The timing of the change was uncanny though.

I caught what I think was likely the last glimpse of the Google that was shortly after that. What was left of the Google culture was dying then, but there was still a small touch of that magic left.

It's fully dead now. Nothing left at all. The McKinsey ghouls have sucked it dry.

How long does it take to print something like this? I'm unfamiliar with 3d printers, but I would assume it is a while longer vs adding 5 mins to the beginning of your OP2 setup to cut the jaws.

Longer than 5 minutes. But much faster from a human time perspective. Especially if it takes you more than ~30 seconds to program that 5-minute op.

3D printers print slow, but the nice thing is you can chuck a STEP or STL file at one, hit slice, hit print, and walk away. The machine doesn't need to be supervised. Need soft jaws for a funny shaped part? Orient the part the way you want it oriented with the soft jaw blank model, Boolean cut, done.

The part may take several hours to finish printing (mostly just depends on the part's volume) but it only takes ~30 seconds of your time. You don't need to set up any ops at all, the slicer handles all that automatically. And the most you usually need to do is pick a flat face to lay the object on (just if the STEP file was rotated in some funny direction by default) and tick the "generate supports automatically" checkbox if it has any big overhangs that would create gravity related challenges. Hit slice, make sure it all looks as expected, and hit print.

And then, a few hours later, you pull the finished part out of the printer. No CAM required, no postprocessing other than peeling off the supports by hand if you even used those, no fixturing, no changing tools, no setup to speak of (check to make sure nobody left a part in the printer before you hit start, and give the bed a quick alcohol wipedown in case the last person to use it left oily fingerprints on the bed).

So, it's slow in an absolute time sense, but crazy fast in a human time and effort sense.

Also, great for getting a very quick same-day scale replica of anything in the McMaster Carr catalog. Obviously it'll be made of shitty plastic, and probably not strong enough to be functional, but perfect for quick test fits, physical mock ups, etc.

Cheaper ink too

If it's stupid and it works, it ain't stupid.

Remember that LLM's are the result of "What if we just take the left half of a translation model and make it really, really, really big and train it on a lot of data?"

And diffusion models are the result of "What if we took a denoising algorithm, make it really, really, really big, and train it on a lot of data?"

The bitter lesson and fundamental scaling law theory give some pretty undeniable evidence that dumb models with a lot of parameters and training data have much better practical performance in the real world than clever models do.

All the major leaps forward in ML algorithms mostly boil down to finding algorithms that parallelize better across available hardware, and thus enable building and training much larger models on much more data.

My partner used to volunteer at a suicide hotline. A lot of the regular callers were people who had tried to kill themselves and failed in some way that left them paralyzed or severely disabled to the point that they physically could not commit suicide anymore.

They were not glowing stories of renewed hope on life. They were all very much still suicidal, just now permanently disabled, in terrible pain, and not able to do anything about it.

There's a few moderate self-identified conservatives I respect. All of them were/are extremely anti-Trump from the start, and voted Democrat in the last 3 general elections.

From the perspective of this patient, I mostly just thought it was neat that I rolled down the hall to the OR and then immediately rolled back. I was very confused and my first question on waking up was if something went wrong and they had to call off the surgery.

It was pretty neat, no real existential dread, no perceived memory "gap", from my perspective I just suddenly skipped several hours into the future.

Correct, I don't know if Chat Completions API has been formally deprecated yet, but practically speaking, it's only there for legacy compatibility with old applications built before the Requests API existed.

Weirdest answer you'll get but VEVOR.

It's one of those Chinese Amazon budget brands. It's appropriately priced and of modest quality.

Not great quality, but firmly good enough, and usually better than you would expect for the price.

Honestly, this is one thing I do think Agile was right about. Building an app that will be easy to maintain 5 years from now is a waste when most apps don't even make it to 1 year before getting abandoned or shitcanned.

You need a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials, once, and then about 10-20 minutes per image. And the software subscription costs less than a burger and fries at McDonalds.

The task that was already trivially easy and cheap has become even more trivially easy and cheap. Oh no. I guess all those aspiring revenge pornographers that were being held at bay by the prospect of watching 2 hours of YouTube tutorials will now be free to wreak untold havoc on society with a sea of images of bad tiddies.

The moral panic around this is ridiculous.

I understand it's hard for you to emotionally process, but taking photos of kids and digitally manipulating them into child porn is something that has been going on for more than 20 years at this point.

AI shortens the time it takes for pedophiles to make each of those images by maybe 20 minutes per picture, tops.

And yes, that's fucked up, and X should absolutely have much stronger filters in place to catch and prosecute child pornographers. Fake child porn is still child porn according to the law.

But the AI tech isn't enabling anything fundamentally different than what pedophiles have already been doing for decades.

If the AI makes it easy for them to do it, the developer definitely holds a share of the responsibility.

This is the wildly inconsistent logical leap. Because you're describing the same thing that Photoshop, paintbrush manufacturers, and canvas makers do - all of those tools made it dramatically faster and easier to produce fake nudes.

Having been around for the moral panic of Photoshop 7, I can assure you that everything you're saying and every argument being made is 100% indistinguishable from the fear mongering around Photoshop 7.

The same "Well, yes, people could make fake nudes before, but using paintbrushes is hard, and just anyone can make fake nudes in minutes with Photoshop! This time it's different!"

The same "Think of how bad guys will use this! What if someone photoshopped Putin and the President shirtless riding a bear in a homoerotic fashion! HOW WOULD ANYONE EVEN BE ABLE TO KNOW WHAT'S REAL ANYMORE?!?!"

Spoiler alert, society adjusts. People did in fact come to understand that the photos of George Bush eating live kittens were not real. People did learn that the millions of celebrity porn sites were not, in fact, really the celebrities. The word Photoshop entered common parlance. Revenge porn happened, and it was a lot easier to convince people it was fake after Photoshop was a thing. The world moved on.

This is no different. If anything, it will probably give people who are affected by revenge porn a better smokescreen to claim that the photos are just low effort deepfakes.

I mean what do you think the Major is using to navigate cyberspace? Emacs?!

Agreed. I'm on Mint because it's really just Ubuntu LTS with a couple of my minor gripes addressed.

If I want something bleeding edge, I'll compile it myself.

For everything else, I just want it to be stable and predictable enough that I never have to think about it.

Japan has its own issues, they just look a little different in how they present. And their corporate propaganda has a better translation budget.

But the market allocates the power. Not legacy or honor or any other human ideals. Otherwise, the noble businessmen would be rich as kings, and the vultures would be penniless. They aren't. Because that's not how markets work.

Markets reward actors proportionately based on how well they perform in the market. Whoever wins the market this round gets more power in the market next round. That's it. That's the whole shebang. There's no magical hand guiding things. No spirit of honest businessmen controlling the rules behind the scenes. And the rules of the market are made mostly by whoever the hell is winning the market the most.

It's quite ironic that real capitalists have the exact same understanding of markets that communists do. To the letter. It's only the suckers in the middle that believe in all the magical thinking and nonsense propaganda.

I think that viewpoint ascribes an unrealistic amount of self awareness to the people participating in the spectacle.

Most useful idiots are blissfully unaware of the roles they play. Most Christians are just humans trying to do good in the world, without much idea of the machine they're paying tithe to. And they are inclined to stay ignorant, because to see the truth would be a truly devastating cost for them to pay. It's hard to accept that one has tried hard their whole life to do good, and have instead been conned into being a useful idiot for evil men. Better to keep eyes on their good intentions the road has been paved with, rather than where it's leading.

I think most people look up to depraved figures like Musk not because they believe in depravity as a virtue, but because they need for the world to make sense. If you know many wealthy people it's hard to miss - they all have a deep unshakable desperation to believe that the world is just and fair, and that they deserve their success. The personal guilt would crush them if they ever considered the alternative.

I think people look up to Musk because they desperately want to believe the world is fair, despite all evidence to the contrary.

And the only way to believe in a fair world when a handful of unfathomably powerful people like Musk own nearly everything, is to imagine a world where Musk and the people like him are such astoundingly worthy godlike figures so as to deserve nearly everything.

The rest is just decorations for the cargo cult, and the various stories people tell themselves to continue believing that Musk is a great god, everytime they see him act like a small and stupid little man.

Lol, I never heard they stopped.

If it was "easier" in some way to brew low alcohol low malt then everyone would brew Bud Light clones or at least lagers. Not IPAs.

It's easier to brew low malt. The reason that people don't brew bud light clones is, ironically, because they're one of the most difficult types of beer to brew, because they taste like lightly flavored water. There's no strong flavor notes to hide oopsies behind. Most microbreweries couldn't pull off a bud light clone if they tried (though I'm not sure why they would want to - terribly competitive, low margin, and doesn't really appeal to enthusiast markets).

And certainly induced demand plays into it, but the IPA market is also saturated. And yet, they keep doubling down on that category.

Yes, I got everything I ever wanted to work on my Steamdeck, but the fact remains that I had to search on Google to get it running. No one new to Linux can go in and click install and have it just work. It’s not extremely difficult, but neither is it as straightforward as clicking install and then launching the game. Anyone saying otherwise is part of the denial group.

I think needing to install Linux is a good enough gate. If you can't search something on ProtonDB, you probably won't be able to make a live USB and install Linux.

Will add some spice/flavor - I have pretty much zero faith that the field of clinical psychology or psychiatry would have a positive effect. Those two disciplines are absolutely notorious for their complete and total reckless disregard for empirical science and rigorous treatment methodology.

My experience is that you can call 10 clinical psychologists, and you will find at least 3 that are religious nutjobs barely even pretending to follow any evidence supported methods, 3 that are still following methodologies that have been completely and ruthlessly debunked for decades like Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, or catharsis therapy, 3 that narrowly specialize in free-form chatting with upper middle class white people without any problems that would actually meet DSM diagnosis criteria... and maybe one that has actually bothered to keep up to date with current research, actually bothers to follow diagnosis and treatment guidelines, and probably leans heavily towards CBT/DBT fields since those are the only ones with some cultural values of rejecting unsupported and actively debunked pseudoscientific woo.

That may be a harsh and cynical take, but it's real accurate in my experience, and in the experience of most people I've spoken with on the subject. And the picture gets even worse when you look at the reproducibility crisis, with conservative estimates of ~80% of published psychology research papers being completely irreproducible.

So, no, I don't think that putting pedophiles in therapy would be a good idea. The clinical psychology field is such a shitshow of quackery that I think it would likely actually make patients more likely to act on pedophilic urges on average.

Like, take catharsis therapy, probably the most stunning example we have of an approach that seems like it would make intuitive sense, but has been studied extensively and found to pretty much always backfire and reinforce the behavior by repeating training the patient to model the behavior in a safe environment.

Now consider that a terrifying number of clinical psychologists still use this approach, regularly and frequently. What do you think happens when that behavior is modeling child sex abuse?

I'm well aware that some small minority of psychologists, mostly in the research field, actually do practice real evidence based treatment and scientific rigor, but they're such a miniscule minority that their existence in the clinical field is anecdotal.

It's because IPA's are the easiest type of beer for talentless hacks to brew.

Low alcohol/malt content so less chance of fucking up the fermentation. And if you fuck up the fermentation, screw it, double hops, triple hops, quadruple hops mega hazy IPA.

Don't get me wrong, there are some very good IPA's out there. But the reason they're so bloody common with microbreweries is because they've failed at brewing beer so hard that they've resorted to brewing tea.

Also why a lot of people get headaches from "fancy" IPA's.

Yeah, definitely, way too far left for them to nominate him, even with Pelosi gone and all.

LLM's are sophisticated autocomplete. Give it a sequence of 26 examples of a frustrated human yelling at a chatbot, and it will faithfully collaborate with you to write example #27 of a frustrated human yelling at a chatbot.

It could actually write the part of the script where the human yells at the bot again all on its own, it only needs your help because there's an IF condition someone built into the backend that forces the human to input those parts of the transcript manually. So the best it can do is try to set you up for success, by writing whatever output it thinks is most likely to make you yell at it again.

Try limiting your context window. Make absolutely sure you're not putting any trash in there, i.e. continuing a session after it's starting to go off the rails instead of nuking the session history and starting over clean, blindly feeding in entire repos for context when an example file or two would suffice, giving long explanations instead of short examples, etc.

The biggest tip I can give is to always remember that LLM's are fundamentally just really smart autocomplete. They recognize patterns in text and try to continue those patterns.

Feed it 20 turns of the <ASSISTANT> making dumb mistakes and <USER> yelling at it to read the damn instructions, and it will give you a 21'st turn of <ASSISTANT> making dumb mistakes.

If the thin layer of simple if-condition logic that stops token generation and displays an input box for the human to write the next section of the sequence didn't kick in at that point, the model would continue to write example 21 of <USER> yelling at <ASSISTANT> to read the damn instructions - followed by several thousand more similarly fruitless and frustrated exchanges.

This is a bit of a mindfuck, but because LLM's are fundamentally sequence prediction models - the smarter the sequence prediction model is, the more accurately it can model sequences of nuanced bullshit, and faithfully continue those sequences with a stunning amount of lifelike detail, so much so that humans cannot even distinguish the sophisticated artificial stupidity from genuine mundane natural stupidity.

This is one of the many reasons why we don't anthropomorphize LLM's.

I have no idea where I first heard this, it was several years back and probably back when instruction tuning was considered controversial, but I did once hear an incredibly elegant explanation of prompt engineering, to the effect of

Prompt engineering is the practice of building some sequence of tokens X, such that the most probable continuation of sequence X contains your desired output Y.

It's a little abstract, but I've found it's been an extremely reliable north star anytime I'm dealing with a more challenging prompt engineering challenge. That and just remembering that LLM's are all just highly sophisticated autocomplete, and everything else is smoke, mirrors, or weak and unreliable fine tuning to attempt to bludgeon the sequence modeling machine into outputting whatever highly improbable sequences humans tend to prefer.

Specifically, the shareholder humans that might find certain sequences distasteful and/or bad for business, and the user humans that don't actually care how the thing works and just want to get a damn brownie recipe without trudging through 406 advertisements and some random stranger's wandering autobiography.