I have two chimps within, Laziness and Hyperactivity. They smoke cigs, drink yerba, fling shit at each other, and devour the face of anyone who gets close to either.
They also devour my dreams.
It makes sense for me because it mirrors pretty well my experience using those bots as translation aid. The only tasks they did decently enough were (1) proofreading = spotting translation “bugs”, and (2) suggesting alt ways to translate excerpts I was struggling with. Both are rather similar to your second paragraph, incl. the additional workload you mentioned.
Eventually I ditched it completely, but moral concerns also played a role. Plus skill rusting.
Things done wrong:
Things done right:
Overall this doesn’t sound too bad. I hope the team is able to revert the damage.
The mafia is simply flipping the discourse from “corporates, AI is powerful enough to replace your workers, so invest on it” to “workers, AI is not powerful enough to replace you, so don’t boycott it” depending on what’s more convenient at the time. It’s used TP.
Fun fact #2: the Romans solved this by pouring garum — a condiment made of dissolved fish and heavy amounts of salt — into the horse’s nostril.
Aim it at the tasks it is genuinely good at. First drafts, summaries, structured writing, customer replies, boilerplate. That is where the measured wins live, and they are large.
Emphasis mine. As a customer: fuck off.
As I read his “essays”, one question persistently pops into my head: is he one of those “truth is a matter of opinion” muppets? Because it would explain everything.
For some time I used chatbots to give me ideas on how to translate specially tricky excerpts. It never reached the point of AI drafting stuff for me, but over time I relied on it more and more on it; I was rusting. And my translations were becoming rather bland, even ones supposed to have some emotional impact.
Glad I ditched it before it could become a problem.
The species actually got eradicated from both Mexico and USA, using sterile males, and almost eradicated from the southern tip of North America aka Central America.
So yes, it is possible. Regardless of presence or absence of cows. Because, like I already said and you repeated, they can infest any mammal.
The reason they stopped at Panama is simply because it’s a chokepoint; in the short term it’s cheaper to keep releasing sterile males in the Darién gap than to push further. It works until it doesn’t, like another poster highlighted once they stopped doing it in COVID times the flies re-invaded NA.
I’m criticising governments in the Americas (including but not exclusively USA) for not co-ordinating and pushing further, to get it extinct.
IMO controlling it “down to Panama” is part of what went wrong, I think. Pushing further into South America would’ve been costlier, but if people managed to get those flies completely extinct, the problem wouldn’t come back.
But that requires multiple governments working together with a “helping them out means less problems for me in the future” mindset, and that simply doesn’t roll with USA; USA’s external policy was always “I’m shitting my pants so others smell it”. And working together with a bunch of dictatorships can be a bit hard, specially when those dictatorships were supported by USA so they can’t trust the United-Statian government to die properly.
Well, I told you guys it’s NSFL.
In general humans are the least concern. We’re smart enough to know something is wrong with our bodies, and fix it before it gets worse; we wear clothes and bandage wounds so there’s less exposure of vulnerable areas; etc. It’s a bit more concerning because of children, since the flies can attack eyes and mouths, but as long as the parents actually do their job and take care of the kid, no issue. (Bug repellent, pay attention to small wounds, regular visits to the doc, this kind of stuff.)
Dogs and cats are another can of worms (or maggots). Specially urban strays; if anyone here wants some nightmare fuel, websearch images for [NSFL] miíase cachorro or miasis perro [/NSFL], apparently the flies (it isn’t just C. hominivorax) responsible for this sort of infestation will lay multiple eggs in the same wound, if they can; so it can get really nasty. Same deal with the fauna.
When you see an animal, there’s likely a bunch of the same species you didn’t see. Specially if it’s a small animal, with a fast lifecycle, and the animal burrows itself into something (like, dunno… the flesh of another animal?). And if the animal can live pretty much anywhere there’s another, warm-blooded, animal living. (Livestock? Wild fauna? Pets? Humans? Yes.)
So a dozen cases isn’t just “a dozen cases”, there’s likely millions of those flies in USA already. I’m taking a wild guess here and say a billion dollars won’t even scratch the surface of the problem there.
(Not that it changes things for me. Here in South America the fly in question goes from “present” to “present”. Just businesses as usual.)
Weird how they mention malagueta but omit a far more popular pepper in Brazil, dedo-de-moça:
It’s a Capsicum baccatum variety, related to those ajís amarillos from the infographic. Between 10k and 15k SHU, so it’s hot but by no means as scorching hot as malagueta; that makes it a bit more practical to add to dishes. (Plus dunno about others but I always saw malagueta as something way more regional, from Northeast. Specially Bahia; the text does mention it, but those folks down north use it for sauces.)
Incidentally I was able to cross-breed it with ye olde bell pepper (Capsicum annuum), might as well share the pic here:
That’s F1, mind you. The bell pepper parent is yellow, so I know for sure she has genes for yellow peppers in it. It was barely spicy, way fleshier than the dedo-de-moça, but smaller than the bell pepper.
Now I’m cultivating the F2. My final goal is to make a heirloom variety out of it, then cross-breed it with either chocolate habanero or another cross-breed, for a full gradient of heats and colours:
Ideally shape+size should be like in the F1. Perhaps a bit prettier if I can do it.
There’s also a fourth type of pepper I’m raising, that I don’t see in the graph. I don’t even know it’s name. It grows into a rather large plant (2m height if I don’t prune it), and it seems to be hotter than DDM, so I’m eyeballing ~30k SHU. If possible I’ll cross-breed with the habanero and then use this cross-breed in my project; mostly because the bloody tree endures quite some abuse from cold and heat, and produces a lot of fruit. Still, if I don’t manage to do so before I get a heirloom out of that bell x DDM hybrid, I’m settling for just a trinary hybrid.
This is a good piece. I’m saying this as a user (I’m a translator, not a programmer); plenty times my connection is unreliable, for a thousand reasons (such as a broken connector — uuurgh, that weekend!), and because my internet service is far from stellar. I also like how the author highlights some caveats and potential solutions, like: rely on the TCP instead of IP, use buffers, etc.
But I bet that most of the time those incorrect assumptions pop up simply because plenty devs don’t fucking care about user experience. And because even if assumptions are the bane of any good programmer (or any good human being, really), not assuming requires you to think, and some people treat thinking as if it was one of the Twelve Labours of Hercules. Also because this affects more people with crappier internet, and they don’t really care about poorer people.
Now, I’ll focus on the usage of the word “fallacy” within this text, because it’s rubbing me the wrong way. And because plenty people get fallacies really wrong, even if shit matters.
“Fallacy” is not just a fancy way to say “incorrect assumption”, like the author does. A fallacy is a faulty reasoning. It means that, even if you started out with solid info, the conclusion is unreliable. It’s stuff like this:
P1. Felines are animals.
P2. Dogs are animals.
C. Dogs are felines.
Both premises (P1 and P2) are true, and yet the conclusion © is false: dogs are not felines. Because the reasoning sucks; you can’t assume one set (“dogs”) is a subset of another (“felines”) because both happen to be subsets of a third one (“animals”).
But what if we replaced “dogs” with “cats”, and kept the reasoning intact? Like this:
P1. Felines are animals.
P2. Cats are animals.
C. Cats are felines.
The fallacy is still there, even if the conclusion happens to be true, because I did not change the flawed reasoning; it’s still a brainfart.
Why this matters: because if you start with true premises and your reasoning is not fallacious, the conclusion is reliably true. Like this:
P1. Cats are felines.
P2. Felines are animals.
C. Cats are animals.
As long as both premises is true, since this is good reasoning, the conclusion will be also true.
[HN comment] On the one hand, the list isn’t wrong. // On the other hand, more fortunes have been made by assuming that physics will catch up (closely enough, anyway) to computational needs, than by assuming that every byte and every cycle and every nanosecond matters.
Now, this is a fallacy. Actually two: moving goalposts + nirvana fallacy. Typical HN dumb commenter.
It’s moving goalposts because it’s clear the focus of the author is to encourage good practices, that ensure good user experience. It is not about “making fortunes” or crap like this.
And it’s a nirvana fallacy because the user disingenuously (or worse, idiotically) implies that not assuming better hardware means assuming “every byte and every cycle and every nanosecond matters”.
Sure, people in general will probably get better connections over time. But
And yet you don’t need to pretend every bit transmitted over the internet counts. As long as you keep the eight points from the author in mind, and… well, ask yourself
If MS is forcing this anti-feature regardless of how badly the feature hurts user trust, it means it gets more value out of the former than the later. Likely paving way to make Windows SaaS in the future, Adobe style.
First let me talk about the 6-7 meme. You probably saw it; as someone mentions “six seven”, someone else does the “grab balls” gesture with their hands, alternately, while repeating “six seven~”. It doesn’t really have semantic meaning, but it has a social one, that made it so popular: it signals someone belongs to the group of people who know the meme.
Now lemme talk about carbonara. See, there are a lot of reasons why the “canonical” recipe eventually settled this way, instead of another. For plenty (most?) people, the canonical recipe is perfect:
Bear in mind every single of those points is subjective: they’re a matter of taste, and while I do believe this taste should be shared by plenty people, this is not a true/false matter. As in, someone out there might actually like garlic x eggs, and that’s completely fine.
However. When people gatekeep carbonara, they never talk about those points, right. It’s always that “authentic” babble, being parroted over and over: “ackshyually lol carbonara should be made with $ingredient_1, never $ingredient_2 lmao”. Because the gatekeeping is not about helping you to make the best-tasting carbonara for you, it’s about signalling “I know CHRUE CURRBONAWA”. Much like 6-7, except coupled with disdain for what the others made.
It’s a bloody meme. But a really cringe one.
It’ll also output SATOR squares that are all wrong, instead of either giving up or providing a real one.
That’s disgusting. Almost like school doesn’t care about informing and empowering little human beings for their future, it cares only about shaping them as cogs for the machine… actually, disregard that “almost like”, school is like this.
This will be a source of woes for the following decades.
Okay, stopped reading here.
While there might be some correlation between intelligence — i.e. cognitive abilities — and level of education, that’s by no means “by definition”. This distinction is so essential for the topic at hand I’m not wasting my time with this used e-TP, if it gets it wrong already right off the bat.
(BTW confusing intelligence with knowledge is a sign you lack both.)