@ricecake@sh.itjust.works

comments

• People forget that the terminology is literally just a shorthand for a metaphor that made sense to someone once.
  Due to historical circumstances it’s made of a blend of US military jargon, Japanese auto manufacturing, IT terminology, and terminology from a hodge podge of filler humanities degrees people got because of degree requirements.

  It sounds weird because the history is weird, but it’s still words people liked and found useful.

  I’d use some of them just because they’re funny.

  on synergy rule in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5d ago

• Your statement ignores the meaning of AI or the decades of work that have gone into the field.

  They’re not sentient. They’re not sapient. They’re not conscious, nor do they have feelings, volition, desire, or anything that can be described as an internal life. They can’t even think in they sense that anyone means by it.

  None of those things are intelligence though.

  An LLM posesses the ability to respond to external stimuli in a way that is meaningful. They also have the ability to learn, which is the act of a system transforming information or stimuli in a way that is applied to later stimuli.

  My air conditioner learns and is intelligent. It measures the environment, takes actions based on that stimulus, and when I make adjustments it records when I like different settings and applies that to the temperatures it’s recorded in the past to adjust early. An LLM may be more sophisticated than my air conditioner but it’s in the same category.

  The mistake is thinking that AI in the real world is what AI is on TV.

  on AI Didn't Steal the Mathematician's Work, Sam Altman Did in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026

• I feel like that’s very similar to what I said, including the bit about being routine in most other regards.

  People who spend a lot of time thinking are prone to having thoughts, and sometimes those thoughts are less common.
  The more abstract the topic you’re working with, the more accustomed you’ll be to hearing things that don’t make sense at first.

  Might just be me, but in general the more educated people I’ve met have been more likely to qualify as odd ducks, and the mathy folks tend towards the upper edge.

  on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis' in c/games@lemmy.world · 3 Sep 2026

• I had hoped I was making it very clear that it’s not a case that all mathematicians are weirdos or even difficult to talk to, because they’re not.
  Thinking about complicated things all the time results in complicated conclusions, so you’ll end up talking to people with very detailed thoughts if you’re talking about work. Probably perfectly normal thoughts on cooking beyond a bias towards using their analytical ability where others might not.
  My point was not that they’re all weird, but that the bar is higher because you deal with more people who have thought about something much more than you have.

  My point with the paper wasn’t that it’s weird to have fun, or that the title was bad. It’s that it was complicated and an example of the field requiring you to deal with profoundly unfamiliar ideas and terminology, potentially quite regularly. To some people “that sounded like gibberish” is a sign you dismiss it. In this case, it means you need to do more research to catch up to the terminology.

  The two that I was thinking of were erdos and diffie. I’ll concede to featuring some of the more notable characters because their stories are more fun.

  The idea being described was a paraphrase of platonic realism and structuralism taken to an extreme to match simulation theory. If the universe is a simulation it means there is, “somewhere”, an equation or algorithm describing our physical reality. Needing that equation to be evaluated to give rise to our universe is an odd perspective since the existence of the equation would be sufficient. An equation describing the motion of a point in a circle doesn’t need to be evaluated to describe that, nor does it need to be written down.

  It’s a notion that I thought fit well with my point of “agree or disagree, it’s not delusional, and it’s not obvious”

  on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis' in c/games@lemmy.world · 3 Sep 2026

• While it’s not true that intelligence is correlated with mental problems, advanced mathematics tends to attract or create odd ducks.

  There are multiple mathematicians in the modern era who are well regarded, technically homeless and just showed up at people’s houses to collaborate on some math. One, who coined the phrase “another roof, another proof”, was a staunch proponent of mixing amphetamines, coffee, and 70’s antidepressants.
  People didn’t notice John Nash devolved into a deep schizophrenic break for a long time because it’s not weird for advanced mathematicians to be talking about very complex unintelligible ideas. Scary Wheels and Super Shrubs is an example of a good title and not-transparent description.

  Another was the uni-bomber.

  There’s plenty of perfectly well balanced mathematicians. You just can’t help but get some weird ideas when your life’s work is to think outside the box about very complicated things all the time.

  If you go deep into math work, you’ll meet people who think the universe is a simulation. You’ll meet others who think that’s silly, because the universe is clearly actually an abstract embodiment of the platonic ideal of mathematics. 7, blue, and cat are all equally real or not real, and we don’t need a simulation as the equation defining structure is sufficient to give rise to what we experience, and requiring it to be written or executed is just an odd affectation.
  You’ll just nod and concede the appeal because it’s not the first time someone has shared that idea with you.

  So when the mathematicians start saying the ideas are getting odd, you know it’s not just “I don’t understand therefore it’s weird”.

  on Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI and layoff-happy CEOs: 'Everyone I know, their bosses are slowly getting psychosis' in c/games@lemmy.world · 2 Sep 2026

• I went and read the commit descriptions.

  Previously it was using whatever cursor the theme had loaded and just scaled it up. Now it references the full set of resources for the theme and picks the appropriate one for the size.

  So they went with the most correct third option: defer to the standard set by a more authoritative source. :)

  on different design philosophies in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 17 Aug 2026

• People in charge of the company I work for are actively delusional.

  We had a four hour mandatory meeting to go over our product strategy. The high level vision. For the engineers. No rest breaks. It was announced there would be a test on the materials. Not as a joke.
  The top question in the Qa section afterwards was “what is our product strategy?”.
  The meeting had roughly 10k attendees.

  “AI agents are going to become so pervasive that we’ll need to put a computer on every desk in every office. I’m serious: have you tried to buy a Mac mini lately? They’re just not available”. “Datacenters in space”.

  We think they were announcing a new product dashboard, but we’re not sure.

  A huge amount of freakout about how AI will make everything different and better that most people on the ground don’t agree with, but we’re mandated to reorganize stuff according to the theory of how it should work in their vision. Teams that change and shift every few weeks. No fixed goals in the week to week timescales. Less planning, more demos, and development goals dictated by higher ups AI agents.

  When it all shits the bed they won’t be the ones getting fired. They’ll be the ones collecting the same paycheck and talking about how “limited restructuring” is hard for everyone, but market forces dictate.

  I’ve never been under the impression that my work makes the world a better place. I’ve always sold a product that goes to companies that do stuff that might help someone else help people.
  It’s someone else having a goddamened coke bender on 50k people’s livelihoods with no consequences that has me down.

  on Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad? in c/technology@lemmy.world · 12 Aug 2026

• I won’t disagree with what you said, but I’ll disagree that it’s the same point I was making.

  My point was that there isn’t a technical solution to traffic congestion. You need less fluid or a bigger pipe. What you correctly mention is why a bigger pipe won’t work for humans when it does for water.

  And out of pure pedantry, I’d disagree purely because my analogy said “non-newtownian liquid” - those don’t expand. :P it’s more like a hyperactive toddler manically jamming silly putty into a PVC pipe.

  on Cloudflare says humans could become a "rounding error" as bots generate 1,000 times more internet traffic in c/technology@lemmy.world · 10 Aug 2026

• Traffic congestion doesn’t happen because of lack of coordination. Coordination prevents collisions. Our success rate could be a lot better but the system does pretty well with coordination limited to blinking lights, a noise that says “fuck off”, the mutual knowledge that we all got the same training and the private knowledge that everyone else on the road is a suicidal idiot who slept through the training.

  Congestion is a physical property of the road network. There’s a physical limit to the number of cars you can push through a road in a given time period. Drive the cars too fast and they fly off the road when it bends, or cars slam into each other when a deer tries to commit suicide.

  Traffic is well modeled as an incompressible slightly non-newtownian fluid, like runny oobleck. If you apply more pressure/increase vehicle volume the fluid starts to bind up as it becomes harder for the cars to maneuver without collision, regardless of coordination.

  You reduce traffic by taking cars off the road, or scheduling utilization. Self driving cars won’t help, and we can do both of those without them. Long term they’re likely to make collisions worse because humans don’t know what they’re going to do, so the primary mode we have of coordination, “the theory of mind” will break down. Right now they’re so uncommon that you assume any car is a human who reacts and prioritizes like you.

  Tear down the freeways and replace them with trains.

  on Cloudflare says humans could become a "rounding error" as bots generate 1,000 times more internet traffic in c/technology@lemmy.world · 9 Aug 2026

• Almost certainly.

  They don’t have to, since it’s not a part of the system that it requires them to hold onto the information, but they all invariably hold onto the information to keep training on it, which includes your personal information.

  They are likely not using for selling to other people or anything since that’s not their business model at the moment, but it’s probably finding it’s way into the next version in some capacity.

  on Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents in c/technology@lemmy.world · 8 Aug 2026