I think you’re underselling just how evil he was…

They found lots of bones from women and girls when excavating the torture chamber beneath his former mansion, and Stalin distrusted him so much that he dropped everything when he learnt his daughter was alone with Beria.

Most people in this thread were either evil in their career, or in their personal lives, but Beria managed to excel separately in both.

Ok, and Gaddafi’s policies were only for the political subgroup of people who supported him, as you’d be imprisoned or worse otherwise?

Worse is relative, a proportion of the requirement increase will be due to worse code, but much more will be for features to make the software more accessible to more people, and adding features without needing to remove old ones, neither of which are a bad thing, otherwise everything would be a command line tool that removes options every few months and only has one way to use it

Sure, but corporations which keep profits up by providing a good service that people are willing to pay for should be celebrated and rewarded over those which keep them up by wringing every last penny out of you while simultaneously degrading their service.

AI image generation is amazing for replacing stock photos, and not bad at replacing clipart and porn images.

AI video generation is ok at replacing very simple videos without continuity or physics, but their only real applications are for spreading misinformation or mindless scrolling, there’s just no real way to get anyone to pay for them.

That’s aside from the fact that sora could’ve been great for generating generic stock footage/b-roll, but the way they implemented it was to generate a script, then audio, then video, which meant that it really struggled to generate anything without a focal point, ie what it would actually be useful for.

It’s fundamentally hard for AI to make things dirty.

It can do messy, but it’s based on denoising, and it’s very hard to distinguish a layer of dust or grime from noise, so unless some new technology comes up we’re still going to have that as an indicator well after scale and limbs are fixed.

The existence of the attacks were, but not the details.

Israel results in reduced contrast? That’s news to me…

(I appreciate the point of the comparison is all the devastation, but editing the photos to make it look better before, when the difference is obvious without it just gives people with different political views something to grab on to)

Twitch is more of a parasocial website in most cases though, unless you’re watching exceptionally small streamers

Regarding rigging voting machines, that’s conspiracy theory territory, however you did miss that Democrats are more likely to be working jobs where you can’t easily take time off to vote, or it’s that or lunch, or the time they give you isn’t enough, so doing it in advance by post is pretty much the only way you can vote.

Good, if it’s as good or better than we have currently then that’s great, if it’s not then oh well.

There hasn’t been an insignificant number of times I’ve found out about a new product or event I’m interested in, a sale for something I already want, or something like that through advertising.

It’s rare as a proportion, but it definitely does happen.

I believe that ads are just yet another tragedy of the commons type of thing, where bad actors not only ruin it for everyone, but also convert good actors to being bad actors.

I’d say there’s three tiers:

• Ads showing you things you actually want or need, and providing you with new information.
  • These are going to have high CPMs, so you don’t need many per page, and having more per page will decrease their value, but kind of require tracking to ensure their relevance.
• Ads showing you things you might not want or need, but might cobsider buying, or information that isn’t immediately relevant.
  • This is the baseline for reasonable quality, untargeted ads, and CPMs for these are going to be fairly low, but much higher if you click on them
• Ads promoting scams, malware, and things you neither want nor need.
  • In this case, the CPMs will be virtually zero, so the site is forced to cram as many on the page as they can. They’re also encouraged to get you to click by mistake.
  • This makes people block ads or trackers, reducing the number of ads in the first category and forcing more sites to adopt these patterns.

It’s kind of sad that it’s going this way (and has been for a while) but I guess it’s going to end up with just a return to paying for media with money rather than ads.

I suspect it was intentional - afaik at least in English speaking countries, live event subtitles for a foreign language are either just in that language, or [speaks in ...]. It’s more for pre-recorded shows, and even then baked into the video feed rather than the subtitle track, that you get subtitles.

Why do you think I said "thinking"/planning instead of just calling it thinking…

The “thinking” stage is actually just planning so that it can list out the facts and then try and find inconsistencies, patterns, solutions etc. I think planning is a perfectly reasonable thing to call it, as it matches the distinct between planning and execution in other algorithms like navigation.

That kind of matches my experience, but some of the negatives they bring up can be fixed with monitoring thinking mode. If they start to make assumptions on your behalf, or go down the wrong path, you can interrupt it and tell it to persue the correct line without polluting the context.

I’ve started using AI pretty heavily for writing code in languages I’m not as confident in (especially JS and SQL) after being skeptical for a while, as well as code which can be described briefly but is tedious to write, and I think the problem here is “by” - it would be better to say “with”

You don’t say that 90% of code was written by code completion plugins, because it takes someone to pick the right thing from the list, check the docs to see it’s right, etc.

It’s the same for AI, I check the “thinking”/planning logs to make sure the logic is right, and sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, at which point you can write a brief psudocode brief of what you want to do, sometimes it starts on the right path then goes off, at which point you can say “no, go back to this point” and generally it works well.

I’d say this kind of code is maybe 30-50% of what I write, the other 50-70% being more technically complex and in a language I’m more experienced in, so I can’t fully believe the 30% figure when you’re going to be having some people wasting time by not using it when they could use it for speedup, and others using it too much and wasting time trying to implement more complex things than it’s capable of - this one irks me especially after having to spend 3½ hours yesterday reviewing a new hire’s MR that they could’ve spent actually learning the libraries, or I could’ve spent implementing the whole ticket with some time left over to teach them.

The surge starts around 2016, could be political instability following David Cameron leaving/Brexit, smartphones being common enough that muggings increase, changes in policies due to Sadiq Khan being elected, children who grew up during the recession growing old enough to join gangs, or a number of other things

I think the drop is 2020 and then it never recovered actually?

I feel like this is a labels issue though… Lots of people don’t want to go “vegan” or “vegetarian” because of a small group of vegans, but if you were to give them a meal without announcing it was vegan they’d probably enjoy it.

Same to an extent for me: I could never give up dairy because I love milk, cheese and butter too much, but I do eat (asian style) vegetarian meals multiple times a week and have at most one meat meal per day, instead of at every meal, and I have a mindset that meat is nice but not that you can’t make other nice dishes with mushrooms, tofu, cheese, etc. - you just have to make different things.

Reframing it as “look at these nice things you can have” seems a lot more accessible than telling people they shouldn’t eat meat, or they should eat less meat, or that the other proteins are just a substitute for meat, which makes it seem like you’re missing out on something.