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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. I think speed and accuracy of reading is also pretty low (I read like 80 wpm and 80% accuracy somewhere, but i couldn’t immediately find a good source for that).

    If you’re on a text forum like this you’re probably well above the average person, and your experiences are not universal.

    That said, I don’t have any data on hand about readability so you could be right. I’m sure people have studied it.






  • I had a job that paid stupid well. I’d give some money to almost anyone who asked on the street. They need it. I have plenty. I’m not going to notice the $1 or $5 or even $20 that I gave away. I make more than that in interest every day.

    Rarely, I’ll talk with them a little. Ask their name or their story. There’s a regular around me that seems delighted that I remember his name.

    Sometimes someone will seem unsafe, but most people are alright. It helps that I’m a bearded man, so certain classes of danger and harassment are rarely pointed at me.

    I got laid off in February. I still give to people who ask, but I carry less cash so sometimes I don’t have anything to give.

    When I’d be out with coworkers, before we all got laid off, none of them would give anything to people asking. I know they made as much or more than I did. I don’t judge people for not giving cash out when they’re in debt or struggling to pay rent, but I do judge my coworker for like wearing a high five figure watch and never helping the poor.










  • It is absolutely stupid, stupid to the tune of “you shouldn’t be a decision maker”, to think an LLM is a better use for “getting a quick intro to an unfamiliar topic” than reading an actual intro on an unfamiliar topic. For most topics, wikipedia is right there, complete with sources. For obscure things, an LLM is just going to lie to you.

    As for “looking up facts when you have trouble remembering it”, using the lie machine is a terrible idea. It’s going to say something plausible, and you tautologically are not in a position to verify it. And, as above, you’d be better off finding a reputable source. If I type in “how do i strip whitespace in python?” an LLM could very well say “it’s your_string.strip()”. That’s wrong. Just send me to the fucking official docs.

    There are probably edge or special cases, but for general search on the web? LLMs are worse than search.