• 3 Posts
  • 48 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • Maybe the problem is a lot of their marketing relies on the dominance of their search engine (ie sponsored search results, and ads based on user searches, as well as tracking user web usage via their search click throughs and other cookies). If open ai’s products become the go to for questions and basic searches, they will eventually be able to use that dominance to include marketing results in their answers. I think this threat is why they want to try to compete with them to be able to offer an alternative. Because it doesn’t actually have to be better than chat gpt. It just has to be similar enough for people to continue using Google rather than change their habits to use chatgpt, or Microsoft’s implementations of it. Especially with windows 11 where copilot (basically Microsoft rebrand of chatgpt) is built in and you can use it from the task bar. That ease of use may steadily decrease people’s reliance on Google search, which will eventually hurt their ability to sell targeted ads.



  • Yeah I agree with you. If they had used her actual voice without permission, that’s one thing. But they hired a voice actor who sounded like what they wanted their voice model to sound like. Sam Altman tweeted “her” on May 13 2024, which I guess people are using to say he ripped off SJ, but I don’t see how. 1) being inspired by other creative works, and referencing them in your own work is neither stealing nor illegal, and 2) if anything he was inspired by the AI character in the movie, not SJ herself, i.e. the inspiration was from the writer/director/audio engineers in conjunction with SJ’s performance. You getting downvoted here is just the Internet hive mind doing its thing rather than anyone having any actual argument for why this is wrong.


  • Never too old to learn. I think Python is a great beginner language. It has fairly broad applications, and easy to set up an environment (don’t have to download/install a thousand things, you just install python and can run the text files in terminal). I also learned by doing starting in late middle school/early high school. I always found YouTube videos to be the most engaging way to get started. I used to like thenewboston. Once I had a handle on the basic programming language, I would do easy programming challenges where you have to solve some sort of basic problem. The challenges helped me learn basics like taking in input, changing the input based on the various rules and conditions of the challenges, then outputting the proper results formatted in the right way. Also helped me to think about algorithms, etc. After that, I started learning programming through a textbook. This was helpful for understanding some of the more technical aspects, basics of memory management, what different variable types are really for, OOP, abstraction, algorithms etc. I found that leaving these advanced topics till after I had a working understanding of the programming language helped understand the concepts better, and helped me understand why it’s important to learn the concepts in the first place. I was using Java for learning most of this, which might also be a good place to start for you, but I feel like python has simpler syntax to start with. In the end once you learn one language, I recommend learning more and not being stuck to any particular language. Every language has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the commonalities and differences will only make you better in the long run.

    Edit - now I use Go, python, JavaScript, R, Java, Julia, rust based on what I’m actually doing. It’s fairly easy to switch languages once you get used to basic syntax.


  • I have a question about rigid curriculums. This is mostly for high school. Many of my teachers had curriculums and syllabi that they had been using for years and kept them basically the same, and then there were the AP classes where the curriculum was determined by the AP exam. I felt that I learned really well in AP classes and we would get through much more advanced material in the AP classes than in others. And I also felt that the teachers who had developed somewhat fixed curriculums from experience taught much more efficiently than those who hadn’t. It never felt like the teachers were changing their curriculum for each class whether it was an AP class or not because most had their curriculums kind of figured out over the course of teaching for many years. And most of the teachers I had in high school were excellent. So my question is, why is it believed that rigid curriculums don’t work? Because in my schooling experience, whether the rigid curriculum was developed by the individual teacher or by an external organization (like AP), the class seemed to benefit from having fixed goals for the year.



  • Most programming (simple tasks, scripting data analysis, most common web apps, basic automation) is about as difficult as doing your own plumbing (which likely includes fixing a faucet or doing other minor tasks around the house). But just like in any profession, the “professionals” are able to handle the complex tasks that others can’t/don’t want to do. For plumbers that means building the whole home systems to maintain proper pressure/temperature at every outlet, suitable for whatever climate the home is built in, or in commercial settings where the systems are much larger and more complicated.

    Ask a professional plumber which they find more taxing: being bent into awkward spaces on their hands and knees all day, or sitting at a desk thinking hard about a problem someone has likely already solved.







  • Honestly I remember it being at 7 o’clock too but I think it might’ve just been that my camera was rotated a bit weird because it was mounted to a star tracker. I was really happy with how crisp it came out. I used a longer lens (this photo was at 400mm) and also made sure to use f8 as that’s been noted to be the sharpest aperture for my lens. Beyond that I had focused on the sun using the sun spots and then didn’t change the focus at all. I also had a remote trigger so I wouldn’t shake the camera while taking the image. Also for this image I brought down the highlights which helped cut down on the blooming around the brightest features and helped them look more defined. I am very happy I was able to get this result because this was the first time I’ve tried shooting an eclipse and really wasn’t sure if I was doing it right.




  • Yeah it was crazy, we could all see a red dot with our bare eyes during totality and weren’t sure what it was. Think it might’ve been a particularly bright solar flare!

    Like this photo isn’t even specially edited. I literally just brought down the highlights to get better definition on the beads because without that it looked more like the diamond ring. No artificial color enhancement or anything.