However, many times getting a carrier unlocked phone carries a price premium.

That’s a good point. I’ve started advocating for buying phones lightly used (1-2 generations behind). Until just a couple of months ago, I was rocking a phone from 2019 with no issues. When I upgraded recently, I bought a Pixel 9 from a reseller selling one with an open box and a slight scuff on the bezel (that gets covered by a case anyway). Now I have an almost new phone that works like a dream for almost 75% of what I would get buying it directly from Google.

So, I typically buy fabric in person since I live near a couple really great independent fabric stores, but one of my friends who doesn’t live near any good stores says she uses https://fabricdepot.com/. I can’t personally say they’re any good, but she seems to like them! One of the places I will sometimes go has an online store here: https://www.voguefabricsstore.com/.

I’m actually starting to get to the point that I want to start drafting my own patterns to make some clothes that are inspired by some futuristic clothes that I really like.

Unironically, yes. It’s such a great, fun hobby. I got into it back in '20, and I have loved making things for myself and others. There’s no better feeling than finishing a garment, and it looks good. (There’s also no greater annoyance than having to use a seam ripper on something you just sewed…)

The message above looks like a mixture of someone trying to meet their enlistment quota through outreach and a certain well-intentioned blindness that comes from years of indoctrination to trust the system. I’d be hesitant to say this recruiter is personally trying to round up immigrants, although there is always a chance.

This was my read as well. That E-6 probably doesn’t care about immigration and the like; he just wants to dangle whatever carrot he can to get bodies.

It’s scummy, but it’s not meant to be as malicious as it comes off.

That being said! Intention doesn’t matter. This is a program that can be weaponized and it should be ridiculed as such.

100%.

Sounds perfect for some trust-busting action. If only we had a capable government…

This is the hard-hitting knowledge I’m here for!

Yep, I also have a directory for my programming projects on each of my machines, but mine is Programming. On my main desktop, I also have an ISOs folder to hold my OS ISOs for VMs and old CD-ROM game ISOs.

If God’s mind were a soup of linear algebra doing stupid number tricks, then sure (with the assumption we’re just talking about LLMs).

In reality, no.

Source: I study AI and work on it professionally.

I totally agree with this. Babylon 5 is by far my favorite show when it comes to plotting and structure. I wish more shows would be like B5 in having 22-episode seasons with an overall arc to the series but more-or-less self-contained episodes.

Everyone should have a strong base in STEM and the humanities. It irks me to no end when STEM majors can’t write, communicate, or understand a wider historical context just as it irks me when humanities majors claim to not understand basic algebra or scientific concepts. It’s fine to have a preference, but an expert engineer should have a passing familiarity with philosophy and ethics, just as a historian should have a passing familiarity with scientific laws and mathematics.

Then there’s business majors who have no familiarity with anything at all. If I had my druthers, “business school” wouldn’t even be an option at a university.

I think it also has to do with how closely someone is looking. AI images look amazing at a glance, but a deeper inspection shows the weird unnatural flaws. I figured that some percentage of older people just glance at the image and take the immediate reaction.

I agree, but this does sound cool for a one off–like Picard s3. Ultimately, though, I want new adventures with new characters exploring the vastness of the universe.

100% agreed. It should not be used as a replacement but rather as an augmentation to get the real benefits.

I study AI, and have developed plenty of software. LLMs are great for using unfamiliar libraries (with the docs open to validate), getting outlines of projects, and bouncing ideas for strategies. They aren’t detail oriented enough to write full applications or complicated scripts. In general, I like to think of an LLM as a junior developer to my senior developer. I will give it small, atomized tasks, and I’ll give its output a once over to check it with an eye to the details of implementation. It’s nice to get the boilerplate out of the way quickly.

Don’t get me wrong, LLMs are a huge advancement and unbelievably awesome for what they are. I think that they are one of the most important AI breakthroughs in the past five to ten years. But the AI hype train is misusing them, not understanding their capabilities and limitations, and casting their own wishes and desires onto a pile of linear algebra. Too often a tool (which is one of many) is being conflated with the one and only solution–a silver bullet–and it’s not.

This leads to my biggest fear for the AI field of Computer Science: reality won’t live up to the hype. When this inevitably happens, companies, CEOs, and normal people will sour on the entire field (which is already happening to some extent among workers). Even good uses of LLMs and other AI/ML use cases will be stopped and real academic research drying up.

this “cameras for everything!” idiocy.

That’s why I’m so impressed with how well it’s actually working. When they get off that really weird self-imposed restriction, it could be an interesting technology.

Not great performance at all.

That’s better than I was expecting to be perfectly honest.

I’m pretty impressed with the technology, but clearly it’s not ready for field use.

It’s also not all-or-none. Someone who otherwise is really interested in learning the material may just skate through using AI in a class that is uninteresting to them but required. Or someone might have life come up with a particularly strict instructor who doesn’t accept late work, and using AI is just a means to not fall behind.

The ones who are running everything through an LLM are stupid and ultimately shooting themselves in the foot. The others may just be taking a shortcut through some busy work or ensuring a life event doesn’t tank their grade.

Not gonna lie, I don’t really blame the AI.

I see both points. You’re totally right that for a company, it’s just the result that matters. However, to Bradley’s, since he’s specifically talking about art direction, the journey is important in so much as getting a passable result. I’ve only dabbled with 2D and 3D art, but converting to 3D requires an understanding of the geometries of things and how they look from different angles. Some things look cool from one angle and really bad from another. Doing the real work allows you to figure that out and abandon a design before too much work is put in or modify it so it works better.

When it comes to software, though, I’m kinda on the fence. I like to use AI for small bits of code and knocking out boilerplate so that I can focus on making the “real” part of the code good. I hope the real, creative, and hard parts of a project aren’t being LLM’d away, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a mandate from some MBA.

Zog yes? Zog no?