Readit News logoReadit News
timdiggerm commented on Poisoning Well   heydonworks.com/article/p... · Posted by u/wonger_
bboygravity · a day ago
I find this whole anti-LLM stance so weird. It kind of feels like trying to build robot distractions into websites to distract search engine indexers in the 2000's or something.

Like why? Don't you want people to read your content? Does it really matter that meat bags find out about your message to the world through your own website or through an LLM?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is trying to figure out how to deliberately get their stuff INTO as many LLMs as fast as possible.

timdiggerm · 11 hours ago
If it's ad-supported or I'm seeking donations, I only want people reading it on my website. Why would I want people to access it through an LLM?
timdiggerm commented on Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time   bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/202... · Posted by u/aways
PaulRobinson · 2 days ago
I found it so off-putting, I couldn't really listen to the show. On some episodes he would basically lead them through his notes, as if he were the expert and was having to suffer these people explaining things badly to him.

Bragg has been a strong force in intellectual culture in the UK for many decades. I remember my Mum and Sister being upset by a trailer for The South Bank Show back in the early 1980s, and he was a prominent "elder statesman" figure of the media by then, really - so he's had very good run.

But to be honest, I am hoping we get somebody a little bit less frumpy and grumpy picking up the space he will inevitably leave behind. I just hope it's not closed down and we end up with more middling dross.

timdiggerm · 2 days ago
His notes, of course, were assembled by his producers, based on the notes & writing of those academics (and others, I'm sure, thus the weekly reading list). He sometimes made reference to this, saying things like "Well you said it in your notes; what did you mean?"
timdiggerm commented on Doctors could hack the nervous system with ultrasound   spectrum.ieee.org/focused... · Posted by u/purpleko
hinkley · 3 months ago
I know I'm meant to be thinking, "wow this is so awesome, the body is amazing!" but all I can think about is the future of war crimes. And I don't know if that says more about what goes on inside my head or what is happening outside of it.
timdiggerm · 3 months ago
A nontrivial plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Green Mars" (1993)
timdiggerm commented on The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction   science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/simonebrunozzi
pmontra · 3 months ago
TL;DR

> The temporal match between the ejecta layer and the onset of the extinctions and the agreement of ecological patterns in the fossil record with modeled environmental perturbations (for example, darkness and cooling) lead us to conclude that the Chicxulub impact triggered the mass extinction.

which is exactly what everybody believes. Was it still controversial in 2010, the publishing year of the paper?

timdiggerm · 3 months ago
There are still paleontologists [who?](I do not know; I'm sorry) who would like to substantially credit the Deccan Traps; this appears to be adding stronger analysis to the evidence that it really was the meteor impact.
timdiggerm commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts   fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
GardenLetter27 · 3 months ago
What environmental cost? The uranium is going to decay on its own anyway, we might as well use that energy for useful things.

Maybe LLMs will help lead to a breakthrough in nuclear fusion or battery research.

Degrowth is the philosophy of poverty, and a poverty of philosophy.

timdiggerm · 3 months ago
Degrowth and "Maybe this uses too much electricity" are not the same thing, particularly when a nontrivial portion of US generation is fossil-fuel based.

As for the breakthroughs, maybe they will, maybe they won't; it's not much of an argument.

timdiggerm commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts   fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
raddan · 3 months ago
I think what is going to happen is that junior devs will develop a strong reliance on AI tools to be able to do anything. I cynically think this was OpenAI’s aim when they made ChatGPT free for students.

I had a rather depressing experience this semester in my office hours with two students who had painted themselves in a corner with code that was clearly generated. They came to me for help, but were incapable of explaining why they had written what was on their screens. I decided to find where they had lost the thread of the class and discovered that they were essentially unable to write a helloworld program. In other words, they lost the thread on day one. Up until this point, both students had nearly perfect homework grades while failing every in-class quiz.

From one perspective I understand the business case for pushing these technologies. But from another perspective, the long term health of the profession, it’s pretty shortsighted. Who knows, in the end maybe this will kill off the group of students who enroll in CS courses “because mom and dad think it’s a good job,” and maybe that will leave me with the group that really wants to be there. In the meantime, I will remind students that there is a difference between programming and computer science and that you really need a strong grasp of the latter to be an effective coder. Especially if you use AI tools.

timdiggerm · 3 months ago
> I cynically think this was OpenAI’s aim when they made ChatGPT free for students

Is there any interpretation that makes sense _other_ than this?

timdiggerm commented on InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel   techcrunch.com/2025/05/12... · Posted by u/LorenDB
elif · 4 months ago
On second thought, while that makes it less practical for western construction, this material would be extremely suitable for Japanese framing methods.
timdiggerm · 4 months ago
Do they not use saws?
timdiggerm commented on LLMs get lost in multi-turn conversation   arxiv.org/abs/2505.06120... · Posted by u/simonpure
jsnider3 · 4 months ago
Seems easy. Have a set of vague requests and train it to ask for clarification instead of guessing.
timdiggerm · 4 months ago
How does it identify what's vague?
timdiggerm commented on US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired   theregister.com/2025/05/1... · Posted by u/croes
mattxxx · 4 months ago
Well, firing someone for this is super weird. It seems like an attempt to censor an interpretation of the law that:

1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law

My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against. When I look at the litany of derivative fantasy novels, it's obvious they're not all fully independent works.

Since AI is and will continue to be so useful and transformative, I think we just need to acknowledge that our laws did not accomodate this use-case, then we should change them.

timdiggerm · 4 months ago
Or we could acknowledge that something could be a bad idea, despite its utility
timdiggerm commented on Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies ‘produced in foreign lands’   theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/limbicsystem
Aeolun · 4 months ago
Look to Idiocracy for a documentary of what happens if this keeps going unchecked?
timdiggerm · 4 months ago
You may have missed that Idiocracy is a pro-eugenics film, in which the populace got stupider by way of being fecund. It's not about this problem, really.

u/timdiggerm

KarmaCake day753March 20, 2012View Original