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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • That's fine. It just reads to me sometimes as if people in the comment sections are angry at YouTube for trying to uphold a stream of revenue, when it's the only thing that makes the platform possible. Personally I think YouTube has been a huge boon, I've learned so much from people who post on the platform and I don't want to see it go away (which is not to say that it doesn't have huge issues). So I'm fine with paying in some manner, at least until a better alternative comes up. If you don't think it's worth it, great for you, go and do whatever you think brings value to your life. But I don't understand the vitriol or sense of entitlement to getting a costly service free of charge.





  • I just think Microsoft Word is actively making the entire world less efficient. It's not made to produce documents that are easy to read. Don't have an obvious contender though. LibreOffice Writer just tries to be the same shitty product but free, LaTeX is way too technical and has horrible error handling. Markdown usability and quality breaks down if you make any serious use of tables and figures.

    Since I'm not a US citizen I also think it's a threat to our country that our entire administration and every company is dependent on storing documents in an effectively proprietary format controlled by a US company, on cloud servers controlled by a US company. If compelled by the US government, Microsoft could put all of EU to a halt with the flick of a switch. National security calls for formats as central as this to be open standards supported by multiple competing products.


  • tias@discuss.tchncs.detoTechnology@lemmy.mlToday's AI is unreasonable
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    6 months ago

    The article makes several claims and insinuations without backing them up so I find it hard to follow any of the reasoning.

    I don't think it's desirable that it's easier to reason about an AI than about a human. If it is, then we haven't achieved human-level intelligence. I posit that human intelligence can be reasoned about given enough understanding but we're not there yet, and until we are we shouldn't expect to be able to reason about AI either. If we could, it's just a sign that the AI is not advanced enough to fulfill its purpose.

    Postel's law IMHO is a big mistake - it's what gave us Internet Explorer and arbitrary unpredictable interpretation of HTML, leading to decades of browser incompatibility problems. But the law is not even applicable here. Unlike the Internet, we want the AI to appear to think for itself rather than being predictable.

    "Today's highly-hyped generative AI systems (most famously OpenAI) are designed to generate bullshit by design." Uh no? They're designed with the goal to generate useful content. The bullshit is just an unfortunate side effect because today's AI algorithms have not evolved very far yet.

    If I had to summarize this article in one word, that would be it: bullshit.









  • tias@discuss.tchncs.detoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlDateTime
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    9 months ago

    To do that you first need to choose a calendar and a time zone, then convert to that representation. It can be done, but you need a good implementation that understands the entire history of what has transpired w.r.t. to date conventions in that location and culture. For timestamps in the future it is impossible to do correctly, since you can't know how date conventions will change in the future.

    However, I should add that as far as mathematical operations go, calculating the number of months between t1 and t2 is an entirely different thing than the duration of time that passed between those timestamps. Even if it is expressed similarly in the English language, semantically it's something else. It's like asking "how many kilometers did your car go" vs "how many houses did the car pass on the way".


  • tias@discuss.tchncs.detoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlDateTime
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    edit-2
    9 months ago

    I feel like this is a solved and simple problem as long as there are no relativistic effects. Just make sure t1 and t2 are represented as seconds since a known reference time, e.g. Unix epoch, and make sure that measure is accurate. You don't need to bring the Gregorian calendar into it, use TAI represented as an integer.