Some of the “open” models seem to have augmented their training data with OpenAI and Anthropic requests (I. E. they sometimes say they’re ChatGPT or Claude). I guess that may be considered piracy. There are a lot of customer service bots that just hook into OpenAI APIs and don’t have a lot of guardrails, so you can do stuff like ask a car dealership’s customer service to write you Python code. Actual piracy would require someone leaking the model.

Thanks. So much better than RHVoice.

It’s ok for very small scripts that are easy to reason through. I’ve used it extensively in CI/CD, just because we were using Jenkins for that and it was the path of least resistance. I do not like the language though.

Worked manual jobs (assembly line) right out of highschool (well fast food during highschool too), and absolutely hated how boring it was to me. I’m not a social person, and used to have really bad social anxiety. I’ve always had an interest in computers, for whatever reason, so after a few years of manual labor, decided to go to college for that. Also, I lived in a very depressed area, and the jobs I had were very low paying, to the point I couldn’t afford to move out from my parents, so something had to change.

Anyways, I made the right choice, because I’m pretty good at what I do, and I love encountering and solving difficult problems.

While in college, I did work at a metal fab shop for a summer, and I could’ve totally seen myself doing that as well. It wasn’t mind-numbing like assembly line work, did involve problem solving, and the tools and machines were “cool.”

I’m unfamiliar with that delivery uniform, maybe it’s another country’s postal service, but the USPS has had a kind of “higher purpose” associated with it. E.g.

The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

I learned it because I had to write a WPF desktop application, so you could start with WPF tutorials. I was already very familiar with Java, which is very similar, so it wasn’t too hard. Last time I used it was in Unity. You might want to find a good free online course for C# to get a good grasp of C#/Java’s style of OOP, design patterns, and all that kind of stuff.

That’s really cool (not the auto opt-in thing). If I understand correctly, that system looks like it offers pretty strong theoretical privacy guarantees (assuming their closed-source client software works as they say, with sending fake queries and all that for differential privacy). If the backend doesn’t work like they say, they could infer what landmark is in an image when finding the approximate minimum distance to embeddings in their DB, but with the fake queries they can’t be sure which one is real. They can’t see the actual image either way as long as the “128-bit post-quantum” encryption algorithm doesn’t have any vulnerabilies (and the closed source software works as described).

I think TikTok appeased the right by changing their algorithm. Charlie Kirk is apparently doing extremely well on the platform now.

You can also just install the libreelec os (Kodi), and install the Jellyfin Kodi addon. Haven’t tried that addon. I used to use Kodi when I had only one TV, and liked it. Now that I have 2 Android TVs, just installing Jellyfin on the TVs works fine. I might go back to rPIs and disconnect my TVs from the internet though.

Layden says releasing PC versions of PlayStation games years after they first arrive on the console causes plenty of anger among Sony fans, so Xbox releases from PlayStation Studios would result in even more outcry, potentially harming Sony’s brand reputation. “I don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze,” he said.

Waiting years to release on PC causes anger among Sony fans?

Apple uses Arm for their desktops, including the Mac Pro workstation. I don’t know of anything upgradable/customizable like x86 Desktops though.

how are you going to set your hourly wage?

As much as the market will bear, which is what my work is worth according to market principles. What’s just needed to expand operations or whatever only plays the role of setting a minimum price. You seem to keep arguing that people and businesses only charge what’s needed and no more; and very few people or businesses do that (those working for passion, like academic scientists and non-profits).

Einstein may explain it better than me:

The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists’ requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

It’s not really automation though. The store is outsourcing labor to the consumer.

I use GPT (4o, premium) a lot, and yes, I still sometimes experience source hallucinations. It also will sometimes hallucinate incorrect things not in the source. I get better results when I tell it not to browse. The large context of processing web pages seems to hurt its “performance.” I would never trust gen AI for a recipe. I usually just use Kagi to search for recipes and have it set to promote results from recipe sites I like.

There was a dark web site kinda like this (just a regular assassination market; not sure if it was real or a honey pot): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

It’s also the reason prediction markets have been so heavily regulated (until recently), because they can easily incentivize assassinations while adding plausible deniability.

Shaq’s best performance.

I’ve known and know business people as well (not extremely wealthy; most have probably < $10M net worth). I don’t think I’ve ever met one that wasn’t trying to make the most money possible (for the businesses they had equity in, and for themselves). They certainly think of themselves as good people, and are interpersonally decent people, but the ideologies they adopt allow them to justify anti-social actions. They brag about being able to secure low-wage labor (third-world workers, unpaid internships, etc), and employing anti-consumer and predatory practices in their products. Anytime they do good, they either have ulterior motives, or it’s just nepotism. Every social interaction they have seems to have a transactional sub-text.

I reject this notion that all businesses exist to exploit workers.

Profit is literally the surplus value of the worker’s labor. The workers generate it, and the business appropriates it in whatever way the business owners see fit. This is exploitative, anti-democratic, and damaging to society, imo. Eventually, the owners may take a big payout by selling the company (whose value was generated by the workers), and possibly throw some crumbs to the workers, who may get laid off soon after.

it’s striking how little government knows who is in need of what.

Many of the problems with government is it’s beholden to the wealthy, imo. In regards to the U.S., I think the next administration will preside over an almost complete capture of government by oligarchs. I think we will become like Russia or East Asian oligarchies. I’m an anarcho-leaning leftist, so I don’t think large powerful governments are the answer either.

This is what we should be having more conversations about. How is it that we have this powerful tool to speak our minds yet so many people are being ignored? Or voting against their own interests.

Most media is controlled by the wealthy/corporations, who either purposely use it to advance their own interests (divide the working class, selective reporting, purposely biased algos, and spinning narratives), or are just damaging as a side-effect of pursuing profits. Honestly, at this point in time, I think most of it is purposeful, and not a side-effect. In “new media” the far-right seems to have an awful lot of money, to the point they’re doing theatrical releases of movies. It’s already came out that some far-right “new media” was directly funded by Russia (an oligarchal nation with ties to the wanna-be oligarchs of the upcoming administration).