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hattmall commented on What is going on right now?   catskull.net/what-the-hel... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
cstoner · 4 days ago
> all i know about these LLMs is that even if they understand language or can create it, they know nothing of the subjects they speak of.

As a recent example of this, I was recently curious about how the heart gets the oxygen depleted blood back to the heart. Pumping blood out made sense to me, but the return path was less obvious.

So I asked chatgpt whether the heart sucks in the blood from veins.

It told me that the heart does not suck in the blood, it creates a negative pressure zone that causes the blood to flow into it ... :facepalm:

Sure, my language was non-technical/imprecise, but I bet if I asked a cardiologist about this they would have said something like "That's not the language I would have used, but basically."

I don't know why, but lately I've been getting a lot of cases where these models contradicts themself even within the same response. I'm working out a lot (debating a triathlon) and it told me to swim and do upper body weight lifting on the same day to "avoid working out the same muscle group in the same day". Similarly it told me to run and do leg workouts on the same day.

> i do like it as a bit of a glorified google, but looking at what code it outputs my confidence it its findings lessens every prompt

I'm having the exact same reaction. I'm finding they are still more useful than google, even with an error rate close to 70%, but I am quickly learning that you can't trust anything they output and should double check everything.

hattmall · 2 days ago
AI is impressive for a subject you know nothing about. If you ask it what you already know it becomes far less impressive.
hattmall commented on Southwest Is Changing Its Rules for Plus-Size Passengers   nytimes.com/2025/08/22/tr... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
t1E9mE7JTRjf · 4 days ago
Ok but guys, 6 4 and 6 10 is incredibly tall. Surely you see that's edge case AF?
hattmall · 4 days ago
At 6'10 I can't imagine much anything is comfortable.
hattmall commented on Southwest Is Changing Its Rules for Plus-Size Passengers   nytimes.com/2025/08/22/tr... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
avalys · 4 days ago
I’d like to see airlines charge for carryons and allow checked bags for free.

Carryons are by far the best experience for a passenger - your bag is there with you and you don’t have to arrive at the airport early, nor wait around at baggage claim. All business and frequent travelers would pay extra for this.

Meanwhile, carryons are worse for everyone else, and for the airline! They massively slow down the boarding and deboarding process while you wait for people to heft their massive suitcases up into the bins.

Fewer carryons means faster turnarounds which means more profit.

Thank you for listening to my talk.

hattmall · 4 days ago
Honestly that's pretty brilliant. But I think the airlines have some incentive to encourage travelers to carry less weight overall.
hattmall commented on VHS-C: When a lazy idea stumbles towards perfection [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=HFYWH... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
reaperducer · 4 days ago
It's so sad how back when Sony was an electronics company, it fought the content makers in court for the right for people to make recordings.

Then Sony became a content company, and stopped making things to allow people to make recordings.

With advances in technology, I should be able to pop an SD card in my TV and record what I see, then bring it over to a friend's house and pop it into his TV so we can watch together.

The future has been monetized.

hattmall · 4 days ago
I will admit I haven't tried this, so I don't know if there's some encryption that would be problematic but there are definitely HDMI video capture devices that are very reasonably priced and would let you record content. BUt most all content is online so it seems there would be very little demand for the feature you are talking about. I can just go to my friends house and log in to whatever app and watch the same stuff I can at my house, or use something like a Chromecast.
hattmall commented on Popular Japanese smartphone games have introduced external payment systems   english.kyodonews.net/art... · Posted by u/anigbrowl
bluefirebrand · 4 days ago
Maybe we should be identifying those types of people and preventing them from ever controlling anything?

I mean, if we ever want society to improve at all

hattmall · 4 days ago
Maybe we need to limit them a bit more, but there's an evolutionary factor or purpose or something at play. I remember a psychology lecture where they talked about it and how in hunter and gather societies most people would be content for a while when they found a good gathering area, they would hang out and gather the food and eat. But they had certain people that didn't want to stay they just wanted to move on to find the next better gathering area and would practically be forced to eat and carry enough food before they could keep searching. Those people were important too, and I feel that's the psychology of billionaires today. There is never enough they don't even actually care about the bounty it's just the idea of getting more and more.

I also remember an experiment found that something like 8% of people swerve over to purposely hit turtles on the shoulder of the road. I would be much more interested in identifying and containing those people.

hattmall commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States   blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
dyauspitr · 9 days ago
What exactly is made in the US though? Besides cars and some forged tools, I can’t think of a single thing made in the US.

Edit: I looked it up, it’s a lot of things. Airplanes, military aircraft, helicopters, satellites, rockets, construction/agriculture equipment (Caterpillar, John Deere), ICE and EV cars, chips, medical equipment (MRI, CT scanners), lots of defense stuff, drugs and pharmaceutical, processed agri goods etc.

hattmall · 9 days ago
Guns are a pretty large domestic manufacturing segment.
hattmall commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States   blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
kingofmen · 9 days ago
If there is one house per person then approximately every person gets a house, because almost everyone is willing and able to pay more for their first house than even a very wealthy person will pay for a second one. If there are 1.5 houses per person then you will have to work quite hard at being homeless.
hattmall · 9 days ago
This is wildly incorrect, wealthy people are far more likely to be able to afford and willing to pay more for excess housing than an average person. Especially if they can turn around and rent those houses at a profit.
hattmall commented on The decline of high-tech manufacturing in the United States   blog.waldrn.com/p/the-dec... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
nostrademons · 9 days ago
So here's what I don't get about the public discourse on manufacturing in the U.S:

When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. You'll have a production line that takes in plastic and chips and solder, and spits out consumer electronics at the end, and there are maybe a couple dozen employees in the whole plant whose job is to babysit the line and fix any machine that goes awry. Their description is backed up by data: manufacturing output has been flat since roughly 2000 [1], but manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 50% [2].

The public discourse about why we want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been split into two main points (and you'll see it in comments here):

1) We should bring back manufacturing jobs so that we can have good, middle-class wages for the large segment of the population that's currently in low-wage service jobs and about to be displaced by AI.

2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.

If it's #2, that's fair enough, and every indicator is that we can do that, it'll just take time and capital and perhaps some entrepreneurship. But it won't fix #1. Just like all other manufacturing in America today, the lines will be highly automated and largely run by themself. And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. The jobs are not coming back. If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory ("manufacturing engineer" is a skilled job today anyway, not unlike a computer programmer), but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.

Is this just a case where politicians tell voters what they want to hear so they can go do what they want to do anyway? "We're going to bring back good high-paying manufacturing jobs for everyone" is a lot more palatable message than "We're going to go to war so you can die."

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

hattmall · 9 days ago
I think you have a flawed assumption. Highly automated manufacturing is only common because of high labor costs. If we are forced by non-profit driven reasons to bring manufacturing back it won't be automated as well. Things that can be highly automated are still being manufactured in the US. The things that can't be are made using human labor in cheap countries.
hattmall commented on Flock Reports to Police If It Thinks Car Movement Patterns "Suspicious"   aclu.org/news/national-se... · Posted by u/gscott
SoftTalker · 10 days ago
> Flock's founders vision is that Flock will "eliminate all crime"

And he quite possibly genuinely believes it.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

hattmall · 10 days ago
Is that even good intentions? "Crime" is mostly how the world progresses.
hattmall commented on A single lock of hair could rewrite what we know about Inca record-keeping   science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/warrenm
nis0s · 10 days ago
Cool article! My favorite fact about the Incan empire is that the University of Oxford is older than it.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/university-oxford-...

hattmall · 10 days ago
That's correct, though the article mentions the Aztecs, but thinking of the Inca empire as a standalone unit is sort of dubious. The Inca were just the named phase of upper Andean civilization when the conquistadors arrived. Most of what's considered Inca empire was already in existence for a long time. It's much more reasonable to consider upper Andean civilization as a whole instead of just looking at the final administration and taking that name.

u/hattmall

KarmaCake day2210December 28, 2020
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