• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: April 27th, 2024

help-circle




  • Fuck Amazon, fuck Alexa.

    But that wall clock is glorious. It’s a decently look clock, but seeing how much time you have left on multiple timers with a single glance is so incredibly useful. Especially when you’re cooking.

    I’m currently in the process of migrating away from the shit Alexa ecosystem, but no matter what I end up with, I’ll have to find an alternative for this clock




  • For me personally, there is only two applications of LLMs in programming:

    • doing tasks I kinda know how to do, but don’t want to properly learn (recent example: generate pgf plots from csv data in matplotlib. 90% boilerplate, I last had to do it 3 years ago and vaguely remember some pitfalls so can steer the LLM in that direction. Will probably never again have to do this, so not worth the extra couple hours to properly learn
    • things I would ordinarily write a script for, but aren’t worth automating because they won’t come up in the future again (example: convert this Lua table to a Nix set)

    Essentially, one-off things that you know how to check for correctness.





  • IDK. They will certainly be fine here, on earth. Even if everything else goes to shit, they will continue living in luxury.

    On a spaceship / station / Mars colony though? As much as I love sci-fi, living there will be ROUGH, regardless of how rich you are.

    I think it’s more an ego thing: “I want to go down in history as the first human on another planet, lest I be forgotten” combined with an unhealthy dose of not giving a fuck about other people, which is kinda a prerequisite to being a billionaire in the first place.






  • OK, this is only tangentially related but it has been on my mind lately and I need to rant:

    I am T1 diabetic. Over the last decade, a LOT has happened to improve my life, especially in regards to no longer needing to check glucose levels with blood, as glucose sensors you wear on your arm have become ubiquitous.

    It started with a dedicated device that you needed to hold up to the sensor to get a reading (much nicer than pricking your finger) to that sensor being able to notify the dedicated device of high/low glucose values (yay! Sleep through the night, knowing you’ll be woken up if something is wrong) to the sensor now constantly streaming glucose values to your phone.

    Which is fantastic.

    In theory.

    In practice, there are two companies making these sensors (OK, there’s a couple more, but they suck way more and are much less commonly used).

    And both of their closed-source apps suuuuuuuuck. They do the bare minimum and nothing more. (Actually, it’s worse than that. Ask me if you want to know. It’s its own rant.)

    Then there’s xdrip+, a FANTASTIC app made by diabetics for diabetics. Instead of just showing you “this is your glucose” and sounding an alarm, once, when it’s required, you can (just off the top of my head): Set an arbitrary amount of alarms with their own behaviors, which can be configured to vary by time of day; show the glucose everywhere (notification, lock screen, home screen,…); mute alarms for a custom time; do not sound an alarm if you’re trending in the correct direction fast enough; do not sound the alarm multiple times if your are jittering around the threshold; notify other people automatically in case of emergency; and roughly 1000 things more. The app is well maintained, and of course open source.

    Can you guess what the problem is?

    That’s right, manufacturers disapprove of using this app. For the worse one of the two sensors mentioned, the community reverse engineered the communication and it is now working perfectly with the app. For the better sensor, they can’t and won’t due to fear of legal repercussions.

    It’s my health. And I need to decide between worse hardware and useless software.

    There’s no technical reason for this. I dream of the EU passing a law that requires manufacturers of wearable medical devices to publish the comm protocols and to legitimize use of third party software.

    Rant over.


  • I was fully on board until, like, a year ago. But the more I used it, the more obviously it came undone.

    I initially felt like it could really help with programming. And it looked like it, too - when you fed it toy problems where you don’t really care about how the solution looks, as long as it’s somewhat OK. But once you start giving it constraints that stem from a real project, it just stops being useful. It ignores constraints (use this library, do not make additional queries, …), and when you point out its mistake and ask it to to better it goes “oh, sorry! Here, let me do the same thing again, with the same error!”.

    If you’re working in a less common language, it even dreams up non-existing syntax.

    Even the one thing it should be good at - plain old language - it sucks ass at. It’s become so easy to spot LLM garbage, just due to its style.

    Worse, asking it to proofread a text for spelling and grammar mistakes, but to explicitly do not change the wording or style, there’s about a 50/50 chance it will either

    • change your wording or style, or
    • point out errors that are not even in the original text in the first place!

    I could honestly go on and on, but what it boils down to is: it is able to string together words that make it sound like it knows what it is doing, but it is just that, a facade. And it looks like for more and more people, the spell is finally breaking.