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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • I setup 2FA on Facebook using one of those USB keys ages ago. I tried to login again recently but it tells me to use an authenticator app which I never configured, and when I try to use the USB key it blinks at me. I know the key works because I use it for other things. When I looked into logging in somehow else it brought up some crazy page telling me I’d have to send my license to Facebook or some such shit. Oh well, guess it’s a dead profile now.





  • I’m not redefining anything, I’m just pointing out that intelligence is not as narrow as most people assume, it’s a broad term that encompasses various gradations.

    “I’m not redefining anything, I’m just insisting that my definition of the term is the only correct one.”

    You’re running a motte-and-bailey here. First you say someone else is definitively “not correct” in their usage of the term, and then you go on to make a more easily defensible argument of “well who is to say what the meaning of the term truly is? It’s a very gray area”.

    Then 99% of animal species would not qualify as intelligent.

    By some definitions, certainly…and that’s the whole point.

    You may rightfully argue that term AI is too broad and that we could narrow it down to mean specifically “human-like” AI, but the truth is, that at this point, in computer science AI already refers to a wide range of systems, from basic decision-making algorithms to complex models like GPTs or neural networks.

    I think taken as a whole the term “AI” has more meaning if you take both words in the phrase into account together rather than separately.

    For instance, computer opponents in early video games naturally fit the moniker “AI” because even though it obviously does not possess intelligence in the general sense of the term, the developers are trying to artificially fool you into thinking it does.

    Ultimately, it’s probably futile to try to rescue the phrase from the downward spiral it is on into meaninglessness, but I do not believe the word “intelligence” necessarily needs to spiral down in concert.


  • https://www.etymonline.com/word/intelligence

    Simple algorithms are not intelligence. Some modern “AI” we have comes close to fitting some of these definitions, but simple algorithms do not.

    We can call things whatever we want, that’s the gift (and the curse) of language. It’s imprecise and only has the meanings we ascribe to it, but you’re the one who started this thread by demanding that “to say it is not intelligence is incorrect” and I’ve still have yet to find a reasonable argument for that claim within this entire thread. Instead all you’ve done is just tried to redefine intelligence to cover nearly everything and then pretended that your (not authoritative) wavy ass definition is the only correct one.









  • Isn’t yelp a pretty easily replaceable thing?

    They built a reputation by being one of the first in the space, but they’ve squandered that reputation and I’m pretty sure someone else could start up a competing “reviews” product.

    I’d like to have one that actually showed the history of things like restaurants, because if the head chef leaves and the reviews have gone to shit it turns out that the reviews since the new chef are much more relevant than the 1000+ 5 star reviews of the food of the old guy, and that isn’t discoverable anywhere on yelp or anything like yelp.

    I’m not sure how you’d protect against enshittification long-term. But I think one of the things that has largely poisoned the spirit of the Internet in general is that everything is always about a “sustainable business model” and “scaling” before anyone even dreams of just writing something up and seeing if they can get it to go popular.


  • I get Dreamweaver vibes from AI generated code.

    Same. AI seems like yet another attempt at RAD just like MS Access, Visual Basic, Dreamweaver, and even to some extent Salesforce, or ServiceNow. There are so many technologies that champion this…RoR, Django, Spring Boot…the list is basically forever.

    To an extent, it’s more general purpose than those because it can be used with multiple languages or toolkits, but I find it not at all surprising that the first usage of gen AI in my company was to push out “POCs” (the vast majority of which never amounted to anything).

    The same gravity applies to this tool as everything else in software…which is that prototyping is easy…integration is hard (unless the organization is well structured, which, well, almost none of them are), and software executives tend to confuse a POC with production code and want to push it out immediately, only to find out that it’s a Potemkin village underneath as they sometimes (or even often) were told the entire time.

    So much of the software industry is “JUST GET THIS DONE FASTER DAMMIT!” from middle managers who still seem (despite decades of screaming this) to have developed no widespread means of determining either what they want to get done, or what it would take to get it done faster.

    What we have been dealing with the entire time is people that hate to be dependent upon coders or other “nerds”, but need them in order to create products to accomplish their business objectives.

    Middle managers still think creating software is algorithmic nerd shit that could be automated…solving the same problems over and over again. It’s largely been my experience that despite even Computer Science programs giving it that image, that the reality is modern coding is more akin to being a millwright. Most of the repetitive, algorithmic nerd shit was settled long ago and can be imported via modules. Imported modules are analogous to parts, and your job is to build or maintain the actual machine that produces the outcomes that are desired, making connecting parts to get the various components to interoperate as needed, repairing failing components, or spotting the shoddy welding between them that is making the current machine fail.