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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I’ve been driving for about a decade and a half now, including a few years here and there working jobs with a lot of wheel time. Either pizza delivery or cable technician or driving around a box truck.

    I have never gotten as much as a speeding ticket. I typically don’t speed more than 5~10 mph over the limit. If it’s a 35 or 40 in a city area though I will typically stay the speed limit. Sometimes I go a little ham on country roads in the middle of nowhere. I drove through central Florida once at like 4am and I peaked at like 120mph because I hadn’t seen another car for at least an hour.

    I think it probably depends on your jurisdiction, but nobody really respects the laws. On the interstate near my house, the speed limit is 65 but it might as well be 80. Cops will pass you and people will pass the cops and nobody cares.

    I think the speeding laws are just to give the cops a reason to pull you over if they want you - OR a way to get people that are really being crazy. For example if you’re going 110 in a 65 you deserve to get pulled over and given a ticket or worse, depending on context.



  • The reason is that the web browser chatgpt has a maximum amount of data per request. This is so they can minimize cost at scale. So for example you ask a question and tell it not to include a word. What will happen is your questions gets sent like this

    {‘context’: ‘user asking question’, ‘message’: {user question here} }

    then it gives you a response and you ask it another question. typically if it’s a small question the context is saved from one message to another.

    {‘context’: ‘user asking question - {previous message}’, ‘message’: {new message here} }

    so it literally just copies the previous message until it reaches the maximum token length

    however there’s a maximum # of words that can be in the context + message combined. therefore the context is limited. after a certain amount of words input into chatgpt, it will start dropping things. it does this with a method to try and find out what is the “most important words” but this is inherently lossy. it’s like a jpeg- it gets blurry in order to save data.

    so for example if you asked “please name the best fruit to eat, not including apple” and then maybe on the third or fourth question the “context” in the request becomes

    ‘context’: ‘user asking question - user wanted to know best fruit’

    it would cut off the “not including apple bit” in order to save space

    but here’s the thing - that exists in order to save space and processing power. it’s necessary at a large scale because millions of people could be talking to chatgpt and it couldn’t handle all that.

    BUT if chatgpt wanted some sort of internal request that had no token limit, then everything would be saved. it would turn from a lossy jpeg into a png file. chatgpt would have infinite context.

    this is why i think for someone who wants to keep context (ive been trying to develop specific applications which context is necessary) then chatgpt api just isn’t worth it.


  • very short term memory span so have longer conversations as in more messages

    Really, this is a function of practicality and not really one of capability. If someone were to give an LLM more context it would be able to hold very long conversations. It’s just that it’s very expensive to do so on any large scale - so for example OpenAI’s API gives a maximum token length to requests.

    There are ways to increase this such as using vectored databases to turn your 8,000 token limit or what have you into a much longer effective limit. And this is how you preserve context.

    When you talk to ChatGPT in the web browser, it’s basically sending a call to its own API and re-sending the last few messages (or what it thinks is most important in the last few messages) but that’s inherently lossy. After enough messages, context gets lost.

    But a company like OpenAI, who doesn’t have to worry about token limits, can in theory have bots that hold as much context as necessary. So while your advice is good in a practical sense - most chatbots you run into will likely have those limits because of financial reasons… it is in theory possible to have a chatbot that doesn’t have these limits and therefore this strategy would not work.



  • Nobody ever directly engages the devs on the articles that created this whole affair. They simply accuse them of some vague “human rights denial” “genocide-supporters” “tankie” without any real substance. Go ahead and search out the articles. I read through some of them.

    Yes, they are leftist essays. The devs didn’t write them, they just compiled them together. I skimmed through a couple and read the titles of the rest. Some of them deal with topics such as Maoist China and the number of deaths from the Cultural Revolution. The article puts together an argument, with cited sources, that the common death figures are overblown.

    Maybe the author is wrong, I don’t know. I’m not an expert in this field nor do I have the energy to do as much research as I’d need to feel comfortable leaning one way or the other. But from reading the article, at no point does the author condone genocide.

    Is this what we’ve come to? Someone can’t post an article challenging one small piece of the narrative without all of a sudden being totally disavowed? I think it’s absurd. Wrong or right, people should be allowed to discuss and share reasoned analysis.


  • it really depends on what

    padding the years of experience for a specific skill from 4 to 7… not really a big deal in my opinion. someone’s 4 years could be more valuable than another’s 7

    if you’re making up whole degrees or careers… then it becomes impractical because you’ll have to walk the walk. if you’re frank abagnale, maybe you can do it. for us regular folk it’d be hard to convince someone who knows what they’re doing that you know what you’re doing when you actually don’t


  • This is a decentralized platform meant to be a social media system without the corporate power inherent to all the others. The developers of Lemmy for example have essays on Maoist China being hosted on their Github.

    By its very nature, it’s going to attract people who are trying to get away from corporate influence. It’s essentially why I’m here and not on reddit. I don’t want a company profiting off of my content.

    There’s space for pro-capitalists as well though. I believe in the open market of ideas - listen to what people have to say and share your bit. Engage genuinely and you’ll learn something and maybe teach someone else something.


  • I think it has the tendency to create a snowball effect. You see a comment with -50 points you are already subconsciously looking at it trying to analyze why everyone hates it. It essentially primes you into disagreeing with it. Sometimes it’s obvious in the case of a troll or someone saying hate speech or something but other times it’s someone sharing a genuine opinion that’s relevant to the discussion but the snowball effect of the first few people downvoting it causes it to spiral downwards.

    By itself it isn’t a bad thing but when comments are ranked based on votes or downvoted comments past a certain threshold are hidden, it contributes to creating echo chambers.

    Personally, I think it’s like that Churchill quote. Democracy is trash and has a lot of problems. But still, it’s the best thing we’ve come up with so far. It’s got its issues but the transparent nature definitely helps if someone is consciously trying to read things with an open mind.


  • In fact it is sort of freaky how a little one minute change in your schedule could potentially change the lives of dozens or hundreds of people

    If we’re talking about future humans, we get into the exponential growth stage pretty quickly.

    You have 2 kids, and they each average 2 kids, and they each average 2 kids, etc, etc

    2, 4, 8, 16, etc - 2 ^ n where n is number of generations

    After 20 generations we’re already talking a million descendants. With a rough range of 20 years per generation we get 400 years.

    That number only blows up from there. In 30 generations we’re at a billion in 600 years.

    One minor decision whether to take a train or a bus or what have you can have wide ranging effects on potentially billions of humans far into the future. It’s a bit absurd thinking about it. Everything you do has potential to radically change the future. Of course, your family line could just as well die out with you.

    Now imagine how many descendants you have in your family tree going all the way back to the cavemen. Think of how many infinite little decisions led to the chances of your dad fucking your mom on that specific minute of that specific day. It’s effectively a 10 ^ -∞ chance of you being born. And yet you’re still here.







  • Whatever the costs for shipping are are outweighed by the gain in efficiency. Realistically we’re not growing bananas or apples as the main economic output. Complicated modern products like computer chips have a million little steps on the supply chain. Spending even 1% or 2% more resources to produce these at a global scale we’re talking much more than shipping costs.

    If you care about environmental costs, you should support free trade.

    Also, you have a warped perception of manufacturing vs service jobs. Service jobs are the mark of an industrialized and modern economy for a reason.

    I would rather work as a sales rep for a solar company, or a clerk for an underground construction company, or an accountant or lawyer or doctor or IT guy a million times over before I work on an assembly line. And trust me, this is from someone who was born in a 3rd world country and has worked on an assembly line - now I work with computers.



  • Imagine you’re Farmer Bob in a temperate region great for growing apples and I’m Farmer Fred in a tropical area ideal for bananas. We each like bananas and apples, so tried growing both fruits, each of us harvesting 12 of our specialty and 6 of the other, making a total output of 36 fruits.

    But then, we learned about the power of trade. We focused on what our lands did best: I harvested 24 bananas, you 24 apples. We swapped half our produce, and like magic - We both had 12 bananas and 12 apples each, totaling 48 fruits, a 25% increase just from trade.

    But what if we stopped trading due to trust issues? We’d revert to the less efficient system, losing out on the additional produce.

    Now, think of this on a global scale. When countries specialize and trade, we all gain. But as governments decouple from global trade, they’re choosing to lose these benefits, making economies less efficient. It’s a dangerous path where everyone ends up poorer.

    And for our governments to deliberately choose a path that makes us all poorer - that means there’s an unchecked growing tension. It’s almost palpable. We’re already living through a Gilded Age nearly a century after the last one… what happened after the Gilded Age?

    Call me a doomer but this is alarming news, even if understandable from a national security perspective