the code is often over weirdly overengineered

With the GPT + deepseek combo it fixes that problem (in my layman’s eyes); deepseek has a problem of overengineering especially if you don’t scope it correctly but if it works on an initial script, it will mostly stay within it. It’s also able to simplify GPT code.

For the life of me I have never been able to learn javascript, so when I need to code something for ProleWiki I just throw the problem at them. You can look into https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Common.js our script file for what they came up with - the color scheme picker, the typeface picker, and the testimonials code. Color picker is a bit overengineered because we have a theme that should only be available for one month out of the year and it was simpler to hardcode it in.

I still have to think about the problem, if I don’t scope it well enough they will come up with whatever they feel like. For the color schemes when I had the first custom theme working I told them to refactor the code so that we could add new themes in an array, and they came up with everything. So now I can add unlimited themes by just adding a line in the array.

Potential simplifications that they don’t think about (and hence why it’s good to know how the generated code works) is that there’s no need for className and LabelId in the array, it could generate that from the value. But eh, it works.

edit - using it as a “copilot” is also a good use, though I find that sometimes it just utterly fails. It’s still an RNG machine at heart. But if you get it to work, it can really help unlock your other skills and not get stuck on one part of the process.

I mean, AI as a word has been used in tons of different ways. We still say “NPC AI” in video games and that’s just a whole bunch of if statements, no LLM involved. And on the other end of the spectrum we still talk about AI in movies like I, Robot, with fully sentient machines. My line when I say “AI” with no qualifier is neural networks, the parameters that we hear so much about.

And I don’t think GenAI is “the” grift like the tweet implies, because the AI they describe (machine learning, ML) is the exact same - neural networks with trained models. They talk about the Kinect using ML - you can do machine learning without the neural network - but was the Kinect not “wasteful”, “unethical”, and “useless”, to use their words? It was an expensive system that worked okay (on some tech demos) but barely had 3 games. The EyeToy for the PS2 was more fun.

A lot of the conversation around Generative AI surrounds image generation and I feel that’s harmfully reductive. It centers a lot around artists and the purity of their art (as if they’re the only people impacted by AI) when there’s so much more to talk about; GenAI can do code - there was a whole discussion around it here the other day, and maybe it’s not super great code, but it can do code nonetheless and for people who don’t code and need something, it gets the job done.

Yes, there is also a whole lot of stuff you can do with AI without LLMs. In fact, I’m not sure how LLMs specifically became so ubiquitous because you can do neural network AI stuff without ever needing an LLM. I remember back when AI became big (2022 or so), China announced they’d used an AI to map the wiring on a new ship model. What took an engineer one year to do was done by the AI in 24 hours.

GenAI including LLMs have hard limitations that I think are, conversely, overlooked. LLM AI will not do everything, but it can get you part of the way there. The grift is moreso tech companies trying to pretend their toy is a panacea. When asked about AI making stuff up in an interview, OpenAI’s CTO “well you know, it’s very human in that regard [emphasis mine], because when we don’t know something, what do we do? We make stuff up”. They admit it themselves that they have a bullshit generator. But when it works, it works - you can use GPT 4o or o4 or whatever the new model is called as a tutor, for example, for photoshop, guitar, or whatever other hobby you have. It works great! You can ask it any question you have like a tutor, instead of being limited to what the page cares to tell you about! And yes I could ask someone, but: a- people are not necessarily available the moment I have a question and b- google is crap now and if you ask on most forums they will tell you to google it. So chatGPT it is. We just have to take into account that it might be making stuff up to the point that you need to double-check, and that OpenAI clearly has no plans to fix that (not that they even could).

For coding my choice nowadays is start with chatGPT then pass it over to deepseek once I have the prototype, it works great.

I just recently learned that Methyl anthranilate, the artificial grape flavoring, also repels birds and is used heavily by the agro industry nowadays. I imagine because of all the other products they also use they don’t need the birds around anymore.

You can also use old cd-roms tied to a long-ish string btw, the sparkling makes birds stay away.

he locked up a lot of people during the cultural revolution sometimes for quite arbitrary reasons

He was not the one who signed arrest orders or ran trials though, a lot of different people were involved in that. You can’t blame Mao as an individual for stuff that other people did. You can’t run an entire state with just one person.

the backyard steel and culling of the sparrows

Nobody in the 60s knew about the importance of sparrows in agriculture. Not even in the West. I think it’s easy to say “oh well duh of course don’t kill the sparrows” but who here among us is an actual farmer? Who here knew that sparrows ate more bugs than grain before it was told to them? I can barely grow a plant, I have no room to judge others when it comes to growing food.

I just didn’t find it to be very relevant to me

I’m an adult in Europe and I find Mao’s writing to be both relevant and applicable. But there is Mao the general and Mao the chairman. By the end of his life he was definitely saying some stuff that I don’t think even he believed in. But theory is an all encompassing body, and that is true in all fields. One couldn’t read one physics paper about gravity and then say “now I know how to launch a rocket to the moon”. I opened up my copy of the red book randomly and here’s one:

“Take the ideas of the masses and concentrate them, then go to the masses, persevere in the ideas and carry them through, so as to form correct ideas and leadership – such is the basic method of leadership”

It makes perfect sense to me, but that’s also because I have the associated baggage to understand what he means there and how that fits in not only to more of Mao’s writings but also in regards to other figures, the ‘best practices’ if you will of organizing.

I also found it really interesting that deepseek would refuse to answer any questions on Mao

The deepseek devs want it to be mainly used for math, coding, and other STEM applications for lack of a better word. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact personally I think people should stop using LLMs as oracles so much and focus them on tasks instead. Deepseek produces great results (and all for free with no rate limits) if you give it some code to start with, because it needs proper framing of the project to avoid trying to overdo it. I usually start with chatGPT, have it do the first working version of the code, and then switch it to deepseek to finish it, and it works almost perfect on the first try.

The music sucks if you actually listen to it (and not just have it as background noise) but it doesn’t stop get rich quick grifters from flooding Spotify with it. Also there’s Word going around that Spotify uses ai songs in their own playlists so they don’t have to pay royalties

I’m not asking to see the comments for myself, I’m asking if you can point to evidence of this happening; it’s not the same question.

Fun fact: did you know the ICC has only ever prosecuted African nationals since its inception in 2002?

Okay so no evidence Hexbear or Lemmygrad have denied genocides?

Can you point to genocide denial before you make sweeping accusations?

Wikipedia is not a source bruh. In the introductory paragraph on the uyghur genocide article they say that thousands of mosques have been destroyed… But don’t mention they have been rebuilt to accommodate more people or because they weren’t up to code. There are more mosques in Xinjiang alone in 2021 than there are in all of Europe lol.

Wikipedia has a clear agenda and this is clear from looking at their board of directors and demographics. They are not a source and neither are their sources - - they are carefully curated to offer a specific analysis.