~~You ok CustardFist? You’re stuff’s always been weird but it seems to have taken a decidedly sexual slant in the ones I’ve seen lately.

Also, there are impossibly few women turned on by having a doctor rooting around in their privates. That last facial expression overwhelmingly pushes the whole comic into the territory where I’m questioning if these aren’t some way of not so subtly sharing your personal kinks with the world.~~

Edit: Nevermind, just checked your profile. For some reason a ton of your recent stuff hasn’t shown up during my doomscrolling. Guess it’s time to try a new sorting algorithm!

While I’m not against an anonymous stand for what’s “right”, that really was the tipping point for a lot of changes on 4chan.

It really fuelled the idea that anonymous should have some sort of goal of justice rather than just doing things “for the lulz”. It normalized the concept of shamelessly bringing your internet culture of choice out into the real world regardless of appropriateness (most of the protests were really just 4chan irl meetups, not really protests).

The biggest change was the sheer amount of public attention it drew to the site. That brought in a huge influx of new users who didn’t care to conform to the existing board culture (for better or worse). Things changed considerably following all that mess.

Does homeboy not know about crabcakes? All the taste, none of the pain in the ass and paying for the privilege of preparing your own food. Just get them somewhere that doesn’t use filler.

Solarwinds Orion

We don’t curse in this household.

Anyway, guessing it’s the classic “sales sold the demo of a perfectly configured setup maintained by a dedicated team, management expects you to make that happen alone on top of everything else you already do” situation? Multiple years into cleaning up the mess of that shit at my place.

That’s a combination of too simple/short in your sentences, mixed with too specific jargon with no clarification. It’s dumb as hell that people don’t know stuff like what a server is, but if they don’t you have to abstract it more.

My go to is some form of: I’m in IT, I do systems administration. I help keep all the things behind the scenes working so that everyone’s stuff works at my workplace. Less of making your email work, more of making everyone’s email work.

Obviously I work with a hell of a lot more than just email. I’m mostly scripting out custom automation jobs to bridge gaps in the integrations between different systems. But like you said, keep it simple.

So for those not familar with machine learning, which was the practical business use case for “AI” before LLMs took the world by storm, that is what they are describing as reinforcement learning. Both are valid terms for it.

It’s how you can make an AI that plays Mario Kart. You establish goals that grant points, stuff to avoid that loses points, and what actions it can take each “step”. Then you give it the first frame of a Mario Kart race, have it try literally every input it can put in that frame, then evaluate the change in points that results. You branch out from that collection of “frame 2s” and do the same thing again and again, checking more and more possible future states.

At some point you use certain rules to eliminate certain branches on this tree of potential future states, like discarding branches where it’s driving backwards. That way you can start opptimizing towards the options at any given time that get the most points im the end. Keep the amount of options being evaluated to an amount you can push through your hardware.

Eventually you try enough things enough times that you can pretty consistently use the data you gathered to make the best choice on any given frame.

The jank comes from how the points are configured. Like AI for a delivery robot could prioritize jumping off balconies if it prioritizes speed over self preservation.

Some of these pitfalls are easy to create rules around for training. Others are far more subtle and difficult to work around.

Some people in the video game TAS community (custom building a frame by frame list of the inputs needed to beat a game as fast as possible, human limits be damned) are already using this in limited capacities to automate testing approaches to particularly challenging sections of gameplay.

So it ends up coming down to complexity. Making an AI to play Pacman is relatively simple. There are only 4 options every step, the direction the joystick is held. So you have 4ⁿ states to keep track of, where n is the number of steps forward you want to look.

Trying to do that with language, and arguing that you can get reliable results with any kind of consistency, is blowing smoke. They can’t even clearly state what outcomes they are optimizing for with their “reward” function. God only knows what edge cases they’ve overlooked.

My complete out of my ass guess is that they did some analysis on response to previous gpt output, tried to distinguish between positive and negative responses (or at least distinguish against responses indicating that it was incorrect). They then used that as some sort of positive/negative points heuristic.

People have been speculating for a while that you could do that, crank up the “randomness”, have it generate multiple responses behind the scenes and then pit those “pre-responses” against each other and use that criteria to choose the best option of the “pre-responses”. They could even A/B test the responses over multiple users, and use the user responses as further “positive/negative points” reinforcement to feed back into it in a giant loop.

Again, completely pulled from my ass. Take with a boulder of salt.

I would hope, but I’ve been burned enough to not assume big companies are doing things the sensible way.

This is a common thing in online discourse, and reviews. People aren’t usually going around posting “Yet another day of no issues with my computer”. There’s no emotional motivation there.

I’ll take a swing. I’ve had no issues with my Windows 10 desktop since I built it in 2020. None of the bloat, ads, forced updates, OneDrive pushing. None of the shit people regularly cite as problems inherent and unavoidable with Windows.

I did my research and used the proper official tools to configure it before and immediately after a fresh install. Used third party scripts and programs for messing with configuration shit as minimally as possible.

I’ve only had to adjust things maybe three times a year, and most of the time it’s been to re-enable shit that the average user would never disable like printing or hibernation, rather than having to fix or adjust anything from an update.

It doesn’t take many times being on the hiring side of the table or talking with someone who is, to hear the horror stories of why the stupid questions get asked.

Or, to frame it a different way:

Modern work enviornments being what they are, as a worker you will be required to have some bare minimum soft skills in order to interact with co-workers and your boss in a manner that isn’t completely deranged.

Shitty questions like these, with an obvious difference between the blunt honest answer and the “workplace acceptable” answer, serve as quite possibly the lowest bar possible to measure your ability to cater your communication properly to an audience.

These stupid questions are a litmus test for whether you are capable of reasonably functioning socially in a work environment. Very few jobs exist where you never interact with others.

I’d rather not spend my 8 hours a day listening to someone rant constantly about UBI and hating the job. That only makes the grind worse and drag on longer, even when the complaining is on the mark.

Most of all: for as dumb as a lot of this song and dance is, very few people ask these questions because they want to. Most people in recruiting have experienced times where they skipped the stupid question, and ended up missing the red flag to not hire the person.

I’ll give you that, but it seems to me that you must not have been around for the surge of iPhone bootlegs earlier in the smartphone era.

Lock screen, default background, fonts, literal stolen icons (not just stupidly similar ones), Chrome labelled as Safari, etc.

Settings panel design and especially the icon are super minor.

Hell, what about new Samsungs disabling the App drawer by default and tossing all apps on the home screen?

Sorry buddy, but that capitalistic framework is where we all have to exist for the forseeable future.

Giving corporations more power is not going to help us end that.

Ehhhhh… that’s a pretty shit take. Any site that allows uploads of files “allows” uploads of CSAM? See how that breaks down immediately?

Regretting doing a nude scene is humanizing. Making your regret someone else’s problem is just shitty all around.

🎶 What can I say except you’re welcome? 🎶

Lol, tell me you’ve never worked IT support again.

The average user can’t remember passwords without browser autofill. They don’t want to tinker. A “just works” linux distro with a relatively limited set of default features targeted to a specific hardware set to avoid complications, like SteamOS on Steam Deck, is pretty much at the limit of the investment level the average user is willing to put in to keep things working.

Then perhaps this is not the correct audience for this piece.

Only if it’s enabled by default, or the dev knows to enable it.

I had a lot of weird problems processing some info with names in Powershell until I found out that Powershell doesn’t default to unicode format when shoving output into files. You can easily specify the encoding, but if you don’t it replaces any non-ascii characters with “?” by default, so it’s not even immediately obvious that there’s an incorrect character, as it just silently substitutes a valid one.