dash2 (u/dash2) - Readit News

dash2 commented on Positron, a New Data Science IDE posit.co/blog/positron-pr... · Posted by u/kgwgk

dvt · 5 days ago

I have a feeling that hardcore data scientists will continue to use RStudio because of the huge ecosystem there, while data engineers will continue to use VSCode which is, at least for me, good enough with a few extensions that let me run notebooks and data visualizations when I need to do data work. In other words, I'm not sure if there's a niche here.

dash2 · 5 days ago

The ecosystem is just R packages, right? There's also RStudio integration with e.g. rmarkdown, knitr, quarto etc. but presumably all of that can also come in positron.

dash2 commented on LL3M: Large Language 3D Modelers threedle.github.io/ll3m/... · Posted by u/simonpure

exasperaited · 7 days ago

... is like...

What if I don't want to learn guitar? What if I just want to spend a couple of hours and get something that sounds like guitar?

I tend to say in this situation: you can do that. Nobody's stopping you. But you shouldn't expect wider culture to treat you like you've done the work. So what new creative work are you seeking to do with the time you've saved?

dash2 · 7 days ago

I just want to make a fun 3d model of my dog! It's like complaining I haven't taken a professional photography course when I snap photos of my kids.

dash2 commented on LL3M: Large Language 3D Modelers threedle.github.io/ll3m/... · Posted by u/simonpure

Etherlord87 · 7 days ago

As someone using Blender for ~7 years, with over 1000 answers on Blender Stack Exchange and total score of 48.000:

This tool is maybe useful if you want to learn Python, in particular Blender Python API basics, I don't really see other usage of this. All examples given are extremely simple to do; please don't use a tool like this, because it takes your prompt and generates the most bland version of it possible. It really takes only about a day to go through some tutorials and learn how to make models like these in Blender, with solid color or some basic textures. The other thousands of days is what you would spend on creating correct topology, making an armature, animating, making more advanced shaders, creating parametric geometry nodes setups... But simple models like these you can create effortlessly, and those will be YOUR models, the way (roughly, of course) how you imagined them. After a few weeks you're probably going to model them faster than the time it takes for prompt engineering. By that time your imagination, skill in Blender and understanding of 3D technicalities will improve, and it will keep improving moving onward. And what will you learn using this AI?

I think meshy.ai is much more promising, but still I think I'd only consider using it if I wanted to convert photo/render into a mesh with a texture properly positioned onto it, to then refine the mesh by sculpting - and sculpting is one of my weakest skills in Blender. BTW I made a test showcasing how meshy.ai works: https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/319797/60486

dash2 · 7 days ago

What if I don't want to spend a few weeks learning Blender? What if I just want to spend a couple of hours and get something that's good enough?

dash2 commented on Model intelligence is no longer the constraint for automation latentintent.substack.com... · Posted by u/drivian

dash2 · 8 days ago

I'm not sure about the assumption that science is context-free. Maths maybe, but a lot of practical science has tons of unformalized contextual knowledge that is "handed down" by practitioners. It's one reason why replication can be so hard.

OTOH, I also think a lot of science is like 1% inspiration, 99% very mundane tasks like data cleaning. So no reason the AI can't help with that. And scientists write terrible code, so the bar is low :-)

dash2 commented on What does Palantir actually do? wired.com/story/palantir-... · Posted by u/mudil

raffael_de · 11 days ago

Given that the world is headed towards a surveillance dystopia and Peter Thiel being involved I think I should buy some stocks now. What happened end of 2024 that kicked off its price hike?

dash2 · 10 days ago

Maybe not... given its Price/Sales ratio, it's pricing in about 10 years of 30% growth. It's a great company (bracketing the ethics issue which has produced a lot of boring discussion here). But even a great company can be severely overvalued.

Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.

dash2 commented on All Souls exam questions and the limits of machine reasoning resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/benbreen

lordnacho · 10 days ago

I went to see the last Mallard Song. Just to say I went, of course. It looked like a bunch of weirdos in a courtyard to me, but it was a literally once-in-a-century event, and I was living less than a minute away, so why not?

I don't think I've ever heard of a scheduled ritual that has a longer period. You're guaranteed to never have anyone present at more than one of these, so surely many aspects of the ritual will wander quite far from the original?

As for LLMs on the All Souls test, it's predictable that it mostly whiffs. After all it takes in a diet of Reddit+Wikipedia+etc, none of which is the kind of writing they are looking for.

Reddit is a lot of crappy comments. If you have no grounding in reality (being a thing that lives in a datacentre), how are you going to curate it? Some subs are really quite good, but most are really quite bad. It's not easy to get guidance, of the kind you would get if you sat with a professor for three or four hours a week for a few years, which is what the humanities students actually do.

Wikipedia is a great reference work, but it tends to not have any of the kinds of connections you're supposed to make in these essays. It has a lot of factual stuff, so questions about Persia will look ok, like in the article. But questions that glue together ideas across areas? Nah. Even if that's in the dataset somewhere, how is the LLM supposed to know that the sort of refined writing of a cross-subject academic is the highest level of the humanities? It doesn't, so it spits out what the average Redditor might glue together from a bit of googling.

dash2 · 10 days ago

OK, interesting hypothesis. So, I wondered how it would do with "Why should cultural historians care about ice cores?" which indeed requires gluing together ideas across areas. I asked ChatGPT 5 on Thinking mode:

https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5361-fad8-8010-b203-f4f80d1457...

It does a pretty good job summarizing an abstruse, but known, subfield of frontier research. (So, perhaps not doing its own "gluing" of areas....) It clearly lacks "depth", in the sense of deep thinking about the why and how of this. (Many cultural historians might have reasons for deep scepticism of invasion by a bunch of quantitative data nerds, I suspect, and might be able to articulate why quite well.) It's bullet points, not an essay. I tried asking it for a 1000 word essay specifically and got:

https://chatgpt.com/share/689e5545-0688-8010-8bdf-632d3c3466...

which seems only superficially different - an essay in form, but secretly a bunch of bullet points.

For a comparison, here's a Guardian article that came up when I googled for "cultural historians ice cores":

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/20/solar-storms...

It seems to do a good job at explaining why they should, though not in a deep essayistic style.

dash2 commented on FilBench: Can LLMs Understand and Generate Filipino Language? arxiv.org/abs/2508.03523... · Posted by u/bananatype

dash2 · 11 days ago

I found chatgpt happily translated my questions about Cagayan De Oro into Bisaya, which my wife verified was pretty good.

dash2 commented on Long-term exposure to outdoor air pollution linked to increased risk of dementia cam.ac.uk/research/news/l... · Posted by u/hhs

olalonde · 15 days ago

I find this very hard to believe... Mind sharing that study?

dash2 · 15 days ago

Yeah, I mean, how do they identify the causal effect here? It's obviously not easy, because polluted areas are also poor areas, and poor people live in poor areas (and have other problems).

It would be nice if the article had mentioned this issue. A metastudy of lots of bad correlational studies is just garbage in garbage out. So, did they address the issue?

There are ways round it, by the way. As a recent review said:

"it is unclear why federal ISAs that are the input into all regulatory analyses tend not to incorporate the emerging body of evidence on the effects of air pollution on health outcomes from the economics literature despite the additional rigor imposed by the emphasis on causal inference."

https://www.annualreviews.org/docserver/fulltext/resource/15...

dash2 commented on The current state of LLM-driven development blog.tolki.dev/posts/2025... · Posted by u/Signez

dash2 · 15 days ago

They missed OpenAI Codex, maybe deliberately? It's less llm-development and more vibe-coding, or maybe "being a PHB of robots". I'm enjoying it for my side project this week.

dash2 commented on Exit Tax: Leave Germany before your business gets big eidel.io/exit-tax-leave-g... · Posted by u/olieidel

psychoslave · 17 days ago

[flagged]

dash2 · 17 days ago

Man soll den Flüchtlingen aus Deutschland keine Träne nachweinen, eh?