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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • That’s because it doesn’t learn, it’s a snapshot of its training data frozen in time.

    I like Perplexity (a lot) because instead of using its data to answer your question, it uses your data to craft web searches, gather content, and summarise it into a response. It’s like a student that uses their knowledge to look for the answer in the books, instead of trying to answer from memory whether they know the answer or not.

    It is not perfect, it does hallucinate from time to time, but it’s rare enough that I use it way more than regular web searches at this point. I can throw quite obscure questions at it and it will dig the answer for me.

    As someone with ADHD with a somewhat compulsive need to understand random facts (e.g. “I need to know right now how the motor speed in a coffee grinder affects the taste of the coffee”) this is an absolute godsend.

    I’m not affiliated or anything, and if anything better comes my way I’ll be happy to ditch it. But for now I really enjoy it.


  • You can’t measure this, because it has drivers behind the wheel. Even if it did three “pedestrian-killing” mistakes every 10 miles, chances are the driver will catch every mistake per 10000 miles and not let it crash.

    But on the other hand, if we were to measure every time the driver takes over the number would be artificially high - because we can’t predict the future and drivers are likely to be overcautious and take over even in circumstances that would have turned out OK.

    The only way to do this IMO is by

    • measuring every driver intervention
    • only letting it be driverless and marketable as self-driving when it achieves a very low number of interventions ( < 1 per 10000 miles?)
    • in the meantime, market it as “driver assist” and have the responsibility fall into the driver, and treat it like the “somewhat advanced” cruise control that it is.



  • There’s a lot of context we’re missing here. For example this happens with my company and the reason is tax implications - if they provided “free money” that would be additional salary and taxed as such, whereas “free meals” are taxed completely differently. There could be completely legitimate reasons. Maybe if they let people use it for whatever purpose, the $25 would turn into $15 due to tax.

    What I won’t defend is firing people for this reason. I don’t see how that can be ethically acceptable…


  • Visibility is a very real problem in environmental measures that I rarely see discussed.

    The example that comes to mind is Madrid. Over the past few years there have been many measures to divert the traffic from the city centre. At a “visible” level this is great, which results in less pollution in the city centre, less traffic, less noise. All amazing. If you delve a bit deeper though, this hasn’t been backed up properly by additional public transport, or encouraging working from home, or anything like that. So people who work in the area are having to drive more kilometres, so that they can go around the city centre, resulting in more emissions and pollution overall. The catch? It’s in the impoverished areas of the outskirts. Therefore invisible.

    The governments look amazing at improving the pollution in the city centres not by addressing it, but by moving it somewhere else. Most times they opt for what is “visibly” good rather than what will actually result in a measurably better outcome. The negative effects of nuclear are very visible, so that weighs a lot in the decisions unfortunately.


  • Jrockwar@feddit.uktoTechnology@lemmy.worldHow to make an Amazon-free Kindle
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    5 days ago

    Well what were you expecting? This is like when people install GrapheneOS on Pixels, because it’s still the best platform to have a Google-free device.

    It’s entirely possible that someone wants to buy a Kindle because of it being a great device, but not want to be tied to Amazon’s data mining exercises and/or buy books from them because of their behaviour as a publishing company.




  • Sort of. It just depends on how much the person needs to control the vehicle.

    The easiest example I can think of: Imagine lorries traveling along a motorway, and they can do that autonomously because it’s “easy”, and when they get into a city a remote operator needs to drive them manually into the depot.

    Each operator could easily drive 4 or 5 lorries, if only one of those is entering a city at a time. Instead of needing a driver per truck, you only need drivers for the maximum number of trucks that might be entering cities at the same time. For a fleet of 30, that could be 5 drivers.

    For things like mining, where safety regulations mean that you want to avoid having people in the mine as much as possible, even having one driver for every haul truck (so yeah, regular driving with extra steps) could be economically profitable if it means you can reduce some other, potentially expensive safety controls.


  • So hang on, did your managers not come from the same background? Did they promote people who couldn’t do the job at the individual contributor level, or was it that they hired “career managers” whose only skill was to organise things?

    I’m obviously not as skilled with coding anymore because even though I try to stay current with pet projects, the reality is that I don’t have much time for that and there’s no replacement for practice. But whenever there are technical challenges I’ve usually seen them before and can offer at least some guidance.

    What does help is that I work in a system-wide role (you could call it systems engineering) and despite the management component of my role, my understanding of the interactions between components has gotten better over time, not worse.


  • I think my job is technically a middle manager at this point?

    The reality is that the priorities come straight from the top, people in my team are mostly self-organised unless the tasks they choose were to be wildly misaligned with company milestones (which in practice never happens) or people have questions about what needs tackling first or when by, and I’m mostly a technical unblocker that jumps into the hardest or slowest moving technical challenges.

    My point to all of this - “middle manager” is a wildly different concept in every company. Nobody likes a pen pusher with no knowledge, but also no company hires people into the title of “middle manager” hoping they’ll boss people around cluelessly. If that happens and that role exists, something has gone clearly wrong IMO.


  • I agree with you with the fact that it’s wild, very distopian sci-fi.

    However, even it this very much an ethical no-no, I’m not sure which bit is the technically illegal part.

    If he were selling normal sheep, that would be perfectly legal. Nobody would bat an eyelid, despite being similar treatment to animals.

    Is it the cloning that is illegal? If he were to clone a species on the brink of extinction to re-populate an area, would that be ethical but illegal?

    Is the problem that he’s cloning without authorisation? Who decides whether we can bring new animals to life via cloning? Is there a Ministry of Clones that needs to authorise people to clone stuff?