That article feels unfinished, but at least the author pushes back a little. Those numbers cannot possibly be true. And if they somehow are, based on my experience cleaning up that code will take nearly as long as a person writing it from scratch.

Oh yeah, that last point rings true for my dad too. My family hired a health aid to assist with our relative who he’s helping care for in home hospice, and we fought with him for weeks to defer to the aid’s expertise. He believes, despite the fact that this is literally her career, that he knows better how to take care of someone on their deathbed. Despite not having gone through it before, or having any medical or healthcare experience. He would snap at the aid for showing him how to do something.

We ultimately had to have a heart-to-heart with the aid to apologize for his behavior and to teach her how to use his own narcissism against him so he would do things the right way.

I think he’d be a grandiose narcissist. He truly believes he’s the best and can’t be wrong. And when someone calmly and carefully explains why he is wrong about a particular thing, his mood flips 180 degrees and he blows up and gets super defensive. If we don’t give up trying to convince him, his mood gets even more sour and he essentially mopes like toddler. This can be for anything, even the most trivial bullshit that wouldn’t phase anybody else.

And he does all that while bragging to anyone that will listen that he’s open-minded and loves being proven wrong.

I’m not a psychiatrist, so this is all observational for me, but my father is a narcissist so I can at least tell you what he’s like.

In conversation, or any interaction, if the topic veers into anything that my father can’t relate to or isn’t aware of from his own personal experience, he immediately reframes the topic so it’s about him. This consistently happens in the middle of a conversation, and it usually interrupts someone speaking. The interruption is always unrelated to what the person was actually saying, so after he interrupts you can always see the person he cut off deflate and shrink away from the conversation. Because it’s clear he wasn’t participating in a two-sided conversation, he was just waiting his turn to cut in and take over.

He manages to come across as caring, but that’s only because he knows exactly how to act so he appears that way. But his motivation is only to be praised for his apparent empathy, because if you probe his behavior even a little bit, it’s like a switch is flipped and he goes into a full on angry defensive mode.

For example, a close family member is dying, and he is the only one available to care for them. And he is taking care of them physically, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that, but whenever another family-member asks for an update on their condition, his framing is always about what he has done and how he has learned what to do in a particular situation, it’s never about the condition of our dying family member.

He takes credit for every idea and new concept he comes across, even if the person who gave him the idea is in the room with him. It sometimes even happens in the same conversation.

Anyway, those are just my personal experiences living with an extremely difficult and selfish father who is incapable of thinking genuinely about other people. I learned a lot about myself and him by reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Worth a read even if you’re not thinking about a parent.

Thank you. He gets more normalized any time someone talks about this asshole and doesn’t mention his extremist and wildly unpopular views. He is a terrible person, and not enough people know why.

This article does a pretty solid job of explaining how horrible he is, though I’m sure there are better ones.

Yes! I listened to a couple chapters when I didn’t have the book with me, and ended up going back and listening from the beginning. It’s a great audiobook.

The Darth Plagueis novel also added a ton of context to The Phantom Menace for me. It’s a long history of Palpatine and Plagueis that goes all the way up to the Battle of Naboo, so it really feels like you can see clearly Plagueis’ influence on Palpatine and his scheming. If I remember correctly, Luceno even does a couple of the scenes from the movie, with way more detail. I rewatched it after finishing the book and got a lot more out of it.

If you have a general interest channel that includes most/much or your company on slack or something similar, you could post links to articles that explain the problems with relying on chatbots or best-practices for using them in a professional setting, and hope the person in question sees it. That way you don’t have to call them out personally, and the whole company can benefit from a reality check on how these things should or shouldn’t be used.

Your whisky preference is indeed correct.

I like this idea a lot, but I wouldn’t want it to be an either/or setting. It’d be perfect if I could set my swipe gesture to hide on upvote, and the upvote button to just mark as read on upvote. Or even just a different swipe gesture for each, would be awesome. Usually I want a post to go away immediately, so I do a lot of vote and hide swipe gestures one after the other. But sometimes I’m weird and want to leave a post in my feed in case I want to go back to it.

For me, if I read a post in a browser instead of the app, and then switch to the app those posts are marked as read, so greyed out a little, but aren’t hidden in the app. I’ve noticed it a lot, and it’s kind of annoying, but it may not be exactly what you’re describing. Pretty sure they persist as read but unhidden in the app even on refresh, which maybe is a bug? Hard to say.

I recently asked myself similar questions about two friends I knew for about 15 years. I thought I had been close with them, but I quickly answered No to all of them (plus a bunch of follow-ups I asked myself), and realized they were never real friends, or at least hadn’t been for a while, they were just people who were accustomed to seeing me and sometimes making plans together.

I always felt anxious after hanging out with them, never felt like they listened to or cared about anything I said, never remembered my preferences or things about my personal life from visit to visit, never believed me when I said I knew something, etc etc. It’s easy to get used to this kind of thing and to think it’s normal and healthy, but it was so exhausting and frustrating for me that I finally gave up and haven’t talked to them in over a year.

Sometimes these types of questions are super helpful in evaluating longstanding relationships as well as new ones.

The drinking water systems in the United States are so precarious and vulnerable, that I’m genuinely shocked we haven’t had more widespread issues with the water supply. The systems are made up of thousands of locally-managed interconnected intakes and outflows, and oversight is spotty and combative.

Please use a water filter. And thank your local utilities and maintenance people for their hard work keeping us alive.

Wow, that’s really impressive. I don’t really know why, but I want this.

Though I initially thought it was handheld, which would make their claim to be able to print on nearly any surface a little more believable. Still seems like incredible tech.

One of my favorite Japanese dramas, Isekai Izakaya Nobu, based on an anime of the same name, has a plot kind of like this. Lots of fun.

don’t think that FAANG companies realize how toxic their image is

Ain’t that the truth. Their behavior and the products they’ve been launching the last few years prove this to me. They’re completely out of touch with society and what consumers actually want. LLMs are another perfect example of that.

I highly doubt that. For so many reasons. Here’s just a few:

• What data would you train it on, the Constitution? The entirely of federal law? How would that work? Knowing how ridiculous textualism is even when done by humans, do you really think a non-thinking algorithm could understand the intention behind the words? Or even what laws, rules, or norms should be respected in each unique situation?
• We don’t know why LLMs return the responses they return. This would be hugely problematic for understanding its directions.
• If an LLM doesn’t know an answer, instead of saying so it will usually just make something up. Plenty of people do this too, but I’m not sure why we should trust an algorithm’s hallucinations over a human’s bullshit.
• How would you ensure the integrity of the prompt engineer’s prompts? Would there be oversight? Could the LLM’s “decisions” be reversed?
• How could you hold an LLM accountable for the inevitable harm it causes? People will undoubtedly die for one reason or another based on the LLM’s “decisions.” Would you delete the model? Retrain it? How would you prevent it from making the same mistake again?

I don’t mean this as an attack on you, but I think you trust the implementation of LLMs way more than they deserve. These are unfinished products. They have some limited potential, but should by no means have any power or control over our lives. Have they really shown you they should be trusted with this kind of power?

I love that they let him develop beyond a scripted holonovel character. He knew he was a hologram, and they left the holodeck on for him so he could almost live a normal life. Don’t really know why, but that’s so freaking wholesome to me. Peak Trek.

Casey Newton founded Platformer, after leaving The Verge around 5 years ago. But yeah, I used to listen to Hard Fork, his podcast with Kevin Roose, but I stopped because of how uncritically they cover AI and LLMs. It’s basically the only thing they cover, and yet they are quite gullible and not really realistic about the whole industry. They land some amazing interviews with key players, but never ask hard questions or dive nearly deep enough, so they end up sounding pretty fluffy as ass-kissy. I totally agree with Zitron’s take on their reporting. I constantly found myself wishing they were a lot more cynical and combative.

Wait, am I the only one who thought that game was an underrated masterpiece? The graphics were gorgeous and performant, and the mission design was intuitive and challenging. I 100%ed every mission, and loved all the investigation mechanics. I was recently thinking about doing a full replay…