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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 14th, 2024

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  • Yeah, the American West has a huge variety of very distinct biomes. For the purpose of telling a story though, one rocky desert or forested mountain vale or whatever is as good as another, leaving us, the audience, largely unaware and misled. We mostly only notice when they do that to areas we’re familiar with.

    Reminds me of the movie The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson. There’s a scene where he is at his home in what is clearly the upcountry of South Carolina not too far from the Appalachians and he takes a walk down his garden path to visit his wife’s grave, which is located in the South Carolina lowcountry, by the coast, somehow skipping past over a hundred miles of pine forest that would have been between those areas. If you’re not familiar with those areas, they both just look like areas in the American Southeast, but if you are familiar, it’s very jarring.









  • I can see the argument that it has a sort of world model, but one that is purely word relationships is a very shallow sort of model. When I am asked what happens when a glass is dropped onto concrete, I don’t just think about what I’ve heard about those words and come up with a correlation, I can also think about my experiences with those materials and with falling things and reach a conclusion about how they will interact. That’s the kind of world model it’s missing. Material properties and interactions are well enough written about that it ~~simulates ~~ emulates doing this, but if you add a few details it can really throw it off. I asked Bing Copilot “What happens if you drop a glass of water on concrete?” and it went into excruciating detail about how the water will splash, mentions how it can absorb into it or affect uncured concrete, and now completely fails to notice that the glass itself will strike the concrete, instead describing the chemistry of how using “glass (such as from the glass of water)” as aggregate could affect the curing process. Having a purely statistical/linguistic world model leaves some pretty big holes in its “reasoning” process.


  • So is ‘security camera’ also a misnomer? His job is to make theft less likely because he will report you to the police. That still falls in the realm of security. I will say that ‘security observer’ would be a better job title than ‘security guard’ but they never claimed a job title, just a general field of work.


  • The board’s job is to hire the CEO and demand good value for shareholders. The CEO’s job is to make the big decisions to achieve that goal quickly and then usually leave before their short term thinking falls apart. The manager’s job is to enforce whatever decisions the CEO makes, even if it is stupid or cruel. And the employee’s job is to suffer so that each layer above can look good to the layer above them.

    Not to say there’s no good people in the system. My manager for most of my time there was actually a good manager who felt that his primary job was to deflect away the shit that rolled down from above so we could focus on our work, but then he got laid off along with half my coworkers.

    I do miss writing software, but I really don’t miss working in the corporate world.