I just wanted to look up 9V block battery prices online and these automatically generated descriptions are getting dumber by the minute:

Datum der Erzeugung: Verfallsdatum minus 7 Jahre

(Date of manufacturing: expiration date minus 7 years)

Or look at this one:

Die leistungsstarke 9 V-Block E Batterie, auch 6LR61 genannt, eignet sich besonders gut für Taschenlampen, Radio oder Kinderspielzeug, die einen gleichbleibenden Strombedarf haben. Ihre max. Spannung beträgt 1,5 V.

(The high performance 9 V block E battery, also known as 6LR61, is particularly suitable for torches, radio or child’s toys, which have a steady power demand. Its max. voltage is 1.5 V.)

The battery is best suited for… devices where it fits. No shit, Sherlock! Has anyboy ever come across 9V block torches? O_o I haven’t.

Jumping Frog Radius
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Apparently MTD of uknowingly toggling mouse on in tmux for the first time is 1.5 agonizing days

↳ In-reply-to » @bender Thanks for this illustration, it completely “misunderstood” everything I wrote and confidently spat out garbage. 👌

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

Skill Erosion vs. Skill Evolution

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

tl;dr

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

Never again

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They are optional dependencies and listed as such:

$ pacman -Qi pinentry
Name            : pinentry
Version         : 1.3.1-5
Description     : Collection of simple PIN or passphrase entry dialogs which
                  utilize the Assuan protocol
Optional Deps   : gcr: GNOME backend [installed]
                  gtk3: GTK backend [installed]
                  qt5-x11extras: Qt5 backend [installed]
                  kwayland5: Qt5 backend
                  kguiaddons: Qt6 backend
                  kwindowsystem: Qt6 backend

And it’s probably a good thing that they’re optional. I wouldn’t want to have all that installed all the time.

↳ In-reply-to » i wish it was realistic for me to learn golang but every single time i try to comprehend any go code i'm like What the fuck am i looking at. why is all of this so short and condensed GIVE ME VERBOSE CODE

@movq@www.uninformativ.de i feel like when i read go code i’m reading some algebra shit where every part is 1-5 letters long and then there’s weird symbols like := and it’s just infinitely harder for me to parse and infer meaning from lol. it’s such a me problem

Bluesky Passes Threads for Active Website Users, But Confronts ‘Scammers and Impersonators’
Bluesky now has more active website users than Threads in the U.S., according to a graph from the Financial Times. And though Threads still leads in app usage, “Prior to November 5 Threads had five times more daily active users in the U.S. than Bluesky… Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger tha … ⌘ Read more

China unveils $1.4 trillion stimulus package + 1 more story
China launches a $1.4 trillion fiscal package to support its economy; Earth is set to experience its hottest year ever, exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius. ⌘ Read more

↳ In-reply-to » @bender I don't mind the character limit. If I hit it and I still have more to say, it's a good reminder that I should probably write a note instead. I like to POSSE anything that might have value outside of the current conversation.

@mckinley@twtxt.net, in your blog, I think a “line-heigh” of 1.5 (if I remember correctly you are setting it on the “body” on CSS) will make it more legible.

Experts warn ‘green growth’ in high income countries is not happening, call for ‘post-growth’ climate policies
The emission reductions in the 11 high-income countries that have “decoupled” CO2 emissions from Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fall far short of the reductions that are necessary to limit global warming to 1.5°C or even just to “well below 2°C” and comply with international fairness principles, as required by the Paris Agreement, according to a paper published in The Lancet Planetary Health j … ⌘ Read more

I played with nlpodyssey/verbaflow: Neural Language Model for Go today a little bit today…. First I had to download a ~2GB file (the model), then convert that to a format the program verbaflow understands which came out to roughly ~5GB. Then I tried some of the samples in the README. My god, this this is so goddamn awfully slow its like watching paint dry 😱 All just to predict the next few tokens?! 😳 I had a look at the resource utilisation as well as it was trying to do this “work”, using 100% of 1.5 Cores and ~10GB of Memory 😳 Who da fuq actually thinks any of this large language model (LLM) and neural network crap is actually any good or useful? 🤔 Its just garbage 🤣

Started with

a concept sketch of a full body end-time factory worker on a distant planet, cyberpunk light brown suite, (badass), looking up at the viewer, 2d, line drawing, (pencil sketch:0.3), (caricature:0.2), watercolor city sketch,
Negative prompt: EasyNegativ, bad-hands-5, 3d, photo, naked, sexy, disproportionate, ugly
Steps: 20, Sampler: Euler a, CFG scale: 7, Seed: 2479087078, Face restoration: GFPGAN, Size: 512x768, Model hash: 2ee2a2bf90, Model: mimic_v10, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires upscale: 1.5, Hires upscaler: Latent

My nutritional supplements aim should be:

• 1 or 1.5 cups of lentils (or any beans you might like better).
  
• 2 or 2.5 cups of bitter greens.
  
• 1 cup of your favourite protein (or an egg), grilled, or fried with a little of olive oil.
  
• 1 or 2 tomatoes, or a handful if of the cherry type.
  
• No added sugars. If it is sweet, make it have fibre.
  
• No added salt (or very little and ionised), as salt is everywhere.
  

Related, I tried wild rice for the first time yesterday. It was different, in a good way.

When you want someone, you don’t say that you need that someone. Tell them “I want to be the person you need”. “Ssanggabpocha” Episode #1.5 (TV Episode 2020) - IMDb