kelnos

SO's new-question rate peaked in 2014 and has been declining since 2017 (with a small, short-lived, early-COVID bump). LLMs have certainly hastened its decline, but it would still be in a pretty sorry state today even without them.

I'm pretty sure these days it's 95+% immigration, though.

> Why is it unreasonable to say, "I'd prefer something other than USian"?

Not the person you're replying to, but my take on it: because in the grand scheme of things it's small potatoes, and putting even a minor burden onto someone else to change their language seems unreasonable and unnecessary.

> The consequences will be me having a slightly lower opinion of you as a person.

That's an incredibly naive take. In many places, especially professional ones progressive/liberal/woke places, the consequences are much more than you having a slightly lower opinion of someone.

> I don't understand this compulsion to make either party into some villain.

If someone replies as the GP suggested, they will be villainized by some subset of the people who hear that reply. In a professional setting, that could involve a visit from HR and/or be a career-limiting move, depending on the company culture.

It doesn't matter if you understand it or not. It happens, and that's what matters.

> It's absolutely not the most demanding demand you could place on another person, but it isn't nothing either

Another way to think about this is as a parallel to microaggressions. Little things that may seem innocuous or not that big a deal on their own, but that add a little bit of emotional or cognitive load to someone's day.

"It's a good change!"

No, STOP is a keyword that the carrier intercepts. The recipient never sees it. The carrier will ensure that you don't get any messages on that number anymore. The business behind the number can (sometimes, depending on the platform they're using) set a custom reply to STOP, which is what makes it seem like they're getting the message, but they aren't.

Of course, it only applies to that phone number, so they can still spam you from another number in their rotation.

"Dead" is a relative measure. When I used it heavily (roughly 2004-2015 or so), most of my friends were active on there, and would post things (interesting or otherwise) multiple times per day or at least near-daily.

Nowadays I sign into my FB account every 3-6 months or so to find something specific about someone, and I see that my feed is dominated by 4-5 people (out of around 1,000 "friends"). If I'm curious and start searching for other friends specifically, nearly all of of them have not posted in years.

Sure, there are some active community-type spaces there, but that is a very small part of what FB used to be.

Instagram is a garbage platform now, too. I used it back when it was just a feed of the people I follow. Every few months I'll click an Instagram link sent to me by someone else, and then I'll check my feed out of morbid curiosity, and it's 70% promoted/recommended posts from people I don't know.

Glad I don't spend time there anymore either.

The only true defense is actual open source. Open "weights" is not that. You need the entire training pipeline open-sourced, plus the entire training corpus, so someone can independently train the model from scratch.

Obviously this will never happen. And even if it did, it still probably wouldn't be that hard to hide something in that mountain of data.

> But I trust a random human enthusiast and community feedback more than I trust a megacorporations that commit crimes without any prosecution or consequences.

I'm not saying we should trust megacorps, but they have a very strong incentive not to build these sorts of backdoors into their models; if that backdoor were discovered, their reputation would be shot, permanently, and they'd stand to lose out big, much much much more than any possible benefit they'd derive.

"Random" is the operative word in "random human enthusiast". I don't trust randoms on the internet, period. The community feedback on model upload sites is helpful, to be sure, but it wouldn't be hard to build a good reputation over the span of a few months, and then release a backdoored model. Given the pace of things here, that feels significantly easier than, e.g. getting a malicious commit into a popular open source project.

It sounds like you've defined "slop" as "anything an LLM produces". Seems unlikely you're going to get much agreement here.

I don't think that solves it. In your "example A", the compromised software can display that you voted for candidate A, but when doing the signing, sign the result that you voted for candidate B. There's no reason why the thing that it signs has to be the same thing that you see on the screen, and there's no way for you to verify it.

Perhaps, but why were the owners of the account then unable to sign into it after it was restored?

That's just your opinion, not fact.

I don't think anyone (including the original author) is saying that the look is inherent to software renderers. The point being made is that software renders of the day tended to do things in a particular way (because CPU speed was limited), and when some of these games gained hardware renderers, they did things in a different particular way, because more computationally-expensive (for a CPU) blending modes were more or less free on a GPU.

I do agree that the author may have missed the fact that they could have overridden texture blending modes via their GPU driver, and gotten a similar graphical look using the hardware renderer. But even that's a little uncertain; there are some other comments in other subthreads that point out that the hardware rendering modes on many of these older games also did other stuff that wasn't feasible with the software renderer, and those other things sometimes can't be tweaked/disabled. So if your goal is "exact same visual style as the software renderer", you might actually have to use the software renderer.

I think you're misunderstanding. No one is saying that a GPU isn't involved at all.

But if you rasterize your frames into a buffer using the CPU (and not OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, D3D, etc.), and then scan that out on the GPU, that is indeed software rendering in the sense that matters here.

The idea that software rendering is impossible because the GPU owns the scanout buffers is just silly pedantry.

I don't think that's the rebuttal you think it is.

GP's argument is usually used in the sense of "if I hadn't done it, someone else would, so I might as well do it and the end result will be the same, except then I'll reap the rewards".

It's a crap justification for doing something unethical. But in many cases, even the unethical ones, it's also true, and I think in this case it is too. If the US had magically shut down every AI lab on day one, and banned all AI research, that wouldn't have stopped this train. Probably would have slowed it down, but not enough to really matter.

I don't like being interrupted, but I'm happy to answer a question when I'm at a good stopping/breaking point with whatever I'm working on.

OT, but my understanding is that recipe sites have long-winded blog posts in front of them because recipes alone are not copyrightable.

> It’s not meant to convince you of an argument quickly and effectively.

Part of the author's argument is that it doesn't do a good job of arguing at all, let alone quickly and effectively. It just inundates you with so many words and "facts" that people get bowled over by how "smart" it sounds.

That feels like a "no true scotsman"...

As a preventive measure, vegetarian/vegan diets are correlated with lower incidence of some types of cancer. There's a little bit of research showing that survivors of these same types of cancer may do better afterward (as in lower likelihood of recurrence) with a plant-based diet, but it's too soon to draw any conclusions there.

But there's nothing to suggest eliminating meat can help combat cancer or increase survival rates. And good nutrition -- including and especially protein -- is critical while fighting cancer. Switching to a plant based diet usually makes this harder for people.

Don't throw around stuff like this. It's pseudoscientific, at best.

> thank you for the downvote, whoever you are.

You're welcome.

Is there any research/literature on this? A couple years ago I read that the "correct" order was mouthwash -> floss -> brush.

> I could put zero effort into writing a quick post on some piece of programming knowledge

For starters, if you're writing something yourself, it's not "zero-effort". It might be low-effort, but you still put some effort into it. And low-effort doesn't mean worthless, as you illustrate ("but if someone needed that information...").

Consider that the refrain seems to be: "I won't put more energy reading something than you put into writing it". A "quick" post takes little energy to write, and little energy to read. That's fine!

The federal government has cancelled funding for a ton of genuinely useful scientific research because "o noes not the DEI monster". (Not to mention just putting the word "diversity" in your proposal has been grounds for rejection, even if it you're talking about, say "wifi antenna diversity".)

But sure, I'm glad now you can say whatever you want in your code comments. Seems like a good trade. /s

If you think that 192GB of VRAM on a video card that costs 3k€ is "pedestrian", I think you're a bit out of touch with the average consumer.

It's psychology. One option is a guaranteed upgrade bill that's due right now. The other one is a speculative what–if that may never happen.

And that's even assuming anyone who runs these sorts of systems have "hacked to turn on defrost mode" on their bingo cards at all, which probably isn't the case.

On top of that, upgrades carry risks of their own!

I doubt it matters. The power company also theoretically has to deal with houses where they coincidentally draw more from one side of the split than the other. But I suspect it all averages out, and the contribution of a couple plug-in panels in a bunch of houses won't change anything.