Years of shrimp posture
That the reason imperial Europe had such a huge and lasting impact on the world was because Europe was playing on a harder difficulty than everyone else.
Europe was functionally foodless when it comes to agricultural with next to no edible plants native to the region, most of their crop foods were imported from Eurasia. Boar were as lethal as the wolves and the wolves besieged cities. The living conditions were functional perfect petri dishes that bred so many massive plagues that they accidentally biowarfared the Americas, they literally didn’t consider the diseases they had as bad enough to leave those guys home. The history of constant warfare in Europe had them so invested in finding new ways to kill each other that they hit the iron age while the Americas were still in stone age despite being an older population.
In contrast, we’re finding out that all the “wasted land” in the US used to be curated foraging gardens. Whole forests regularly maintained by the natives to provide food year round with minimal labor for an exponentially larger population. The great planes tribes maintained a migratory lifestyle that was far less work than the farming efforts we use now. Conflict was frequent, but never to the level that needed technological advancements like Europe.
So when Europeans finally got out of their squalid hell hole, anyone not on their level, which was really just china, was solidly out classed. What was india going to do? They were solidly in the bronze age and fighting an enemy that’s very arival might kill villages with disease alone and they never had to fight an enemy that could host long distance supply lines over seas which meant a counter offense could only ever push them out of the area but never back to the source in a way that could prevent them coming back. Like trying to play volleyball but your opponents can be on both sides of the net and you can’t. The Americas were even worse off, the Technological disparity made the fight entirely one sides.
Finally, Europe took this “git gud” mentality as proof that they were superior in every way, so they implemented their way of life everywhere they went. Those forage gardens were knocked over and burned to grow fields of low nutritional grains because that’s what worked in Europe. The European diet was pushed everywhere despite the local diet being better in most cases. The European work ethic became the standard with no realization that it was born out of desperately struggling to survive and adaptation to any other location would have greatly improved their quality of life.
And all of it still lasts to this day. Half of the things we classify as weeds are edible foods that were dietary staples. Our work life balance, sleep schedule, housing styles, land distribution, hierarchy, are all descendant of feudalism. The whole reason for the midwest dust bowl was because they tried to force Europeans farming tactics into the region with no consideration for the difference between regions.
Of course, I’m not a historian. It’s just a hunch. I’m a fan of history and it was an interesting comparison to see how closely the European exceptionalism mindset aligned with the souls like git gud attitude that a specific subset of gamers developed at the height of their popularity.
This was a fascinating read. As someone with a strong disdain for European ideals (love the socialism, hate how they got there) I was ready to raise my pitchfork at fhe start but this… this makes sense. Europeans have a scarcity mindset and when they came to places that didnt need that as much they turned into the seagulls from finding nemo. And as a result they decimated my people and millions of other peoples across the globe like mine who seemed to have shit better figured out socially.
Honestly, having been learning a lot about Indigenous cultures in the Americas lately, even European socialism can be seen as done the hard way. Most of the north American tribes had a culture of meeting the needs of everyone. Native Mexicans had a social welfare system that effectively made care for the young and infirm a community activity.
Who could’ve known that community resources actually benefitted the community? What a radical and crazy idea it would never work
/s
If there is a Best Of The Fediverse this should be right up there
Between Europeans and the Americans, the Americans lacked pack animals and a region which could create bronze. Also, due to the European exposure to pack animals and other reasons, lethal diseases went mainly from Europeans to the Americans instead of the other way around. It also isn’t a good sign when a foreign civilization has the technology to show up at your shores while your civilization doesn’t.
Between Europe and the rest of the Old World, Europe wasn’t able to colonize the rest of the old world until after the Industrial Revolution started. The Industrial Revolution started in Europe mainly due to increased state competition compared to other parts of the world and higher labor costs making capital investments worth it.
It also isn’t a good sign when a foreign civilization has the technology to show up at your shores while your civilization doesn’t.
This is why we need more research into interstellar travel.
Interesting
I have long suspected - and I don’t know where real music historians stand on this - that a few of the pieces of music attributed to Mozart were actually written by his sister.
That if you’re amazed by how good/smart LLMs are, it’s because you’re well below average. LLMs are still incredibly stupid and bad at things.
I’m required to use LLMs for work (we have metrics and I’ve been told I should use AI daily) and while every once in a while they are useful (i.e. getting examples for stuff that has inadequate documentation) 99% of the time they just piss me off. The output and results are seldom what I want and rather than spend the time to direct it to do what I want I’d often rather just do the work myself. Furthermore when my coworkers send me PRs that are obviously AI the code quality is pretty shit and usually doesnt actually accomplish what we need in a way that makes sense. As someone who has invested a lot of time in improving my coding ability and knowledge I see AI code and it makes me whince.
I’m sorry they’re forcing it on you. That’s unfortunate. You might send them this reasoning section:
https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/#Reasoning
in an attempt to change their minds.
There are additional links in the More Info section at the bottom that provide supporting evidence.
Ah it’s fine my boss told me that interacting with the AI is enough and that he doesnt care if I’m just asking it the weather. It’s a large publicly traded company and the AI push is coming from a lot higher up the change so sadly theres not much i could do to affect the situation.
Use your time complaining to the AI about using the AI, or write a Markov bot to do the work for you.
If they just want you to burn tokens, maybe see how well the LLM handles raw /dev/urandom-style output
Popular take here on Lemmy for sure., but just doesn’t really say much. They are as capable as they are. There are objective measurements. A qualitative statement about smart or good just isn’t that useful. If you aren’t impressed by the technology, fine.
For me, I think the field is interesting. But I won’t let my hatred of billionaires or worker subjugation cloud my judgement about interesting technologies. There is a difference between “This is going to be bad and exploitative” and burying one’s head in the sand and repeating the “they aren’t good” trope.
I’m not just repeating it. That is my first hand judgment of their abilities.
I am a professional software developer, and I have been told by way too many people that these models are amazing at writing code, and yet every time I’ve seen the code they write, it has been unimpressive at best and absolute dog shit at worst. I was writing better code as a college sophomore.
It makes sense though. They’re trained on everyone’s code, and the vast majority of code available for them to steal is, well, absolute dog shit.
The developers who look at their code and don’t see any problems are developers who themselves write dog shit code.
You’re just objectively wrong. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you can see their raw objective scores across numerous software engineering metrics.
I’m a programmer that’s been in the business for decades. That doesn’t make me any more correct than you. I have seen it write some impressive things at impressive speeds. If you haven’t that’s fine. You just haven’t seen it work then. But it doesn’t matter what I have seen or what you’ve seen. What matters are data, and the data are clear when it comes to ability.
Not ability per unit water consumed, dollar spent, or per unit power consumed, but ability nevertheless.
It does write code that usually works, but it makes absolutely rookie mistakes that are, like, worse than junior engineer level. If that impresses you, then so be it, but in my 28 years of writing code, I’ve never been less impressed by something with as much hype as AI agents have.
Btw, there’s not really an objective way to measure software engineering skill. Even the best tests don’t take into account all aspects of engineering skill. That’s why I would be only one of like ten engineers interviewing the same candidate at Google. The “objective” tests are called phone screens, and they’re just the first round of interviews. If you can’t pass those, it usually means you’re not qualified to be an engineer, but just because you can pass them doesn’t mean you are qualified.
Ok lol
imo, llm doing well and being good would be worse situation that what is currently going on.
Imagine how much more power billionaires would get over everything? They could up the prices and people would just have to accept it because they soon couldnt live without llm, they could influence people by manipulating the hidden prompt, they could just threaten to cut off anyone they want, have access to any system their llm is connected to. The current censorship could be extended to anything they like too. And people would just lap all that up and call anyone speaking against it a conspiracy theorist or whatever.
I agree what all that. Fuck billionaires. Off with their heads. That doesn’t change the performance characteristics of current transformers.
I would say if you can’t see how smart they are you’re lower on the curve.
Yeah, that’s basically what I said. When you can see how smart they are, they’re unimpressive. ;)
Approximately 30% of any population anywhere in the world are utter and complete fuckwads.
My dude, it’s much MUCH higher than that
Well over 50%, according to a 2024 US “poll”
That the investor class in America has been panicking for about a decade because there hasn’t been a technological innovation on the same level as the smart phone in that time.
Prediction: The 3D TV will return in the next five years, with AI to turn 2D TV shows into 3D.
deleted by creator
Could be why they are pivoting to space so hard and crying about regulation even more.
Israel had a larger hand in Benghazi than is being let on and Israeli intelligence provided Republicans with a lot of intel regarding the attack as Obama was starting to rift with Israel on how to handle the Middle East.
I have a hunch that there’s something fucky with passkeys, and it’s gonna turn out to be a security and or privacy nightmare in the near future.
The something fucky is that is just centralized public-private key pairs. There’s no need for centralizing that under corporations. Actually, you lose one of the big features of public key cryptography.
It’s just a power grab from corpos
Passkeys are just public and private keys. They have been securing the internet for decades.
That something’s up
That putting lead in gasoline decades ago fucked human progress and we’d have achieved much more by now if not for that.
About 160° (~2.79 rad). Been slouching too much and need to fix my posture.
I’m not crazy and I’ve never heard of it as a conspiracy theory but personally I’m not 100% convinced about Labrador, Canada. The only pictures I can find of the place are either pictures of scenery that could be anywhere, extremely generic, or low-resolution aerial shots of settlements, nothing that concretely convinces me it exists. I know it’s remote and sparsely populated, but there are more remote, less populated places that I can get normal pictures showing daily life a lot more easily.
I have a hunch that world leaders know the planet is fucked and are secretly generating all this chaos so nobody finds out they’re making all these underground arks for them and their families.
once disaster strikes if you’re not on the list, you’re pretty much dead.
Yea this is mine for the most part. They’ve got a list and everyone else is marked for dead. It’s probably what palantir is really for.
Also i think they are giving out money to the worst people to act as useful idiots because they know that the dollar will be useless soon, too. They aren’t on the list, either, they just think they are.
They think they are saving the world and we are all the bad guys.
Still better than being stranded on an ark with those cunts
The reason it feels like we’re slaves no matter how much technology improves is incredibly simple, but invisible: money can’t be created unless an equal amount of debt is also created.
This mathematically ensures that life is a game of musical chairs at all times. Interest serves to model the missing chairs.
That the various new and inventive grid scale energy storage solutions people are trying out won’t end up being better than just building big chemical batteries. Sodium Ion will probably be good enough and cheap enough.
