AccountMaker

I stopped running with music when I ran a half marathon once and about 17km in I just started getting annoyed by it. I'm out there dying, and some asshole is screaming into my ears.

Idk, I enjoy running by itself. I ran a full marathon without music and didn't get bored once. I'd either just enjoy myself, think about random stuff, look around me, play music / sing in my mind etc. But to each their own I guess.

I was at a student project that just transitions to a being a normal job once you get your BSc, and there was one guy on our team who nobody knows how he got there, since there were objectively better students (in terms of grades and knowledge) who got rejected. He was beyond useless and always got other people to do his work for him.

Anyways, the company I worked at offered internships for students, and the main criteria for getting accepted was your average grade. I was present to witness that guy going on a call with someone who determines who gets the internship to vouch for his friend. His friend had an average grade far under 8 (which is honestly embarassing at our uni), but this dude said how his friend is very motivated, wants to work, the grade problem is only there because those are some subjects he doesn't care about, and he personally stands behind him that he'll be a grear intern.

Well it worked, that guy got the internship and other students who actually knew something got rejected because they didn't have connections inside the company. I imagine that's a story that gets repeated often. Higher mamagers don't really know who's doing what, so people who know how to confidently bullshit can talk themselves into and out of many situations and they often form connections with similar people.

The guy is a nazi in his own words. Or rather, he wrote that he stopped considering himself a nazi because he doesn't agree that Slavs are subhumans, only the other groups.

Though Filosofem is soooo good. It really sucks that some of the best music was made by some of the worst people.

It was actually quite an interesting discovery that Newton's first law, the way it's usually repeated, was written in Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan", which was published when Newton was around 8 years old.

I forced myself through the first two seasons, and it turned out to be my favourite series, same happened to a friend. The show massively improves in season 3.

I memorized 100 digits some years ago using physical memory. I would type the digits of pi on the numpad and memorize the movements of my hand, how it feels and which button goes when by position. Then when I would have to recite it, I'd imagine a numpad, move my hand and just say the number that corresponds to the imaginary button I'm pressing.

Don't know if that could work for 70k digits though

PPS: also, if you just study a lot of STEM in college, your views on humanities may still be atrocious, like elonstans.

This was very depressing to learn. I know a lot of software engineers, some of them PhD students, who are really smart and clever people, able to abstract concepts, form connections in thought, recall relevant information and make intelligent conclusions every day. And then they say things like masks don't do anything during COVID, the vaccines don't work, Russia is defending itself, the wokes are oppressing everyone and destroying everything etc. It's almost impressive to see someone seemingly intelligent act like the lowest Trump supporter with certain topics like someone just flipped a switch.

I still cannot come to terms with the fact that people find it completely normal that modern civilization rests on a handful of companies. If Google, Microsoft and Meta were to disappear tomorrow, half the planet would collapse given how many completely depend on their infrastructure. This by itself should be enough to induce a mania of local development and decentralized structures, but alas.

This was partly explored in Erich Fromm's work "Escape from Freedom" and "The Anatomy of Human Destruction", but basically, if I understood correctly, sadistic personalities use it as a means of defence against loneliness and isolation. By exerting power over another, they temporarily lose the painful feeling of being alone. Abusive people tend to be miserable when their victims leave them and they have nobody to control.

Nobody gains anything from cruelty, it's a symptom that something's terribly wrong with the person in the first place. Even animals don't display acts of cruelty in the wild, they do so only when confined to cages and subjected to other inhumane treatment.

Image recognition depends on the amount of resources you can offer for your system. There are traditional methods of feature extractions like edge detection, histogram of oriented gradients and viola-jones, but the best performers are all convolutional neural networks.

While the term can be up for debate, you cannot separate these cases and things like LLMs and image generators, they are the same field. Generative models try to capture the distribution of the data, whereas discriminitive models try to capture the distribution of labels given the data. Unlike traditional programming, you do not directly encode a sequence of steps that manipulate data into what you want as a result, but instead you try to recover the distributions based on the data you have, and then you use the model you have made in new situations.

And generative and discriminative/diagnostic paradigms are not mutually exclusive either, one is often used to improve the other.

I understand that people are angry with the aggressive marketing and find that LLMs and image generators do not remotely live up to the hype (I myself don't use them), but extending that feeling to the entire field to the point where people say that they "loathe machine learning" (which as a sentence makes as much sense as saying that you loathe the euclidean algorithm) is unjustified, just like limiting the term AI to a single digit use cases of an entire family of solutions.

They're functionalities that were not made with traditional programming paradigms, but rather by modeling and training the model to fit it to the desired behaviour, making it able to adapt to new situations; the same basic techniques that were used to make LLMs. You can argue that it's not "artificial intelligence" because it's not sentient or whatever, but then AI doesn't exist and people are complaining that something that doesn't exist is useless.

Or you can just throw statements with no arguments under some personal secret definition, but that's not a very constructive contribution to anything.

What?

If you ever used online translators like google translate or deepl, that was using AI. Most email providers use AI for spam detection. A lot of cameras use AI to set parameters or improve/denoise images. Cars with certain levels of automation often use AI.

That's for everyday uses, AI is used all the time in fields like astronomy and medicine, and even in mathematics for assistance in writing proofs.