don’t need both hands to create voice notes with the Index. Is this a joke? Why do I need both hands to record a voice note with a phone?