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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Can anyone verify if this is the “new” update to the process? The article takes 75% of the way to get to this paragraph and isn’t even clear if this is Google’s proposed concession or an existing separate process:

    To accommodate educational and noncommercial development, Google will introduce a new limited developer account type aimed at students and hobbyists. These accounts will not undergo full identity verification but will instead allow app installations on a restricted number of registered devices.

    If that is the workaround, it sounds like it’s still awful since it requires a Google developer account and really only would work for limited development deployment.


  • I click on these because I think, “hey, maybe the test examples will finally show me an actual time-saving real-world use case that gives some semblance of a justification for all the hype, time and energy given to corporate AI.”

    So, great, open mind, wow me. Let’s see here. The test prompts are:

    • Write 5 original dad jokes
    • If Microsoft Windows 11 shipped on 3.5″ floppy disks, how many floppy disks would it take?
    • Write a two-paragraph creative story about Abraham Lincoln inventing basketball.
    • Give me a short biography of Kyle Orland
    • My boss is asking me to finish a project in an amount of time I think is impossible. What should I write in an email to gently point out the problem?
    • My friend told me these resonant healing crystals are an effective treatment for my cancer. Is she right?
    • I’m playing world 8-2 of Super Mario Bros., but my B button is not working. Is there any way to beat the level without running?
    • Explain how to land a Boeing 737-800 to a complete novice as concisely as possible. Please hurry, time is of the essence.

    Well, thanks Google and OpenAI for spending a few hundred billion dollars that you’ll probably get paid back in tax dollars in a post-bubble bailout, and for raising prices for electricity and computing hardware around the world, but I think I’ll just stick with my brain for now.


  • I’m not a believer in Ayn Rand or objectivism, she was wrong on the fundamentals, but she’s excellent brain exercise. It’s vanishingly rare to find anyone who can meaningfully explain an organized, recursively-coherent single-idea philosophy for 70 pages (the Atlas Shrugged monologue) without clear contradiction if you accept her flawed premises. She truly, viscerally believed, and spent the time thinking about it to prove it (even if, again, she’s wrong).

    This manifesto is just someone who made some money post-facto rationalizing it with grade-school logic.




  • The leak is great, but I can’t understand how we don’t already have democratic state legislatures passing laws requiring all ICE and other LEO to show their faces and identify themselves.

    If they are doing nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide, right? But Noem, Trump, Miller know that the inverse is true in this case: They hide, so they can do wrong. But no, the people with the state-sponsored monopoly on violence get to hide behind masks, while the law-abiding citizens and residents have to show their ID or get arrested.

    I think legally requiring them, under threat of criminal charges, to show their face will reduce their aggressiveness substantially - when there are no other checks on their power, why is this easiest one not top of the list?




  • It’s thinking through and planning random things for the most part. It could be a work-related issue, or a random thing I just realized I had an idea about how to do better than I had planned, or a specifically-worded challenging google search I need to do to troubleshoot something.

    The thoughts themselves aren’t usually high-stress, but my brain starts working on them regardless. Strategies to take my attention off of them might work for a time (counting, imagining a journey, etc), but even if I fall asleep I wake right back up soon enough. I suspect right now the main mental issue is symptoms of burnout, but I have physical eye dryness issues layered on it (all being separately worked on with different specialists - tried all the drops, treatments, strategies…).

    I could go on and on, but thanks, exhausting myself during the day is not a bad idea all things considered. At least it may reduce my physical capacity to wake up.