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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • This is a great conversation because I’m one of those people who’s terrible at arithmetic, but quite good at math. As in: I can look at a function, visualize it in 3D space, see what different max, mins and surfaces are dominated by what terms etc, but don’t ask me to tally a meal check. I’d be useless at applying any math without a calculator.

    Similarly, there’s a lot of engineers out there that use CAD extensively that would probably not be engineers if they had to do drafting by hand.

    The oatmeal did a comic that distilled this for me where they talked about why they didn’t like AI “art”. They made the point that in making a drawing, there are a million little choices made reconciling what’s in your head with what you can do on the page. Either from the medium, what you’re good at drawing, whatever, it’s those choices that give the work “soul”. Same thing for writing. Those choices are where learning, development, and style happen, and what generative AI takes away.

    That helped crystalize for me the difference between a tool and autocomplete on steroids.

    Edit: to add: you’re statement “I claim to understand but don’t” hits it on the head and is similar to why you have to be careful if plagiarism in citing academic review papers. If you write YOUR paper in a way that agrees with the review but discuss the paper the review was referencing, and, even accidentally, skip over that the conclusion you’re putting forward is from the review, not the paper you’re both citing, that’s plagiarism. Notion being you misrepresented their thoughts as your own. That is basically ALL generative AI.




  • Something like 98% of what you see in the night sky is already out of our reach. If you left right now, at the speed of light, you would never, ever, reach them.

    Another consequence of that is that some day the light from those stars will also be unable to reach us. They’ll still be there, same as the day before, but not one shred of information from them will be attainable.

    If you could go to this future, you would have no way of convincing people, except say, the ancient texts. To some extent it would not even matter because again, existing or not, there is no way for them to interact.

    98% of what’s in the night sky would just have to be taken on faith.

    Im not advocating religion here I just always thought there was some poetry in that.










  • Oh I’ve loved it so far. And you’re right on the “what you learn is more useful”. Like I’d done a fair amount of hobby/work prototype stuff on rasbian, and eventually went “man, it’d be great if this but more horsepower” and wound up Debian.

    Anyway, my point is despite doing a fair amount of coding, and circuit level electronics including troubleshooting comms and all the fun things like race conditions that go into that, I had zero idea how a computer was actually arranged. Troubleshooting Debian helped me with that and is infinitely transferable as opposed to being a tip and trick with windows.

    But my original comment was just about Nvidia cards. I’ve had some I just slot in and they work, and some I have to spend an afternoon troubleshooting. Still reinforces your point though, troubleshooting it the first time was how I learned how things actually get displayed.