Curious_Canid

It really depends on how you define it. There have always been locations and groups where things were terrible and there have been locations and groups where things were good. Often the locations were the same but the groups were different.

In the US, there was a general sense that things were gradually improving that may have gone back as far as World War II and lasted through the 70’s. Not that there weren’t a lot of problems, just that society seemed to be recognizing and working on them. The conservative resurgence in 1980, lead by Ronald Reagan and Newt Gringrich, pretty much ended that positive trend. Since then we’ve seen active efforts to divide people, to encourage prejudices, and, especially, to destroy the education system. That last is critical, because it makes propaganda and other forms of social manipulation far more effective.

The US is now living with the result of allowing those changes. There are vast disparities in education, wealth, and power across the population. Many people on the low end of those distributions have been convinced to blame other groups that are also on the low end. That has allowed those at the high end to corrupt our political and economic systems to their advantage.

The current situation is not sustainable, but it will do incalculable damage to hundreds of millions of people while it exists. And we don’t know what will follow it.

There is strong evidence that humans became successful as a species because of their ability to put interests of the group before their own. Those instincts have been subverted, but they are not dead. That is what gives me hope for the future.

My main charities are the Humane Society, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, my local church (which supports all kinds of local needs), a local food bank, and the ACLU. I also donate to various organizations that do serious journalism, including NPR, PBS, ProPublica, Common Dreams, and the Guardian. And finally, I always try to donate to projects that produce things I use, like Fedican, PieFed, Voyager, Signal, Meshtastic firmware and Android app, and Thunderbird. Most of the donations are small, but I do what I can.

Hypocrisy. It’s at the root of refusing to take responsibility for your own words and actions. It used to be considered a serious failure and now we just assume it.

I much prefer metric, but I live in the US so the Imperial units are what I grew up with and can work with most easily. The rest of the world uses metric, so I end up dealing with metric units quite a lot too. I have gotten to the point where I have a fairly good intuitive grasp of most metric units. I almost always use metric when I’m measuring things for my own use.

I do prefer Celsius to Fahrenheit for temperature. Fahrenheit may have made sense in the era and location where it was created, but in the larger world, where climate change is well underway, it no longer fits. The idea that the normal range of temperature fit into 0 F to 100 F was never true outside of the temperate zones. Just within the lower 48 states in the US we regularly experience temperatures above 110 F in the south and below 0 F in the north.

Also, it has always been true that the temperature that matters most is the freezing point. Putting that at 32 has never made any sense.

It frustrates me that the US came so close to adopting metric, then backed away, while the rest of the world moved forward. Now we’re stuck with the worst of both systems.

I’m 65 and I hate the generation labels. I genuinely think they were originally pushed as another propaganda mechanism to create further artificial divisions between people. There is no doubt that people of significantly different ages are often different in various ways, but the over simplicity of the named generations just provides another convenient way to stereotype people instead of understanding them as individuals.

I think I joined reddit in 2008. I’ve been involved in social media since the days of dial-up bulletin board systems in the late 70’s. (And I ran one of my own in the mid-80’s.) I had an email address on Bitnet in 1983 and was on Usenet in its early days. reddit was an interesting and open place for a while there and I enjoyed the variety, but most of it was becoming too cynical and tribal for me by the early 20’s. I discovered Lemmy a couple years before reddit’s API debacle, but that is what convinced me to drop reddit and focus on the Fediverse.

I like the decentralized model of the Fediverse. I think the idea that different servers can have different rules is healthy. I stay away from parts of it, but I have found plenty of communities that are friendly and interesting to me. After hanging out on several different servers, I joined Fedican and have been happy here. It’s a nice place to call my home online.

This is why we could, and should, replace most CEOs with AI. If someone is going to make bad decisions, we could at least avoid paying them hundreds of millions of dollars to do it.

1. I read a lot, mostly fantasy, science fiction, and mysteries, plus some non-fiction.
2. I play and run non-computer roleplaying games. I started in 1976 and have been at it ever since.
3. I have recently taken up playing the recorder, mostly tenor. My wife and a friend play with me.

I think the key to this is how you really feel about it. If you are genuinely happy with the arrangement, and aware you will eventually need to move on, that can be okay. If you start to feel any self-esteem issue, like you’re being taken advantage of, it’s time to get out and find something better. Always respect yourself.

I used to think it was a lack of self-awareness, but it has become clear that they simply don’t care if they are known to be inconsistent, dishonest, and cruel. There have yet to be any negative consequences for it. Their base doesn’t seem to care about anything but “winning”. The definition of “winning” changes from day-to-day, but that’s okay because very little of this is about issues. It is simply about the competition itself.

I write software for a living and I have worked directly with LLM backend code. You aren’t wrong about the exceptions, but I think they actually reinforce my main point. If you play with the parameters you can make all kinds of things happen, but all of those things are still driven by the existing information it already has or can find. It can mash things together in random new ways, but it will always work with components that already exist. There is no awareness of context or meaning that would allow it to make intelligent choices about what it mashes together. That will always be driven by the patterns it already knows, positively or negatively.

It’s like doing chemistry by picking random bottles from the shelf and dumping them into a beaker to see what happens. You could make an amazing discovery that way, but the chances of it happening are very, very low. And even if it does happen, there’s an excellent chance that you won’t recognize it.

I’m in favor of using LLMs for tasks that involve large-scale data analysis. They can be quite helpful, as long as the user understands their limitations and performs due diligence to validate the results.

Unfortunately what we are mostly seeing are cases where LLMs are used to generate boilerplate text or code that is assembled from a vast collection of material that someone who actually knew what they were doing had previously created. That kind of reuse is not inherently bad, but it should not be confused with what competent writers or coders do. And if LLMs really do take over a lot of routine daily tasks from people, the pool of approaches to those tasks will stagnate, and eventually degenerate, as LLMs become the primary sources of each others’ solutions.

LLMs may very well change the world, but not it in the ways most people expect. Companies that have invested heavily in them are pushing them as the solutions to the wrong problems.

LLMs are not capable of creating anything, including code. They are enormous word-matching search engines that try to find and piece together the closest existing examples of what is being requested. If what you’re looking for is reasonably common, that may be useful. If what you’re looking for is obscure, you may get things that don’t apply. And the LLM cannot tell the difference. They can be useful but, unlike an LLM, you need to understand the context to use them safely.

I think the most interesting thing about LLMs is actually what they tell us about the repetitive nature of most of what we do.

Fall is probably my favorite season, followed closely by winter. I do use full-spectrum lights to compensate for the shorter days, but overall I think my mood is better during that time. Winter in a forest is one of the most beautiful things in the world.

I am also a software developer. The interview process in our industry has become increasingly offensive over the last 30 years. That started out with high-prestige companies who provided exceptional pay and benefits. Some people were willing to put up with that, so they mostly got away with it. Now most companies assume they have all the power and can demand whatever they want from applicants.

Refusing to participate is perfectly legitimate. It may keep you from finding a job, at least in this industry, but that may be better than giving up your self-respect for basic survival. And there are still decent software companies to work for, although they are hard to find. Changing careers is also a viable option.

Our overall economy is so broken in favor of the super rich and their corporations that individuals really do have very little power. Organized actions, of various types, give us some counter-leverage. Collective bargaining, strikes, and political efforts to push for better regulations all have the potential to improve things, at least in the middle- to long-term.

We all need to keep the big picture in mind while we do what we need to get by individually.

I have always expressed my emotions, to some extent, but I think I’ve gotten more comfortable with it as I’ve gotten older. It goes along with a general trend of worrying less about being disapproved of by others. I take negative feedback seriously, but I feel that negative judgments say more about the people making them than they do about me.

It can completely ruin my mood. External noise doesn’t both me too much, if it doesn’t include actual words. Anything with words disrupts my concentration badly. It keeps me from reading. It even makes it hard for me to follow a train of thought. It feels almost like a physical assault, to me.

I’m amazed that there aren’t frequent murders over this.

I still use a mixture of both. I am not actually opposed to proprietary software, as long as it comes from small, employee-owned companies. Whatever the business model, people deserve to be paid for their effort if they are delivering something useful. I also donate to FOSS projects that I use.

I have been steadily moving away from corporate software for several years. There are still a few specialty apps I need, but I have very little of it left.

I’ve tried a lot of alternate keyboards, but I hadn’t heard of Heliboard. I just gave it a try and I really like it! Thanks for posting about it.

Does anyone not?

I hold conversations with my pets all the time. And sometimes I sing to them while sometimes I sing with them. Doing harmony with my husky is tricky, but fun.