SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
11hr ago
the thumbnails, specifically, have become terrible even on god channels, I assume for SEO reasons.
This is because such thumbnails generate significantly more clicks even on quality channels. I blame mobile users who can only see a tiny thumbnail so anything "surprising" sticks out.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
That's fair, although I'll caveat that assuming university degrees are good designation of skill and that a skilled user with AI ends up "roughly the equivalent of a third year university student", that's still praising with faint damns.
The joke is of course that DSP is typically introduced in the third year (or at least was around here). Ie. Linus (widely regarded a brilliant programmer and with a masters degree in CS) managed roughly as well as a student after an introduction to DSP course. I don't think he actually used AI for the C code, or at least it wouldn't make any sense given how there's a dearth of good training material (*) and the programming part itself is incredibly easy for any competent C or C++ programmer who doesn't need particularly optimal code (as Linus outright mentions in the repo). The trick is knowing what DSP algorithms to use and how and why the textbook ones are flawed (or outright bad in many cases).
*: There's a site called musicdsp.org which is a somewhat prominent site with pseudo- and sourcecode snippets of all sorts of audio DSP algorithms. They are also almost all from subtly flawed to horribly bad and and a layman (ie. someone who hasn't studied DSP theory) will have a hard time understanding how and where. Thus it's quite ironically almost exactly what you'd get if someone time traveled into the early 2000s and established a site specifically dedicated to poisoning future AI training on that subtopic (with a fair bit of success, I'd say given how the alternatives are either bits here and there or actual books / papers with math instead of code that can be copy pasted). Way back in the day I went from "Hmm, this looks kinda nifty" to "OMG, everyone there is a goddamn moron" in the course of just one year when I started DSP studies.
University degree by itself is no guarantee (as I found out to my pain during a couple of group work sessions when I had to do everything myself when everybody else was so incompetent) but there are many hard science / engineering fields where more or less everyone competent has a degree in a closely related subject, a maths / physics degree with significant self study or are polymaths with near genius level intellect. So in practise a university degree is a requirement to be any good at them. Programming just happens to be a very notorious exception to that (case in point, I only took a handful of programming classes in university and have been making my living for the last 25 years mostly as a C++ programmer in either DSP or embedded systems).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
In Finland in the mid 90s.
Of course that was by far the most useless thing they ever taught in high school math here (and in fact one of the few useless things).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
Or as if the fact that a handful of related universities in one single country were based on an idea two hundred years ago somehow makes that idea The One True Fundamental Truth globally today.
The US used to have an order of magnitude larger presence there during the earlier decades of cold war. The old agreements are still in place and nobody would have complained if they'd have simply founded a bunch of new bases there.
But of course with Trump it's much more about The King getting what the king thinks he needs to feel kingly than it is about any actual usefulness.
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org
Assuming Torvalds hasn't been paid to advertise, that's a bit of a feather in the cap for AI codegen.
Don't read too much into Torvalds' endorsement. The vibe coded python visualizer he talks about is a small helper tool, not the actual project. It's pretty much equivalent to using vibe coding to write scripts and such (where I don't think anyone has disputed that LLMs can be useful).
As a domain expert in that subfield I find it amusing that for all his "programming guruness", the actual meat and potatoes of that project is a combination of what you'd have learnt on a masters level DSP course in the late 70s / early 80s (including the same mistakes students typically do) combined with imitating the state of the art 50 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eventide,_Inc#H910_Harmonizer) on much better hardware. Or to put it another way, when Torvalds is taken out of his comfort zone and field of expertise, he's roughly the equivalent of a third year university student. This is why I think anyone claiming universities are useless is full of shit. "Thinking really hard" (to paraphrase Yud) won't give you the necessary theoretical underpinnings that are required to even realize what you're missing, nevermind do something useful in a whole lot of fields.
Incidentally if someone wants to make an actually decently performing pitch shifter, you could do worse than start with this paper which has a rather good explanation of the basic method as well as some significant improvements to quality compared to most earlier publications that are easy to find and read (it'll still sound warbly on polyphonic input but good sounding realtime polyphonic pitch shifting has to this date been accomplished by only three manufacturers that I know of).
I was around 80 kg at the end of high school. A couple of friends in university absolutely refused to believe I didn't lift regularly (nevermind I hadn't seen the inside of a gym since that one time in civilian service). That's genetics for you (which also made it a huge pain in the ass to find jackets and shirts that would fit me at the shoulders without being massive tents when I was in better shape than now).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
Possibly the first although Minnesota is significantly more south than Finland. Helsinki is roughly at the same latitude as Anchorage (winters here are truly miserable when there isn't snow) while Minneapolis is about as north as Milan, Italy.
The second isn't the case in Finland as the diagnoses were made while the children were small kids due to developmental delays, problems with language acquisition and such (iow not just "a bit of a loner").
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
Children and other learning difficulty havers, and the rate at which the parents would be dual high-flyer doctors, surgeons, academics, engineers or whatever and then the child just gets too much of the secret sauce... It happens.
An interesting aside is that there are other significant risk factors that have nothing to do with parents on the spectrum. Specifically, lack of vitamin D during development seems to increase the risk manyfold as observed in children of immigrants with much darker skin tone who moved to Finland: https://www.laakarilehti.fi/tieteessa/alkuperaistutkimukset/maahanmuuttajien-lapsilla-on-suomessa-paljon-vaikeita-autismikirjon-hairioita/ (article in Finnish, feed it to google translate or something).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
Chocolate is just another example of humans being in some ways insanely tolerating of dangerous substances and damage compared to most animals. We just don't think of ourselves that way because of the specific exception of food poisoning which has a lot to do with differences in digestive tract and us not noticing as easily when animals also get the shits & parasites.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
Heh, this reminds me of the time I realized I was no longer the scrawny kid I was in school and college.
Am I the only one who never thought of themselves as scrawny and always found the pencil-neck geek stereotype baffling?
Not that I was fat or buff as a teen but my clothes size made it pretty clear "scrawny" or "thin" really didn't apply.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
One thing that stands out to me though is how compositionally simple those examples are. They seem to all consist of one character in the foreground and then some kind of dramatic stylistic background.
This is why I consider 99% of examples of any new AI image generator basically useless since they're only exhibiting the ultra-easy mode of one or two clear concepts where the layout, position, exact pose and such are irrelevant.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
Meanwhile Pixiv embraced AI and is basically a unifans export vehicle.
Likewise many stock photo sites are now so full of AI slop that they're becoming useless unless they have a search feature to only search pre-2022 era photos. Otherwise the results are full of the same generic third rate obviously AI photos.
Swedes are all gay anyway so why would you ever believe what they say? And for Danes that's of course a moot point because it's not like you can understand them in the first place with their potato-in-mouth speech impediment.
The thing about internet and this site is that it's international (as my flair says I'm in Finland while @self_made_human is an Indian living in Britain) which means the norms differ between countries. Where I live "shorts and t-shirt" is normal summer attire when it's hot and "band t-shirt" is simply what a lot of guys would wear in the late 90s and 2000s. Hell, I've had most of my bosses dress occasionally in shorts and t-shirt on hot summer days because why wouldn't you when it's hot outside and you work in an engineering department where nobody cares about it?
Which is to say that there is nothing "performative" about shorts and band t-shirt around here. Frankly the vast majority of engineers just don't care about signaling in the first place and who would you even be signaling to when the only people who see you in the office are your coworkers who also don't care. You dress in shorts and band t-shirt because it's convenient and that's how you'd dress if you eg. went out for drinks with mates on such day, not to "stick it to the man" or to flaunt anything.
Sure, it'd be different if you dressed in some tight gym shorts (that you wouldn't use elsewhere outside gym / sports either), "programming socks" or similar ridiculous things that are actually outside the social norms in public - which is why people don't do it here either (barring perhaps some rare socially maladjusted exceptions).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
The problem with intelligence is that it makes you retarded.
No. Being deep enough on the autism spectrum makes you retarded about some things. People keep (often intentionally) conflating that with intelligence.
Scott is much more an example of someone on the autism spectrum than he is an example of the modal intelligent person.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
Die Hard meets Hobo With A Shotgun with a bit of From Dusk Till Dawn thrown in.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
I mean, can you even be considered true aristocracy if you weren't around in the /r/SlateStarCodex culture war thread days?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
How would you check if a 17 year old pre-med student will make for a good neurosurgeon if he won't do any neurosurgery for another 10 years?
It helps to throw away the entire concept of pre-med and just have entrance exams to study medicine in university that test both relevant biology knowledge (to be self studied from common reference book(s)) and requisite math and physics ability. It's not perfect but it's better than just sailing in with high IQ score or using some utterly bullshit proxy like freeform essay or having the right after school activities.
Incidentally the same also works for engineering: Entrance exam that tests (highschool plus level) math and physics which, not surprisingly, are exactly what's required to manage almost all engineering studies. Too bad they fucked up that tried and true system in favor of very noisy high school matriculation exam scores here some years ago :(
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
I worked for a FAANG-adjacent company
Yeah, that's very different from just a "programming company". California woke tech-adjacent culture is its whole own microcosm which cannot be generalized to the entire programming profession, particularly in international conversations (what with self_made_human being an Indian in Scotland). To put it slightly less charitably, the vast majority of programming profession isn't filled with cliche autist weirdos to even remotely the same extent as that particular subculture of it is.
However, I still think it's clear that genuine eccentricity is better tolerated in programming circles. Fursuits, blahajs and programming socks are more prevalent in programming circles.
I don't think any of those would be tolerated in any of the workplaces I've ever been involved with. Sure, worn jeans and an old metal band t-shirt don't even get a second look - that was practically a uniform some 10-15 years ago. Same with combat boots and camo pants. Business as usual.
But straight up "WTF is this shit, that guy is weirding everyone out, what is his issue?"-eccentricity? No. The boss would have a Talk with them.
The SBF types are gaming a second-order effect (convincing investors and managers that they're geniuses), but the underlying infrastructure still requires first-order competence (actually building the thing).
SBF types are basically reverse signaling the same thing the same way that overpaid hype consultanst in fancy suits are signaling to the upper management. Both are trying to use looks and behavior to convince someone who isn't technically competent that "Trust us bro, we're so good that we'll totally deliver you massive benefits".
aristocratic standards are more gameable by the wealthy precisely because they're so trainable. If you have money, you can buy the suit, hire the etiquette coach, send your kid to the right boarding school.
I've gotten the impression from some older comments here that such gameability was almost the point. That by having the money and acting like you were old money, in a generation or two you'd be considered if not actual aristocracy, at least upper class.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
Today, it reflects precisely the opposite, tech-bros compete over who can performatively display their slobbery and betrayal of social norms as evidence of their talent.
In what alternate reality besides truly tiny niche examples?
I've been in the programming workforce for close to 30 years and I have never seen actual slobbery nor any betrayal of social norms there. Peoples clothes (including my own) have ranged from shorts and band t-shirt to straight pants and a fancy collared shirts and I've even seen one or two guys wearing a suit (due to intentional personal style). That is to say, people have dressed exactly as other men of similar age in non-public facing (*) office jobs that don't have status games attached to looks.
The only actual flaunting would be to dress in a business suit with a tie (unless you work in the financial sector) because you'd then be essentially signaling that you're trying to hide your lack of technical substance by over dressing .
*: The one time I ended up presenting a product at an industry trade fair my attire was black jeans, black dress shirt and black leather jacket which was chosen because it was my normal style at the time and also happened to blend in perfectly with the other industry people.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
With advanced math even the latest models will still hallucinate on me when they're just asked to immediately spew output tokens
The other day I needed the equation for the voltages of two capacitors over time when charged initially to different voltages and connected via a resistor. That's simplest possible system of two differential equations, first term of the first year university level math. IOW it's the very opposite of "advanced math".
I wrote down the equations and asked ChatGPT to solve for V1(t) and V2(t). It spent a long time thinking and gave a confident answer with a bunch of "I can also give ..." extras. Too bad it was wrong. I changed the variable names to make it look closer to a basic textbook problem and after a bunch more thinking it gave a different wrong answer. Finally I simplified the problem so much that it became useless (fixed initial values to 1 and 0 respectively) to make it even more textbooky and I finally got a correct answer. Too bad it was useless. Finally I just ended up googling how to present such systems to Matlab symbolic math toolbox and got the answer I actually needed in the first place.
It's too bad it's been already 15 years since the 80s ended and music died.
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