I’m just barely a boomer, but I’m also a software engineer/manager. Sometimes younger folks assume I need help with computers/tech, or are surprised when I’m knowledgeable about them. It’s starting to change for me, too, though. I haven’t kept up with newer languages, and as a manager I really don’t write any code outside of the occasional Excel VBA, so I’m getting pretty stale.

Or he consider himself a crusader for a cause more than a vigilante and was carrying it to get more attention to his beliefs.

I don’t eat at McDonald’s for a variety of reasons, but I doubt very much that the company has anything to do with the guy being called in.

Not knowing anything about his death before reading the article, the headline made it sound like some odd coincidence. “Sudden death” makes it sound like something that just happened unexpectedly. Not sure why they didn’t just say “…before suicide.”

It seems like all companies are susceptible to top level executives, who don’t understand the technology, wanting to know how they’re capitalizing on it, driving lower level management to start pushing it.

I manage a software engineering group for an aerospace company, so early on I had to have a discussion with the team about acceptable and non-acceptable uses of an LLM. A lot of what we do is human rated (human lives depend on it), so we have to be careful. Also, it’s a hard no on putting anything controlled or proprietary in a public LLM (the company now has one in-house).

You can’t put trust into an LLM because they get things wrong. Anything that comes out of one has to be fully reviewed and understood. They can be useful for suggesting test cases or coming up with wording for things. I’ve had employees use it to come up with an algorithm or find an error, but I think it’s risky to have one generate large pieces of code.

My son is in a PhD program and is a TA for a geophysics class that’s mostly online, so he does a lot of grading assignments/tests. The number of things he gets that are obviously straight out of an LLM is really disgusting. Like sometimes they leave the prompt in. Sometimes the submit it when the LLM responds that it doesn’t have enough data to give an answer and refers to ways the person could find out. It’s honestly pretty sad.

Oh, well, silly me then. No, like the other guy said, it’s very stretchy. If you have your own scrotum, it’s easily confirmed. If you have girly parts, the skin is very similar to the outer labia: very sensitive to scratching, but it doesn’t hurt to stretch it.

I don’t think they’re asking about the stretching, but about having a puddle of alcohol on your scrotum. That was my first thought as well. Probably okay if it’s wine, but not sure about something high proof.

I agree that, asking with the bad things OP mentions, there are good things about a smaller site. I remember a lot of times on Reddit when I had something to say, but when I went into the thread there were thousands of comments and I’d feel like there just wasn’t a point in adding mine.

On Lemmy, when I make a comment, it’s very likely to be seen (for better or worse), and I have much more of a feeling of adding to the conversation. It’s more like joining a conversation at a party.

To be fair, torties aren’t happy about much of anything

Isn’t this one of the LLMs that was partially trained on Reddit data? LLMs are inherently a model of a conversation or question/response based on their training data. That response looks very much like what I saw regularly on Reddit when I was there. This seems unsurprising.

Any Warcraft 3 players read the headline and automatically respond with “I’m not ready!”

For those wondering, this appears to be true. Most sites that say it all reference the same person, whose study doesn’t seem very scientific, but I found this much more controlled study that did indeed replicate the conclusions.

Yes, Leckie writes SF. If you’re interested, I would start with Ancillary Justice, her first novel. It’s really good, and the first of a trilogy that’s all excellent.

I think you saw a post by me long ago where I posted my short notes about the books I’d read in that time frame. If you’d like me to pass along those notes for any of the books we talk about, like Leckie or the more recent Gibson novels, I’d be happy to.

And thanks for the offer. I’m good now, but who knows. An interesting time of change for me coming up: I retire in January after 39+ years at the same company, and sometime after we’re going to move from an area of southern California, where I’ve lived my whole life, to northern Washington State. Will be odd for sure.

Oh, good call, I did read those books and liked them quite a bit. Martine’s writing reminds me a bit of Ann Leckie, who I’ve read a lot of and like very much.

Hey, in know I’m just a guy on the internet who you talk about books with, but if you need to talk about more, I’m happy to listen. You might already have a good support network, which is great, but I know not everyone does.

I’m sorry to hear life is having challenges for you at the moment, I hope that resolves soon. A nice thing about a book is that you can put it down for days, weeks, months, whatever, and it’s still waiting for you when you feel like coming back to it.

I’ve been reading more Gibson lately. I read the first two books of the Jackpot trilogy (the third hasn’t come out yet) and the first in the Blue Ant trilogy. They’ve all been very good.

You take care and I hope things get better for you.

Reportedly he has a very worth of $50M. If that was just in investments getting 4 percent a year, that would be $2M annually for doing nothing. Kind of gross to stoop to that level for money when you have so much.

Courting the same demographic

No, some whoppers end up with the inside not all whipped and crunchy, but a little chewy. They’re great.