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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Er, not really… for instance:

    “…back in the day?”

    Which ‘day’? Before digital mapping? Before cartography as a formal practice? Before the invention of the compass? Before the standardization of the meter? Before the printing press? Before Galileo? Before Eratosthenes?

    The time period of the question is potentially the entirety of human history. That’s quite broad.

    What methods were used to scale down in world, to paper distances?

    In which part of the world? In which culture? For what purpose? (e.g. navigation? coastal, inland, international? crop planting? city planning? determining property lines? etc)

    This is not a straightforward question in any way. A complete answer would be an undergraduate degree with a double major in history and geography.







  • Bacon fat can be used as a replacement for cooking oil in a pan or anywhere you would use grease while cooking. One of my favorite things to do with it is grease a cast iron skillet and bake cornbread in it (you get smoky bacon flavor crust). It also works great as a butter replacement for frying eggs or hash browns. You can also use it as a fat base to make gravy.

    If you run the bacon fat through a coffee filter while it’s still hot & liquid (into a glass jar) it will be shelf stable at room temperature. Cone coffee filters are convenient for this.

    If you don’t filter it you must store it in the refrigerator, or else the leftover bits of meat in the fat will go rancid and start to rot.


  • No, we’re talking about companies scraping hundreds of millions if not billions of labor hours of output to train their models for the sake of developing software products which they then sell for profit.

    Every model that was trained on legally acquired free public data and open source code should be freely publicly available and open source.

    Every model that was trained on not legally acquired public data (e.g. Meta’s models) should be taken out of production until all of the lawsuits are concluded, and hopefully the parties responsible are put out of business.

    I’m not talking about future, potential labor that AI might replace. I’m talking about the labor which was stolen to produce these models in the first place.

    But, please use AI.


  • Please identify the issues with the LLM generated code.

    Why would the issues be obvious and easy to point out? Most issues with code aren’t. If they were, we wouldn’t have Patch Tuesday, a direct code review would prevent issues from shipping in the first place.

    Throwing this out as if it means LLM code is acceptable and ends the argument is ridiculous. Do you have any grasp of how software vulnerabilities are discovered at all?








  • Well… the first colleges were established to train clergy, because reading and writing were rare skills at the time, and there was a demand for trained clergy who worked as clerks, accountants and record keepers for nobles who could not themselves read or write, which I think just circles back to the workforce productivity thing.

    This is also true for Confucian schools in China. The students were not clergy in the religious sense, but they learned reading, writing and tradition in order to become useful administrators for local rulers.