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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Would you say you are good at creating a meal plan or a work schedule by yourself, with no AI? I suspect if you know what a good meal plan looks to you and you are able to visualize the end result you want, then genAI can speed up the process for you.

    I am not good at creative tasks. My attempts to use genAI to create an image for a PowerPoint were not great. I am wondering if the two things are related and I’m not getting good results because I don’t have a clear mental picture of what the end result should be so my descriptions of it are bad

    In my case, I wanted an office worker who was juggling a specific set of objects that were related to my deck. After a couple of attempts at refining my prompt, Dall-E produced a good result, except that it had decided that the office worker had to have a clown face, with the make-up and the red nose.

    From there it went downhill. I tried “yes, like this, but remove the clown makeup” or “please lose the clown face” or “for the love of Cthulhu, I beg you, no more clowns” but nothing worked.


  • I am not using it for this purpose, but churning out large amounts of text that doesn’t need to be accurate is proving to be a good fit for:

    • scammers, who can now write more personalize emails and also have conversations

    • personality tests

    • horoscopes or predictions (there are several examples even on serious outlets of “AI predicts how the world will end” or similar)

    Due to how good LLMs are at predicting an expected pattern of response, they are a spectacularly bad idea (but are obviously used anyway) for:

    • substitute for therapy

    • virtual friends/girlfriend/boyfriend

    The reason they are such a bad idea for these use cases is that fragile people with self-destructive patterns do NOT need those patterns to be predicted and validated by a LMM.



  • Meeting notes are the ideal use case for AI, in the sense that everyone thinks someone needs to write them but almost nobody ever goes back and actually reads them.

    But when I got curious and read the AI generated ones (the ones from Zoom at least)… According to the AI I had agreed on an action that hadn’t been even discussed in the meeting and we apparently spent half of the meeting discussing weather conditions in the various locations (AI seems to have a hard time telling the difference between initial greetings or jokes and the actual discussion, but in this one it became weirdly fixated with those initial 5 minutes)



  • One of the few areas where representation is fair is assholery. There are real assholes from all genders, ethnicity and religious backgrounds.

    You can be non-white, non-binary, non-wasp and still be an asshole. And other assholes will accept you, if it helps shield their evil agenda from the most obvious accusations.

    And guess what political side has learned to leverage that fact? I’ll give you a few hints. Neonazi AfD in Germany has a lesbian leader with a Sri Lankan partner, the italian far right party (staunch defender of family values) has a leader who’s a never married single mom (and now she’s Italy’s prime minister), then you already mentioned Trump and Vance.

    Don’t get me wrong, Usha Vance, Melania Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel aren’t being exploited. They are all formidable persons who got to the top by out-assholing everyone else on their side and by actively banking on their “non traditional” status to emerge in ultra-conservative environments.

    So they don’t need to rationalize anything. It’s all already quite rational and by design.











  • I don’t want to get too deep into your business but just to understand better what you’re trying to communicate… Please tell me if I get this right: there’s current (not past) drama in your family and you think that not acknowledging father’s day at all would feed into that drama (maybe your dad’s reaction would be “see, you’re all against me” and he’d play the victim or something like that) . On the other hand you also don’t want to pretend everything is right with your father. So you want something to communicate “I don’t want to be against you, but I certainly am not on your side either; I just want to be left alone and talk to you the strictly necessary amount of times”. Is that it?

    If that’s the case, yes, the standard-est, humorless “happy father’s day” card you can find, with nothing but your signature in it should convey that message pretty well. If you can’t find anything, just a white one with a handwritten “happy father’s day, [your name]” would do.


  • The medical field is ripe for some intrusive ads to boost revenues! Possibilities are endless:

    Ad-supported hearing aids (“this conversation will resume after a quick message from our sponsors!”)

    Pacemakers - want to watch an ad for 100 more free heartbeats?

    Surgery - this will leave a visible scar, but how about we make the cut look like the Amazon logo ?

    Implants - click the nipple and watch an ad to re-inflate the left breast for 10 more days