gerryflap

Water. And I like water, so no issue there. I don't regularly drink alcohol on a weekday, and any soda or other garbage is banned entirely from my house

I dislike it because it is usually used by the kind of people or media that live from buzzword to buzzword. IoT, Cloud, Big Data, Crypto, Web 3.0, AI, etc. I'm quite interested in deep learning and have done some research in the field as well. Personally, I don't think AI is necessarily a misnomer, the term has been used forever, even for simple stuff like a naive Bayes classifier, A*, or decision trees. It's just so unfortunate to see this insanely impressive technology being used as the newest marketing gimmick. Or used in unethical and irresponsible ways because of greed (looking at you, "Open"AI). A car doesn't need AI, a fridge doesn't need AI, most things don't need AI. And AI is certainly not at the level where it makes sense to yeet 30% of your employees either.

I don't hate AI or the awesome technology, I hate that it has become a buzzword and a tool for the lawless billionaires to do whatever they please.

Opera is also Chromium though, so that wouldn't really change anything

We can't even get them anymore in the Netherlands, unless you have bad health and are also eligible for flu shots or are old enough (50+ afaik). I recently checked because I'd rather take another shot than be ill for a week. It kinda sucks but I also do kinda get it. The vaccines were at some point like €30 a piece. Spending that amount plus the infrastructure for everyone isn't free either. So maybe it's just not worth the collective cost anymore, for young and healthy people.

We can't live our lives without yearly influenza waves (and other viruses) either. We had one window of opportunity to stop COVID, that was when it first appeared in China. The moment it got in more places, Pandora's box was open and would never be closed again. The COVID we have now and the one back then are wildly different. Since omicron the amount of deaths and even ICU usage has gone down a cliff while the number of infections has skyrocketed. Vaccines + omicron have lead us from the epidemic/pandemic into the endemic stage, where it's just become a part of life like the flu. Not awesome, still ruining life's, but far from the death machine it once was.

I've done a lot of stuff with generative models called GANs, like StyleGAN (2?) which I believe these pictures to be from. My main focus is the "hair bubble effect". This works best for people with longer hair, which is why I had 30% wrong in this test. Basically, by starting at images generated by these models for a long time, I started noticing that it is bad at creating the few loose hairs that stand out from the main pack. These plucks of hair often seem to go around some invisible "bubble" or weirdly flow together with the background. So my main point of focus is often the transition between hair and background, or just the hair in general, since that's where it's most likely to mess up. But the images picked here were also intentionally picked to be the most confusing according to the rest of the article, so it's not that weird that these are hard to classify. Some of the real ones looked extremely AI to me, and it was only after the first false positive that I got a lot more careful with labeling some as "AI" than I normally would.

Example, the strands of hair here (though admittedly the effect is not very convincing here):

This is probably a difference between countries, but personally I love it here in the Netherlands. I go to the store after work multiple times a week and I have yet to encounter a queue or problem that stalled me longer than 1-2 minutes. Usually I can just directly walk to a self-checkout machine, check out my stuff, pay by holding my debit card (or phone) against the payment terminal, and be on my way. I like it way more than the old way of doing things, because I now have time to properly pack my bag and I don't have to talk to anyone. It's also way more space efficient. There's even the option to take a scanner with you so you can scan while shopping, though I have yet to try that.

None of the traditiona streaming video ones. I have F1 TV and Spotify. Streaming video and movies are fun, but don't really match with how my brain works.

It's way easier to maintain focus on a a video game for me, since it allows me to determine the pace more and it provides constant interaction. If things go to slow, my brain tends to jump focus to the next most interesting thing and get distracted.

An issue I also have with story driven content is that I start feeling the emotions of the characters extremely hard. If something stressful or sad happens then I'll get very tense, stressed, or sad, which I don't enjoy too much. So instead of a relaxing activity it becomes a very stressful one for a lot of series.

If I really want to see something I tend to take a 1 month subscription and binge it all in that month.

If I was at any moment perfectly aware of every minute detail of every programming related topic, and could also apply it perfectly, I honestly think I'd get incredibly stressed and depressed. Stressed from all the billions of projects that I could improve, and would kinda feel the obligation to improve. And depressed because the whole reason I like programming is the learning part. Almost every project I start will end at the point where I learnt the most significant new stuff and it comes down to doing things that I know how to do. It'd ruin my primary hobby (and job) for me, which probably wouldn't result in me being very happy.

I'm very interested in machine learning, or AI as it's usually referred to in hyped-up content, and have also done research in the topic of generative AI. It hurts me so much that such interesting and useful technology has become another empty hype word. Nobody is waiting for this kind of gimmicky shit. It does nothing but hurt the public's view of this technology, similar to all the copyright issues and privacy concerns. Why must companies take things that can ultimately do something good in some cases and apply it to absolutely everything with no regards for the impact on their customers.

Most companies don't need "AI" and would be much better of spending those resources on actually improving their products. Useful places for generative AI would be something like Photoshop incorporating it, or a video game with better AI or more natural NPC conversations. Not some gimmicky AI assistant in a car, or some annoying AI chat window bothering you when visiting a news site. Soon people will be completely done with all this gimmicky "AI" bullshit and the useful applications will constantly have to deal with the stigma created by these greedy mindless corporations forcing "AI" on everyone in places where it adds nothing.

KeePass2Android also has those luckily

My PC is off, power is off as well. I never keep my PC running when I'm not using it. I'll power it down and turn off the power on the power brick. It's what I was taught when growing up, and in a time of SSDs I see little downside.