• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • BlueSky already annoys me because someone took my name for an inactive account. It’s why I chose Mastodon over BlueSky initially.

    With that said, Mastodon has several glaring issues:

    • Federation, in general, solves a problem that very few people have. People don’t want to pick an app or an instance out of dozens. They want the prescribed experience, and then they want to tailor to their preferences.
    • It’s dead. There is interaction, but if you set up an account, follow some people, reply to some stuff, you’ll probably get maybe 1-2 followers? The interaction seems stuck at a few people.
    • There are a lot of bots, which in itself can be useful, but when several are there to maintain archives of Twitter accounts onto Mastodon it just adds to the deadness.
    • It doesn’t offer anything new or interesting over BlueSky or Twitter. It’s just a clone.
    • Humour hasn’t really made it’s way onto Mastodon. It’s all very serious stuff, and many people like social media to look at dumb shit.

    With that said, BlueSky is growing, but it’s still a minnow.


  • Nothing ages you like talking to an actual young person.

    I worked with a software engineer several years ago that was about a decade younger than me. A few of us were talking about first games, and he mentioned playing his dad’s PlayStation and his first game being on the PS2. Our first games were all Master System, NES, all 2D. He said, and I quote, “I wasn’t born when graphics were shit”.

    Oof




  • Haha no.

    A lot of people don’t realise how shit a war can be, even when you’re hundreds of miles away from it. Your local economy fucking TANKS, jobs disappear, workers disappear on the next plane out, and you’re left with a population that’s struggling on all fronts, trying to make a brave face.

    America is full of crazy disparity, but war doesn’t care. The one benefit is that the billionaire class would get fucking rinsed by the locals for every shiny trinket they have when suddenly food costs a fortune because your last shipment got shot up.


  • I’m from Bristol! This pub is called the Bag Of Nails, and while some people aren’t fans (the place naturally smells of cats and you’re not getting food there) I love going there for a drink and to spend time with some friendly cats. It’s always fairly busy, and is a nice talking point when I head for a beer with people that aren’t from the area.



  • Many moons ago I worked briefly on an ad prototype that aimed to replace banner ads, particularly those that sit in content with a single bottom overlay that would “smartly” unobstruct the viewing experience of the page. I was able to reduce a full page of horrible ads into a single box at the bottom of the page that could be closed whenever.

    The idea fell completely flat for various reasons, but some off the top of my head:

    • We have x advertisers that NEED to be on this page - how can we possibly get x on the page with just one box?
    • I don’t care if people use ad blockers, let them do their thing and we’ll target those that are happy to see ads
    • If people can easily close them, the reflex to close will mean no ad is glanced.

    The sad stat that came out was that obtrusive ads, the kind that used popups or automatically opened apps to download were VERY effective. I could prove that my ads were several times more effective than “normal” banner ads and popups, but when you could sell 10x the ads it didn’t matter if they were 10x more effective.

    My brief stint in advertising made me feel that for many years people didn’t care about those that blocked ads because there was always more shit to optimise or grow into. That has stagnated, so now the likes of Google are targeting “market share” by getting those that block ads to look at ads again. It won’t work, at all, but it feels like they’ve now optimised themselves into a hole.







  • As an Amazon employee…the man blatantly lied about the figures for those happy to RTO. He probably got them by seeing that ~10% of corporate staff are in the remote advocacy channel, and assumed that everyone else was…happy?

    Regardless, Amazon is known as a place that values data above anything else. If you are a fresh grad PM and you’re caught fudging or misrepresenting numbers to suit a narrative, guess what happens to you. You are more than likely PIP’d or fired

    I’d say that Matt Garman should be fired for lying about the data, but given that Jassy has a habit of lying about figures also, the rot is at the top.




  • “sigh”

    (Preface: I work in AI)

    This isn’t news. We’ve known this for many, many years. It’s one of the reasons why many companies didn’t bother using LLM’s in the first place, that paired with the sheer amount of hallucinations you’ll get that’ll often utterly destroy a company’s reputation (lol Google).

    With that said, for commercial services that use LLM’s, it’s absolutely not true. The models won’t reason, but many will have separate expert agents or API endpoints that it will be told to use to disambiguate or better understand what is being asked, what context is needed, etc.

    It’s kinda funny, because many AI bros rave about how LLM’s are getting super powerful, when in reality the real improvements we’re seeing is in smaller models that teach a LLM about things like Personas, where to seek expert opinion, what a user “might” mean if they misspell something or ask for something out of context, etc. The LLM’s themselves are only slightly getting better, but the thing that preceded them is propping them up to make them better

    IMO, LLM’s are what they are, a good way to spit information out fast. They’re an orchestration mechanism at best. When you think about them this way, every improvement we see tends to make a lot of sense. The article is kinda true, but not in the way they want it to be.