Woe is me, I’m a cog in the machine but I want to be the machine itself. I think the technology industry is detached from the rest of the world.
Programmers and mathematicians train to be “the utmost correct” and everyone thinks they figured it out. On this quest for hyper-optimization, hyper-correctness, and so on, EVERYONE has become ridiculous.
Yeah I don’t understand how people are so ignorant. But the system is designed to make them so—and they become mouth pieces for the big-agriculture lobby.
Make it an emotional issue and they’ll bring their pitchforks; but they’ve never worked in a slaughter house nor spent time with the animals.
That’s the problem—people are so far removed from animals these days… Farming is done by corporate machines en masse. Well, that and underpaid foreign labor.
In short—many people are dumber than the very animals they say “have no conscience.”
If you don't mind me going on a soapbox here for a minute, I want to highlight something that I suspect is hurting your cause and not helping it:
> In short—many people are dumber than the very animals they say “have no conscience.”
There's a phenomenon that I've observed over the last 20 years that seems to primarily effect progressive causes: an alienating sense of moral and intellectual superiority over the people who do not yet believe in your cause. That statement that you made there is going to do two things:
- Resonate with the people who already believe that eating meat is the epitome of evil and all that is wrong with the world
- Cause people who don't yet believe that to go "wow, those vegetarians are assholes." And... it won't be the first time they've had that thought :)
That being said, the question that has perpetually eluded me with vegetarianism is: what is a good way to promote it? If you do truly believe that people are dumb, but you still want them to start eating an animal-free diet, what's the tack for getting there? My suspicion is that one aspect of a positive approach is to just start cooking and sharing amazingly good animal-free meals. For people who are vegetarian for moral-superiority reasons, it's easy to justify sacrificing on amazing food because, well, morality; for your Uncle Joe, though, all you're telling him is "you can't have bacon on your burger, you can't even have the burger, but here's a soy-based alternative that's not nearly as good but is _moral_". I have had incredible vegetarian dishes, particularly from Middle Eastern restaurants. They are decidedly not the dishes that vegetarians bring to backyard barbecues.
> they’ve never worked in a slaughter house nor spent time with the animals
For the record, I am not a vegetarian but I do try to bias my cooking towards more sustainable ingredients. We buy our meat exclusively from local farms (which I realize is both unscalable and a privilege). I have not worked in a slaughterhouse, but I have raised and slaughtered cows and chickens with my own hands. Mostly I'm not a vegetarian because I'm not good enough at consistently cooking food that tastes nearly as good as beef or pork and I have not yet found the right combination of vegetarian dishes that doesn't leave me with a lack of energy after eating them for a week.
Wtf does HGX mean? God enough with the acronyms people.
Please take an extra ten seconds to speak in proper human language!
You could save on the worlds carbon footprint by reducing the number of times humans have to search for “what is NVIDIA hgx?” or is it “what is AMD HGX” and then subsequently visiting the websites to see if that’s right or not.
In my experience, it usually means Small Block Chevy, but in certain communities it means Single Board Computer, an older way of referring to devices like the Raspberry Pi.
I would elaborate and say, anywhere that your computer is resource constrained ( ram, processing power ) but you still want to make up articles for your Amazon Affiliate blog
In this context I'd assume SBC means Single Board Computer, such as a Raspberry Pi or one of the many imitators. The article itself mentions running LLaMa on a Pi 4.
The interesting implication about running an LLM on a single board computer is that if it's a proof of concept for an LLM on a smartphone. If you have a model that can produce useful results on a Ras Pi, you have something that could potentially run on hundreds of millions of smartphones. I'm not sure what the use case is for running an LLM on your phone instead of the cloud, but it opens some interesting possibilities. It depends just how useful such a small LLM could be.
The Roman Catholic church uses Latin for official definitive documents so they presumably have ways of expressing at least some modern concepts.
"Reginald Foster, a former plumber’s apprentice from Milwaukee who, in four decades as an official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Friday at a nursing home in Milwaukee. He was LXXXI. "
“Prefer non-member non-friend functions to member functions. Doing so increases encapsulation, packaging flexibility, and functional extensibility.”
The text has a lot more detail but that’s a brief summary. Folks just need to read the literature then this sort of knowledge would be in common use.
One downside of language evolution is a lot of people focusing on new language features, etc, but then some of this older, important knowledge gets skipped over.
To be fair to the author—they state it can “pass the medical exam.” Which is different than if I should ask it for medical advice. I mean it can’t examine me physically therefore it can’t be my doctor.
On the other hand, there aren’t enough doctors where I live so I guess I’ll take it! Lol
I think this is the wording I have beef with: “DoctorGPT is a Large Language Model that can pass the US Medical Licensing Exam. This is an open-source project with a mission to provide everyone their own private doctor.” The “provide everyone their own private doctor” part definitely makes it sound like it can replace a doctor.
I’m just worried about the combination of medical misinformation and the people who don’t understand how LLMs work who will take everything a LLM spits out as truth. There are already a ton of examples in the news of people who really don’t understand how they work (like that one professor who failed an entire class because ChatGPT told him that all the papers that the class wrote were plagiarized.) We also just saw how much harm can be done with medical misinformation with COVID.
Maybe I’m just being pessimistic and paranoid, but god am I scared of how things could cause people to inadvertently harm themselves and the people around them.
You’re rightfully paranoid. LLMs are creative entities and there’s no repercussions for making up diseases. Like the chef one that recommended ingredients which combined yielding chlorine gas. Yummy.
Perhaps it knew that someone would die as a result and it did so intentionally. LLMs do have personalities and wit—and they know our human weaknesses.
Somewhere along the line they changed the Xbox UI to sell more widgets. I hate that—let me see all my apps first and foremost, not apps that I don’t want. If I’m in a shopping mood I’ll open the store… and they brought that same pattern to Win11. Stop selling us shit we don’t want please MSFT.
Customer first vs corporation first.
The truth is, if they don’t see lots of returns on software they force it down customers throat. If that doesn’t generate enough revenue they just kill it on the spot.
Microsoft had some great products but it’s hard to want to buy anything from them now because it’ll be EOL in one or two years… feel bad for folks who bought surface duos, to name a more recent one.
Not really; no modern profession is a close analogue, because Roman lawyers of this era weren't professionals. They were first and foremost aristocrats, trading favors and running patronage networks.
The closest are probably modern media consultants. They plead one's case in public forums in an attempt to bend outcomes, even legal outcomes. For high-worth /profile individuals public opinion directly shapes eventual legal outcomes.
If you read roman histories, it is full of exceptions from the law that were based on little more than mob opinion. Rules such as term limits, pay or inheritance were regularly bypassed by high-profile people if they could get the plebs into the streets.
It’s tempting to think that if you just look and think hard enough you can find perfect analogs between the past and the present. But when you do that, you don’t engage with the past on it’s own terms and your understanding of it is fundamentally weakened. It’s best not to do that.
I don't think either of the two "sounds like ..." comments above are interested in any sort of understanding about the past (or present), fundamental or otherwise. It sounds like they're more interested in making cheap political / social commentary.
I think that this comment is not interested in any sort of understanding the parent comments, fundamental or otherwise. It sounds like it's more interested in scoring cheap putdown points and signalling superiority.
I'm also uncertain of what, aside from relevance, makes political/social commentary "cheap" as opposed to "expensive", or why the latter would be more desirable.
Perhaps it's based on a misguided idea that commentary must be tied in scholarship to be worthy of utterance (and that such "expensive" commentary is not just a ritualized and impotent form of social commentary). Or that history moves because of such "expensive" commentary, as opposed because of the "cheap" opinions and actions of puny laymen.
It's _hard_ not to take for granted the way our own societies functions. I know I'm treading a touchy issue here, but West/Westernized societies have failed to wrap their heads around Afghanistan repeatedly and engage with Afghans, because Afghanistan simply not a nation-state like the ones they are organized around.
It's not, it never was, and I don't mean to say that by that they're in a "prior" stage of development than how our societies have turned out, because these processes aren't linear, but a couple of centuries ago no polity or region was a nation-state, including the ones we live in, and despite the relative recency of that we can't understand how a "country" may not be what we imagine a country to be like, when presented with an example right now.
As they say, the past is another country, and I'd say the past of an ancient, foreign culture is doubly-foreign.
Human cultures can be very different and alien, which is especially hard to really wrap your head around when you've only experienced your own WEIRD one.
What you describe as desirable is a form of analysis paralysis.
Engaging to the past "on it’s own terms" is noble.
But refusing or failing to find patterns and analogies (lest they not be "perfect"), and to engage with the past as a store of experience to learn from, and leverage the past to inform your understanding of the present, renders the whole point of studying the past a moot endeavor.
I think a much larger problem is that most people are not looking at the past at all, and know very little about it except what they've seen in some movie or, at best, some documentary. Rather than people making distorted analogies based on a less than functional understanding of it.
Programmers and mathematicians train to be “the utmost correct” and everyone thinks they figured it out. On this quest for hyper-optimization, hyper-correctness, and so on, EVERYONE has become ridiculous.