Congrats, and here’s to a new you.

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That was a good read and this Thea Lim is a good writer.

LLMs are an amazing party trick. I can see how many people could fall under the spell. I also had a brief honeymoon with chatgpt and sometimes claude about a year ago.

Thankfully I have always been interested in AI and machine learning and was passingly familiar with Bayes, was just getting into Markov models, and studying Numenta’s system right as the LLMs started hitting the public space. That helped me approach the interactions in a detached way.

Initially, the experience of interacting with something that is both ‘on your level’ and ‘exponentially more knowledgeable’ than you is pretty exhilarating. Every interest is a potential cluster bomb of rabbit holes to run down.

I did all the things you do with a new tool/toy: modded it, tweaked it, tried to see how it worked on the inside, probed its abilities and explored its limitations.

After a few weeks though, a persistent feeling of what I can only describe as the ‘uncanny valley effect of interaction’ kind of rubbed the charm off.

Couple that with keeping a closer eye on the news surrounding the big tech players and you start to get a better sense of the tremendous extent of the grossly unethical practices that went into shoving these products into the hands of everyone.

Once the news broke about openAI taking that DoD contract I said that’s enough for me and wiped the data and deleted the app.

Kind of shame. While llms are much more limited than their veneer of agency suggests, they still are pretty powerful tools in the right roles.

The potential is awesome… if they weren’t already tainted by theft, fraud, and now employed in the manipulation of the minds of the people at scale. Every new model is now more suspect than the last.

Too bad the roadmap every big player has used consists of making the worst possible choices to rush these models to the market. Once again, the overwhelming greed of the capitalists class has poisoned the fruit of decades of scientific research and unleashed a dangerous swarm of threats upon the future of society well before we were ready to grapple with the implications.

A gallant knight to the rescue

Ah, one of my first jobs involved coming in earlier than everyone else and starting up the inventory management program on the AS/400. Never even saw the machine itself, just connected via command prompt through my desktop and typed in some instructions.

No, I generally assume good intentions from others, especially on Lemmy, even when they’re not exactly picking up what I’m putting down. On the occasions when it does anger me it’s usually because either my ego is especially sensitive that day, or I’m irritated by something else, hunger, life frustrations, etc. and it’s bleeding through in my interactions with others.

Thankfully when I find myself yelling at clouds online, somebody usually reminds me to relax, let go of the ego, and the people I’m talking to are just humans, too, and I should exercise the same patience with them as I would like for myself.

Lol, Ok, grandpa, let’s get you into bed.

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They look shocked to be outside their box

I feel sorry for these people when I read stories like these. They’re pushing themselves so hard physically and emotionally, their head’s in a weird place, their judgement is off and they end up humiliating themselves on the world stage. Virtually the entire world. The worst kind of fame. This person’s life is over. They will forever be the point of ridicule by everyone.

Can you imagine waking up every day, your career is totally over, having to face that. Knowing that the whole world has seen what you did in the heat of the moment. You have let down every one who supported you, your family, and failed your life’s goal in the most embarrassing way possible. To hide yourself away in miserable shame is the best you could possibly hope for.

And it just doesn’t go away, now you have to get on camera to apologize and explain it away. You have to make statements. You have to watch clips of it over and over. Everywhere you go people are talking about you in hushed mocking wispers. Everything you do will have an asterisk near it. One fucked up moment overshadows everything else you will ever do from here on out. For the rest of your life.

That’s a hard burden to carry.

Wait, a fish fucker AND a pervert?? Man, that guy’s got a lot going on.

When an engineer fixes a car.

Nice work!

Nice.

We use that style crimper. Ours are some rebrand from Automation Direct. They do the job. Ferrules are SOP in my life now.

It’s gonna turn your mouth gay.

Maybe it’ll only turn it bi if you don’t go for the back of the tongue every time.

Shrugs Meh, there’s worse fates, and hey, that’s two extra bucks in your pocket.

No. But I wasn’t doing anything particularly complex, just a LAMP stack server for some game forums. Think I had a Dell desktop. Was a dishwasher at the time.

Took a few days fumbling through tutorials but I eventually got it up and running. Repeated that a few times over the years, once to host a blog, stuff like that.

Would like to get into it again but all I have now is a tablet.

Ah, a fellow controls guy out in the wild.

Pour one out for Okcupid. In its heyday it was such a fun site.

For sure!

Yeah, that was a pretty uncharitable take on my part. I love all those you listed.