• 0 Posts
  • 54 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle


  • I weighed anchor despite paying for Prime for years. For one, you never know when they’ll drop a show, and two I prefer all my media in my polled interface.

    I ended up dropping Prime two years ago because Amazon simply can’t hold up their end of their 2 day bargain. I live in a college town and when the school year starts their delivery time stretches to nearly 2 weeks. The rest of the year it fluctuates between 3 and 7 days. That’s not Prime in any way. Of course, without prime, note they wait 3-6 days before even shipping my packages so everything is a week to ten days. OTOH, Walmart - though having a smaller selection- is being me next day service on about 60% of my orders and two day on the rest …for less than half the annual fee.

    My only lament is the weird Chinese electronics/components Amazon sellers stock FBA. It doesn’t take me too long to get to $35, but I do miss the $5 impulse buy of small packs of arduino actuators or pneumatic push connectors when inspiration strikes.




  • Not popular- commercial. The early internet had effectively no profit motive. As it aged there was a modicum of balance between use and profit - a good site drives customers. Now there are a preponderance of sites which exist only to scrape pennies off advertisers and have no useful content except that which is required to garner a click from a search engine in hopes you will accidentally create an advertising impression.



  • It’s not code. It’s a matrix of associative conditions. And, specifically, it’s not a fixed set of associations but a sort of n-dimensional surface of probabilities. Your prompt is a starting vector that intersects that n-dimensional surface with a complex path which can then be altered by the data it intersects. It’s like trying to predict or undo the rainbow of colors created by an oil film on water, but in thousands or millions of directions more in complexity.

    The complexity isn’t in understanding it, it’s in the inherent randomness of association. Because the “code” can interact and change based on this quasi-randomness (essentially random for a large enough learned library) there is no 1:1 output to input. It’s been trained somewhat how humans learn. You can take two humans with the same base level of knowledge and get two slightly different answers to identical questions. In fact, for most humans, you’ll never get exactly the same answer to anything from a single human more than simplest of questions. Now realize that this fake human has been trained not just on Rembrandt and Banksy, Jane Austin and Isaac Asimov, but PoopyButtLice on 4chan and the Daily Record and you can see how it’s not possible to wrangle some sort of input:output logic as if it were “code”.





  • I’ll trade when the money is right. iPhone 12 Pro-13 ProMax cost me $60. Yes it was a year old, but for a fresh battery and better tele lens it was worth it. This year I upgraded to a 15 Pro. I get nothing but a new battery and a C charging port (faster processor means little to me), but it cost me only $95 net - less than a battery replacement. For all the limitation of the Apple ecosystem and over-priced hardware, it gets exceptionally favorable trade-in pricing.

    Iirc, iPhones reset / overwrite the encryption key so it would take substantial effort for someone to see how many steps I take in a day or to find my vacation photos. It’s probably easier to steal info from my iCloud backup at Apple.