Pro tip: If you find large mysterious eggs on a derelict space ship, ALWAYS inspect them very closely. They tend to contain some really cool stuff. Mind-blowing, transcendental best stuff ever. I’m talking, like, way too legit to be legit, feel me? If you see movement inside, be sure to place your head close to the top of the egg. You should try to smell the egg or even give it a lick.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 19th, 2024

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  • Are the cheaper batteries better than the expensive ones? If not, dewalt is charging you for a superior product, which is fair IMO. Is the difference big enough to justify the difference? That’s up to the customer to decide. If the difference is not worth it, just buy the cheaper one instead.

    Is any of this ethical? Probably not. I suspect both manufacturers have poor labor practices and a negative environmental impact. The way I see it, consumers are destroying the planet through indirect means for the most part. Directly, if you’re burning gasoline, and indirectly, when you’re buying stuff from various companies. Those companies are directly destroying the planet buy burning stuff, leaking toxic chemicals into the groundwater etc. If you’re worried about ethics, you might want to look into the environmental impact these two companies have. If you’re serious about this, you might need to do a proper life cycle analysis of the entire production chain, but that’s a topic for another thesis.



  • I agree with most of that, but I think I still need to bring up the benefits of centralised health services. In simple cases, you don’t really need that, but in tricky cases you might. For example, if you need an MRI scan before surgery, you just can’t rely on travelling doctors. Those machines are expensive, so you’re only going to have those in large cities where they can be used more frequently.

    Surgery also benefits from being a centralised service. You can’t expect a traveling surgeon to carry all the stuff you need for keeping the whole room clean. Besides, the room itself needs special equipment. A simple scalpel and a steady hand aren’t enough to make it work.



  • It depends on your level of expertise. If your writing skills are awful, boosting that with below average AI-slop is actually an improvement. The output won’t be good, but at least it isn’t awful either. If you already are a competent writer, LLMs will absolutely ruin your text.

    However, the middle ground is where it gets interesting. You should start with a rough draft. It doesn’t have to be concise, coherent or even good. It’s just a starting point for the LLM to work with. It’s important that the draft illustrates the vision you’re going for.

    If you tell an LLM to improve it, it will usually make some dramatic changes you won’t like, but some of them kinda work. Then you’ll become an editor, and your job is to merge the two texts. Take the best parts from your original and the one the LLM “refined” for you.

    This method requires you to have a vision though, and you need to know what you want. Your job is to curate the material. Discard the trash and keep anything worth keeping. You need to have the ability to determine what’s good and what’s not. Fortunately, that’s a skill you can develop by reading material written by other people.



  • When taken to extreme, the pieces could also rise.

    Imagine that meat demand drops gradually over a few decades, and meat production adapts to it. As a result, the whole industry begins to lose the economies of scale. After a century of this kind of development, meat is produced by a handful of small farms, where the operational costs per mass unit of meat produced are very high. If that ever happens, meat would become a special ingredient most people don’t want. Those few who still do want it, are willing to pay absurd prices for it.

    That’s exactly what has already happened with physical media for audio and video.