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plasticeagle

675 karma · joined November 4, 2022

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plasticeagle··on Cuban: Facebook knowingly runs AI deepfake scam ads; docs say $16B fraud revenue
AND you can report these obviously fake ads to the YouTube High Council, who do absolutely nothing.
plasticeagle··on Stringman, an $800 open-source room scale gripper robot
You know this is a great project but seriously just tidy your room instead.
plasticeagle··on Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI
And what, pray tell, will this search engine search?

If nobody is visiting anything on the internet, because every search engine response is an AI output, then where will any information for this AI output come from?

This paradox was clear from day one, pretty sure I posted on here about it years ago. AI search will kill the dataset that AI itself relies upon.

plasticeagle··on A farewell to Arc browser
If Arc has AI features then I never saw them. Arc was a superb browser, far superior to any of the others due to the care they took over the UX.

There is no AI in it so far as I can tell, and I'm using it right now to type this comment. It's a chromium skin really, of course, but it's great.

plasticeagle··on Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
What points? Does the article make any points? I couldn't find any. For instance, point 1 ends with

"A foreclosure suit is not a lost home — most end when the owner, or the owner's lender, pays — but the pressure is the point."

Which makes no sense whatsoever. I thought they were making a housing crisis worse by forcing foreclosures, but now apparently "the pressure is the point." The point of what, exactly?

plasticeagle··on Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
Sweet f'kin christ that website is unreadable.

Maybe HOA's are bad, maybe they're good, but the intellectual laziness required to shit this kind of garbage out onto the internet in place of genuine thought and analysis will fuckin kill us all.

plasticeagle··on I love software rendering
Firstly, if you're going to write about something you like, you should write it yourself. LLMs just make your writing worse. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Secondly, I love software rendering too. The nicest rendering I ever made was painters-algorithm sorted and shaded by the z-component. It just looked so simple and lovely.

plasticeagle··on You could have invented transformers from memory
I find some aspects of your writeup to be... quite annoying if I'm honest. The writing is good, but you fail to define several of your terms early on.

What is d_k - I assume it's the dimension of the k vector. Similarly, I assume d_v is the dimension of the v vector. What is the "i" suffix for here at this early stage? It doesn't need to be there, it's just confusing.

You say the keys are "used for lookup based on similarity". What does this mean? Similarity to what? The existing keys? Something else?

Your first example then introduces the identifier "M", which seems to be the number of memories. Again, this is not defined. It speaks again of similarities, and introduces "weights". But the matrix Mxd_k is a matrix made of all your keys, which aren't "weights" - or at least this term is new. The term "tokens" makes an appearance around this time also - something else that needs defining.

I think you need to go through the text of this article, with an eye to someone who is reading it for the first time. Define every term you use, remove unnecessary notation - and also perhaps explain at the start why one would be interested in a "memory store" of this nature.

There is a place for something that really explains what's going on here. I've yet to find it.

plasticeagle··on Call Center Jobs Are Declining, but 14,000 Calls Show Humans Still Outperform AI
"so companies are investing early on in the technology."

But this doesn't make sense. The AI bots are worse at the job, across all metrics, other than being cheaper. They're not "investing in the technology" in the sense of actual investment. They are just trying to save money. That's it.

If they cared about the experience of their customers, they wouldn't touch these things with a barge pole.

plasticeagle··on Call Center Jobs Are Declining, but 14,000 Calls Show Humans Still Outperform AI
AI slop article, of course.

It can be summed up thus : AI agents answer the phone slightly more often, but they get hung up on 7 times more often than humans. Overall they make customer service and your business work much worse.

It is also a bullshit advertorial for a product; In this case, an AI sales agent. There is (almost) no worse idea in human history than an AI agent trying to sell things to people. Their entire website is AI generated, and is so stuffed full of slop that it's impossible to read.

plasticeagle··on Tiny Little Office
"Encrypted here: the service holds only ciphertext, and only until then. Up to a hundred links a day from one address."

Random selection of one of the many, many pieces of text in the user interface for whatever this is. What does that mean? Does that mean anything?

plasticeagle··on 2D Vehicles
I wrote a 2D car physics engine, using Verlet integration. Unfortunately, I wrote it in ActionScript instead of something sensible.

It did work great though.

plasticeagle··on A map of every lighthouse
Aside from the incredibly low quality of the data, this jumps out as being vibe coded due to the unbeleviably stupid text.

"Rain as a surface; Height is millimetres of rain per day. Nothing else is encoded."

Why does AI generated ridiculous sentences like these?

plasticeagle··on Reverse engineering my e-scooter and rewriting the firmware in Rust
Very nice article, but I have a question about the rust bloat issues you encounter. Why do the size of the type names grow the size of the binary? Does rust look them up at runtime, and if not, why can they not be stripped like you would in C++?

I like how they used the USB C connector for whatever the hell they felt like. USB C is cheap and reliable, so it makes alot of sense.

plasticeagle··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
M1 Pro 2021 16GB RAM

Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.

plasticeagle··on The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway
"Dissonance" is a funny way to spell hypocrisy.
plasticeagle··on Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
"I'm torn about this."

I'm not. Keep AI the hell away from teaching children.

plasticeagle··on TypeScript 7
I love Typescript, I think it's a fascinating language with a great runtime. It's already very fast to execute, but the compile times have been awful. Especially when you start to run production builds with minification and whatnot.

So I'm interested on what exactly has been sped up here. I can see compile times have been, but is that it? I suppose the runtime itself was always native code, and already very fast.

plasticeagle··on Half-Baked Product
It sounds very slightly AI in some places, but I think this is an example of AI tropes turning up in human writing.

Which is a shame, because it makes those constructs less pleasant to read than they used to be. If you squint, and pretend AI doesn't exist (imagine!), then maybe you might be able to enjoy them again.

It is a little bit too long though.

plasticeagle··on The first early human eggs from stem cells
I suppose that must depend on one's definition of "substantially". Human's haven't changed "substantially", and neither do new breeds of dogs and cats.

Besides which, why does it matter that Humans may or may not be fit according to old criteria? Whatever they might have been.

plasticeagle··on Internal Combustion Engine (2021)
I agree completely, and if you re-read what I wrote I didn't exactly suggest that it was used. But if he's reading this I'd hope he'd nevertheless accept my apology for even the hint of a suggestion.

Happy to find someone else who hates that infernal technology as much as I :)

plasticeagle··on How do wombats poop cubes? (2021)
"exceptional excrement" "sharp-sided scat" "To get to the bottom of the mystery" "...aptly titled journal Soft Matter."

Great to see someone having some fun writing an article.

plasticeagle··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
Slavery is better when you don't have to think about it, I suppose.
plasticeagle··on Internal Combustion Engine (2021)
Who is this person. A beautifully written and illustrated explanation of a fascinating machine. A website filled with other explanations of other things, also wonderfully written and clearly explained.

An instagram filled with beautiful landscape photographs, an "X" page consisting only of links back to this blog, and a Patreon with hardly any more information that that.

I love this. Fantastic content. Zero ego. And if there was any AI use, it's invisible. Certainly there is none in the writing.

plasticeagle··on Most rewrites serve the engineer, not the business
The article is AI slop, obviously, like practically everything on the internet these days it seems. Awful writing, circling endlessly around the same point. The entire article could have been a single sentence. Which of course, is how it began. As a prompt.

The article is also wrong. Or, at least, indicative of a broken relationship between management and engineering. If you have an engineer who can decide to rewrite the entire product without management buy-in, then that's an organisational and a discipline problem.

Added to which, of course, maintainability and build-ability both matter an enormous amount. Work to improve both of those things will improve the business.

plasticeagle··on Single Dose of Frog-Derived Gut Bacterium Eradicates 100% of Tumors in Mice
The paper states that the results are in vivo, not in vitro. The bacteria seemed to literally have cured colorectal cancer in mice. Mice are apparently strikingly similar to human beings in ways that matter, and so this research is very encouraging.

Likely too late for a particular person in my life, but hopefully not too late for others.

plasticeagle··on The first early human eggs from stem cells
It's a very common misconception that "survival of the fittest" means something related to physical fitness or stamina. It does not, in fact it's almost tautological. It means only "survival of those most likely to survive."

Natural selection is still fully in operation, but the things being selected for may have changed. Whatever they are now, they are still being selected for. Those most likely to reproduce are those whose who reproduce the most, and whatever those characteristics are, they will be the ones that become more prevalent.

It's also very important to remember that this operates over hundreds of millennia. Human beings changing substantially will not occur within a period of time less than that. You'd need to look back into deep prehistory to find changes to humans attributable to natural selection. Changes to modern humans are all explicable through changes to nutrition and lifestyle, not through evolution.

plasticeagle··on How information theory saved my word game
Jesus Christ another AI slop post. I give up. Have the internet you fools, enjoy the world of shit you've created.

This might even have been an interesting journey if it had been REMOTELY READABLE.

plasticeagle··on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
According to the link:

"The US Copyright Office and federal courts require human authorship for copyright protection; works created solely by AI are not eligible for registration under the current rules."

The Supreme Court declined to consider a challenge to this rule, and so for the moment at least, the rule remains in place.

This means that companies leaning heavily into their LLM use may very well find that they do not, under the law at least, actually own any of their code. As I've read elsewhere there's every possibility that AI code will be the asbestos of the Software Engineering world. Something we'll be trying to get rid of for decades, once everyone comes to their senses.

plasticeagle··on Claude Code is steganographically marking requests
Why oh why, please why, did you use AI to write this? It's about five times longer than it needs to be. It repeats itself over and over again. It's agony to read.

Please, just write normal English that we can read. Please, for the love of god, respect our time and the attention we will be spending on the text you provide.

Anyway, one can scarcely be surprised that the AI companies are being dishonest in their tools. They're consistently dishonest in their marketing. They're famously dishonest in their financials. Why anyone trusts these people with anything is entirely beyond me. But here we are - people handing over their creativity, their productivity, to these things.

You don't have to. You didn't need these tools before, when you were creating content, when you were writing code. You don't need it now. Fight back. Stop using it. It's not hard. It's easy.

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