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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I know this might go against the flow here, but realistically if they’re using the tools in the way they say they are (which you should 100% check with your doctor to let him know about possible hallucinations) it’s not that bad. Speech-to-text is not prone to hallucinate, it can fail and detect wrong things but shouldn’t outright hallucinate. After that, LLMs are good at summarizing things, yes they are prone to hallucinations which is why having the doctor review the notes immediately after the session is important (and they said they do), so I don’t see this as such a big issue from the usability point of view.

    You might still have issues from a privacy point of view and that’s a much more complex discussion with them about what kind of contract they have with the LLM company to ensure no HIPAA violations (as from the LLM point of view it’s just making a summary of a text it might store it, and then the whole stack is suable). They need to understand that just because they haven’t kept a copy around doesn’t mean the other party hasn’t, and because they shared it out without your agreement (you’re only agreeing to AI note taking which can be done locally so them sharing information with third parties is entirely up to them) they would be liable. I’m not a lawyer, so you might want to double check that, but I would be very surprised if that’s not the way it works, otherwise Drs could get away with a bunch of HIPAA violations by having you sign something that says they use a computer to store data and then storing things in shared Google drive.


  • Cryptocurrency is a decentralized digital currency, it can be used for the same thing as any other digital currency, the difference being that you can use it without relying on a centralized authority like a bank or similar financial institutions.

    Yes you can buy pizzas with it, although that’s less common nowadays because there are more practical ways to pay for that and you probably don’t mind the bank and government to know you buy pizzas.

    I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.

    You don’t? If I were to offer you 1BTC for your mouse, would you accept it? If you say no you’re stupid, if you say yes you confirmed you see it as valuable and are willing to exchange it for goods directly.




  • Not exactly bait and switch, but a long time ago I was looking for a job, had an interview that I aced, I can’t overestimate how much I aced it:

    • There was a “coding challenge” that was supposed to take half an hour and I finished in 10 min
    • They asked a question and my answer was so complete that I could see them turning pages and skipping the next follow up questions
    • One of the few times they got to ask me a follow up question which was very related to the work I would be doing the answer was "I would just do the same I’m doing for my master thesis, and proceeded to explain how I have solved that problem on my thesis and later I found out it was roughly the same way they had solved it on their use case.

    Then they told me “our initial salary is X, but that’s for Juniors, which you clearly aren’t, we’ll finish this round of interviews and contact you”. They contacted me a week later and offered me a Junior role paying X. I can’t really said they baited and switched since they didn’t change the offer, and what the other person told me was more informal. Since I needed a job and they have accepted me part time while I finished my masters I accepted thinking that once I went full time I would get a raise. Nope, they said they only did reviews and raises annually, and I had started right after that. I worked my ass off for that year, proving to them that I was worth the raise. Got to my annual review and was told everything is excellent, we’re bumping you to Junior 2 with a whooping 5% increase in salary…

    That’s when I decided fuck them. They want a Junior, they’ll get a Junior. I started to listen to podcasts and YouTube videos during my work and dragging my feet, taking weeks to do what I would have done in less than a day before, and still outperforming all other juniors. I quit before the next year for unrelated reasons, and went through training a replacement who, let’s just say, was really a Junior.



  • Don’t.

    First of all, Chinese are not that well viewed abroad either, a lot of the Chinese tourists we get in Europe are the top earners kids and are entitled as fuck.

    Secondly no one judges people from their country, sure there are a lot of obnoxious Americans and Chinese tourists, but I imagine that’s just survivor bias, you don’t notice the non obnoxious ones which I assume to be the majority.

    Thirdly, and maybe most important, you won’t be able to do it. This question is proof that you think and act like an American, you have some ancestor who came from China so you think you’re Chinese-american, and that that somehow means you’re Chinese, but you grew in a different culture, eating different food, watching different TV shows, etc. In short, you are an American of Chinese ethnicity, you are not a Chinese who was born in America.

    Do you want to know what’s one of THE most obnoxious bullshit American tourists do? Teaching Italians about Italy because they’re Italian-American, or thinking they know all about Ireland because the grandpa of their third-cousin once removed came from Ireland, so they’re Irish-American. Unless you spent a significant chunk of your life in China, especially during the formative years, you will not behave Chinese, you have an “Americanized” image of what a Chinese is, and at best you would have fooled someone who doesn’t care about your nationality as long as you treat them with respect. There’s a song that I think sums out this feeling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq0_yCNSV-c it is a very common one, I’ve lived both in Italy and Ireland which is why I use them as examples, and every so often you’d get the X-American thinking they’re X, and you could tell them apart from across the street.



    • Monty Python’s Holy Grail, Life of Brian and Meaning of life (in that order of rewaches). Although I haven’t seen them in years, now that I live somewhere where weed is legal I should do that (never seen them stoned)
    • Primer, which if it’s not on your list here you either haven’t seen it or haven’t understood it
    • The Mummy and Harry Potter (especially the first couple). They’re one of my wife’s comfort movies so we watch them every once in a while if she’s feeling down
    • LotR, although it’s more of an event to rewatch them.
    • Stargate, every few years we rewatch the TV show when we have nothing else to watch, we do that with some other TV shows as well as it’s good background noise to just relax. And since it starts and ends with movies we’ve watched those several times.
    • Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555 are awesome music albums so I have watched those several times
    • Hair, similarly love the musics

    And although I haven’t seen them too many times (but at least twice) Memento is a great movie if you haven’t seen it. Also I haven’t seen it multiple times but The Strangers is a great horror movie.




  • One curious thing if you understand this is to think on purple. Purple is blue+red, but like you pointed out 2 colors should give you the average wavelength, which in the case of blue+,red should be green. So why the hell do we see purple as something different? Well, that’s because humans have 3 sensors for colors, roughly corresponding to Red, Green and Blue, triggering both Blue and Red without triggering green at the same time gets interpreted differently than green, even though it shouldn’t. Which means that purple is not a color, but rather a mind trick your brain plays on you.




  • Not European, although I live and work in Europe so the official language at my company is English, so I can give some extra insight there.

    English is my third language, I learned it in part because the school teaches it (albeit very badly), but mostly because games and movies weren’t translated back then, especially those a young teen without money but with internet access could have access to. I watch English content regularly (in fact I think 90% of the movies and TV shows I watch are in English). I do watch them with subtitles (in English), but that’s because I sometimes have trouble hearing things (I also watch content in my native language subtitled when possible).

    I communicate daily in English with my coworkers, some of who also have English as the second language. We’ve had some minor misunderstandings because of things that sound a certain way in one language, e.g. I came out harsh on one discussion because I said something I can’t remember now, luckily my manager is also a native Spanish speaker and explained what I meant when the other person responded harshly. Speaking of my manager, we usually talk in Spanish, but sometimes you get a technical term or something you’re so used to say in English that you just switch and start talking English, until randomly you switch back, so on and so forth. I think someone would have to be fluent in both languages to follow our conversations.


    1. Ecosystem is closed, you buy a quest you need to buy from Meta and have your Facebook account linked.
    2. It is good, and objectively currently the best (and only) standalone headset.
    3. The Quest is a standalone headset, he doesn’t need the phone. He can plug it into his PC, but that’s not the main intended use and there are some quirks.
    4. Not sure what you mean, but like I said the quest is a standalone headset, so nothing else needed. If you want to run it connected to a PC it would require fairly decent hardware for it to be worth the bother.

    All of this being said, and like others have told you, we should be getting the Steam Frame somewhere in Q1, and it’s objectively better in all those points:

    1. Open system means you can’t be closed onto one garden. Although Steam is a lot easier.
    2. It’s theoretically comparable with the Quest 3
    3. Frame is also standalone, but it’s also designed to be wirelessly connected to PCs using it’s own designated bandwidth, making it much better at that than the Quest.
    4. While PC is the same for both cases. The streaming experience should be a lot better with the Frame due to improvements to the way the content is streamed that Valve has made.

    All of that being said, the Frame WILL be more expensive than the Quest. IMO, it’s worth to pay more for an open platform, but you might look at things differently. Also you should consider that we don’t know when it will be available and how much it will cost, but I’m confident that it will be a better purchase regardless if both of you can afford the wait and price.

    Personally I bought the Quest 1, and while I don’t regret it, I got fed up with lots of the Meta stuff. I plan on buying a frame on release, and would only get a quest if it was given to me for free since I don’t plan on spending a single cent more on that platform.


  • There are several ways to counter that sort of thing, but let’s start from the beginning. LLMs (what people call AI) is VERY computational heavy, you need a powerful GPU to run a model locally, and it occupies lots of power and memory. The idea that we’re even remotely close to something like that being embed into hardware without people realizing it is just absurd.

    But let’s imagine someone is able to make it, and magically prevents hackers from breaking it and using it as extra free power. This will have to live in the CPU as anywhere else wouldn’t have authority to “delete files”, and even the CPU would have a hard time doing that. Now this LLM needs to distinguish stuff I’m writing with stuff I’m reading, otherwise it would also delete files when someone is observing me. It also needs to reply in sub millisecond otherwise the computer will lag absurdly. It also can’t update it’s local model because it doesn’t have network access, so just use tokens it hasn’t heard of.

    In short if someone managed to add a piece of hardware capable of doing that it would have to be significantly more powerful than the piece of hardware it’s embed in, and it would only work until someone breaks it and gives everyone a free hardware upgrade.

    You can relax, nothing like that is even remotely close of being theoretically possible.

    That being said, Windows doing this or similar is a possibility, your best bet is to use an open source system.


  • I feel like you might be young and not have had to actually use analog stuff. Your whole family trip photos could be gone in an instant because you burnt the film accidentally, or you could lose the film before getting it revealed, and although rare (probably as rare as a bit flip destroying data nowadays) it happened that pictures were destroyed during the revealing process, and even if all of that worked the pictures could have been over/under exposed, out of focus, or any other variety of issues.

    Typewriters? I wrote stuff in them when I was a kid, granted computers were around back then, but I liked the sound. They would jam the hammers, run out of ink, or just annoyingly one letter would not work. If you’ve made a typo or wanted to edit something the entire page had to be thrown out and rewritten, and if it didn’t fit now the next page would have to be rewritten as well. And now that you’ve finished writing and left the pages on the table a spill could destroy your day’s work, or your dog could eat your homework.

    Film? I don’t think anyone here has actually dealt with film unless you work in the industry. For home users we used to use videocassette, which is a digital medium, and a very flimsy at that, dropped soda on it? Gone, it got stuck in your player? Gone, you put a magnet near it? Gone.

    On the other hand digital pictures, text and movies you can have multiple backups effortlessly and completely avoid any possible single disaster scenario.