men are such fucking spineless dweebs they took a meme about how women fear for their very lives around strange men and compared it to men thinking women don’t understand their fee-fees
@unlucio@darkling@cstross
If you hire a software engineer and they're wrong 52% of the time, they may still be an excellent hire if they're a good learner, open to feedback, conscientious, etc
ChatGPT is not, it has no facility to learn or handle feedback beyond the session (if that), nothing
@unlucio@darkling@cstross
If I spend longer than it would have taken me to do it myself helping a junior engineer through a problem, I've helped them grow, to the benefit of them and the team
If I spend longer than it would have taken me to do it myself helping ChatGPT through a problem, I've wasted my time
The way sentences containing the German character ß get longer when uppercased was specially designed to create memory problems in C programs doing string handling
@stfn@radovan@foone
It can make a big difference in Czech, too, for example "v čele" (in the lead) vs "v cele" (in the clink) makes a big difference when discussing politicians
Even there, the intended meaning is often obvious from context
A friend recommended a newsletter for executives in tech and today's issue had a link to a blog post advising tech leaders on how to get better at asking questions. It had this... illustration...
I am confident the author had no idea how much this graphic torpedoed my trust in them. I am realizing that often people who use AI art don't understand how art works
If I had more energy I'd be tempted to write a snarky, satirical, 21st century Jetson's style short story set in a future where all the dot-com 1.0-3.0 hype turned out to be true and faithful predictions of our lives in 2025. Just so I could explore the unanticipated drawbacks ("oops, the Amazon drone delivering your neighbour's new dishwasher just fell through your roof; meanwhile trades.com only shows you roofers who live in Boston, England, not Boston, MA"). https://aus.social/@ajsadauskas/112317411058906212
Every time I see any story about how fucked scholarly communication is my first reaction is a) yall know you can just make your own websites right, b) yall know you can just review each others work without a journal giving you permission right, and only then do I arrive at c) ok there are systemic problems but seriously have you considered (a) and (b) and how this is all entirely optional
@jonny@villavelius
Right, how do you get hired and promoted when what you've done is posted shit online and what the research institutions expect on your CV are (at the end of the day) Elsevier trademarks
Thinking about world building & the consequences of “too much” history. In many sci-fi tales parts of history are forgotten— some cataclysm results in a society with about as much history as we have: some 20k years with the last 2000 being most referenced and the last 100 (living memory) of real consequence.
But what if you had a million years of detailed written history? What about a billion? I think there is a reason so many sci-fi stories have the trope “we forgot the location of earth”
@chrispackham@futurebird
Hmm, what's the oldest extant tradition we have in the real world? Both Nowruz (Persian) and the Mid-Autumn Festival (Chinese) claim over 3,000 years...
Some of the indigenous traditions will also be pretty old, if harder to date accurately
Remember when the FSF went to the mat for Stallman a few years ago? Since I was writing about open source governance, I remembered it about a thousand times in the last week. It just keeps making me sad, honestly.
There is this Fermi Paradox "solution" that's all about how it's not possible to create controlled fire on many planets. Too much or too little O2. Life that lives in water or other liquids has no access to fire. And the logic goes: no fire, no metal working, no technology, no space faring life.
But hold on just a damn min. Is fire the only way to heat metal to work it? Is fire the only way to control heat? Fire is a controlled oxidation-- but oxidation has many forms.
April 2, 2024- 🤔 “A study by Columbia researchers now shows that far-UVC light inactivated nearly all (greater than 99%) of an airborne virus in an occupied work environment, showing that the technology can work as well in a real-life scenario as in the laboratory. The paper is published in the journal Scientific Reports.”- https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-04-uvc-virtually-airborne-virus-occupied.html
