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

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  • Oh boy, I’ve seen a few:

    • At a startup, one dude had obviously lied about his credentials. He was hired as a writer, but couldn’t write shit. He spent the entire day hitting on women and bitching about how his ex wanted support for a child he wasn’t convinced was his. He was fired about 3 days in…

    • When I was a student, I worked at a sports store. One girl there was, let’s say, packing in the chest compartment. She was also about 17, maybe 18. Most people were nice enough to not hit on her, but one day the security guard (who was maybe late thirties at the youngest) made a comment to me to say “I would absolutely destroy her back door, you know?” (but slightly more graphic). I told management, and she was brought in. She broke down, and went over all the off-hand comments he’d made to her. The manager immediately walked out, told him he was fired, and apologised to her.

    • An old employer hired this guy who was a Microsoft MVP nominee. The guy was one of those types that could talk brilliantly, but couldn’t take criticism. He listened to me, as I was senior, but ignored anything from managers or people at his level. To cut a long story short (I could write a book on this guy, and it would be hilarious) he lied about a project he worked on solo for six months. After checking in on his work we found he had bypassed our PR system and had been accepting all of his own requests, so no one has verified his code. It was an absolute mess. It cost the company a quarter of a million, for a project that should have brought in £50k. We later found out he was a nominee because he was so active on some Microsoft support forums, and mostly got that through posting “yeah I had the same problem” or from supplying easy or wrong answers. That loophole was closed shortly after…





  • 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.


  • “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.








  • Hajime No Ippo!

    It’s a boxing anime based on a manga (that’s still going after decades!) where a school kid is beat up and rescued by a passing boxer, who takes him in to a boxing gym to fix his wounds. It turns out he’s got some solid power from his family background in fishing, so he becomes a boxer and learns what it means to be strong.

    If you like DBZ, you’ll probably love this. Alongside this, it’s refreshing in that it’s an anime that praises hard work, rather than being “the chosen one” or being gifted power. What I love about it is that several characters go through huge growth in ways that are truly unexpected.




  • Something similar. Not necessarily the fear of death or a painful death, but the very real possibility that once the light goes off, you disappear for good.

    I won’t get into religion or anything like that, but it all feels…very inefficient. IMO, reincarnation always seemed cool, because it’s essentially the reuse of consciousness in another being. I also remember reading a cool story years ago where it turned out that everyone was actually the same person, and in death you reincarnated as the next person, with the ultimate goal of having lived every life to ever live and becoming god. The idea that someone could live for even a very brief moment, and that energy is just gone is just so wasteful that the universe just seems cruel for it to even be a possibility.


  • I’ve actually seen this go the other way before.

    I met this dude from Serbia, I can’t remember his name, but he was the friendliest guy you’d ever meet, and was probably about 7 foot tall.

    One day our infra team was having an issue with a custom Spark cluster, and he was brought in to help. He came in a full suit that looked tailor made, like he’d just walked off the set of Suits, a suited Galdalf in a room of hobbits dressed in t-shirts around a foot or two smaller than him. He was in the room for two hours, and whatever he installed or ran for everything up and running again, with some extra time to help with some other tweaks.

    He worked near my desk, so I asked him if he wanted to come for lunch. He declined because he was busy, so I asked if he wanted me to grab him something. His response “…Cherry Coke”. Once he’d finished, he came over to us, and offered to take us out for food. He paid for everything, including a drink at a nearby whiskey bar he apparently goes to often. I asked him why he wore a suit, and his response was “I’m uncomfortable wearing loose clothes, and I like layered clothing that fits to my frame, so I always wear suits when I need to be comfortable”. In many ways, for someone his size, I guess it made sense.

    I miss him sometimes, because he’d always say “hello my British friend” every time he saw me nearby, even though we both lived in Britain, and he definitely knew my name. If I had to guess, the dude probably had a solid mil in stock, and was getting paid a solid £150k a year + more stock. He was definitely rich, because he could afford an apartment in central London near the office. Dude worked probably 60-80 hours a week though, and if asked he was on a plane to the US, India, wherever someone needed a freakishly tall suited guy to fix a data problem.


  • Rule under Mufasa was essentially an oligarchy, with oppression everywhere. Unlike the other RACIST lions, Scar would spend time with the hyaenas, providing them food and protection. He skipped the crowning of a new pampered little shit, and after getting shit from his king brother he had had enough - he ended the bloodline.

    His first act was to remove oppression, giving equality for all. Then a huge natural disaster happened, absolutely no fault of Scar’s, and life was harsh.

    Then, Simba the little prick just fucks off, lives the dream in luxury like the pampered little asshole he is, and then decides “fuck it, this is too nice, let’s bring back the racism”. He comes back, plants doubt through a hate campaign and the hyaenas kill Scar. The drought ends, Simba brings back oppression, and has another little cunt kid.

    Scar was a hero. He undid years of ruthless oppression against other species, and got shit for it because the land was left in a poor state and couldn’t handle a downturn in weather.