SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
No bio...
User ID: 225
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3mo ago
Are people able to suppress the appearance of spren related to an emotion they’re currently feeling but would like to conceal?
To some extent. This does get explored in the series (for example, a character going undercover who has to try to not draw fearspren). It seems to be that the main thing is how strongly you feel the emotion, so not drawing spren is a matter of trying to keep your emotions calm. I would say the books don't get as deep as you might like, but they do give some consideration to how the existence of emotionspren affect the world.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3mo ago
That is not quite true. if I tell you to read the wheel of time up to book six (if we are generous) and then jump directly to the gathering storm will I be giving bad advice?
Yes, because the entire series is great. Books nine and ten are some of the best material in the series in fact.
Fourth was total slog to read - you could remove 3/4ths of the book and improve it.
No way man. The fourth book was one of the best in the series. The Navani scenes alone made that book riveting and well worth reading, let alone the other good stuff on top of that.
And the fifth was both weird and the big secrets revealed and payoffs of mysteries were ... meh at best. And let's not start at the ending. The fifth was cringe in everything but the adolin parts. And even there was substantially weaker than similarly themed Coltaine's chain of dogs.
The fifth book has issues (I've touched on them before), but it still was decent. If Sanderson keeps putting out books that have the same issues as the fifth has, then I'll be more concerned. But for right now it's one single aberration in a series which has otherwise been uniformly excellent.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3mo ago
Based on what you say, I'll probably get to Grave Peril sooner than I otherwise planned, thanks.
I agree with @Muninn that the first two books are just OK. Book 3, for me, is where the series really grabbed me as something special. And from there on out he keeps that high level of quality pretty consistently.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3mo ago
I disagree. Like I said, I thought book 4 was excellent (I would say it's my second favorite behind Words of Radiance). Which is why I'm saying there isn't really agreement on this point, so it would be more accurate to advise new readers "I don't really care for the books after this point, but many people still like them, so you may or may not find it enjoyable".
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3mo ago
I think this is bad advice. First, because that is not generally agreed upon (the fourth book is excellent in my view), but second because if you read three doorstopper fantasy novels you're not going to stop there. Pretty much anyone who enjoys them enough to get that far is going to keep going to see how they like the books they were advised against. Third, it would be extremely frustrating to get only 30% of a story. Better to not read the books at all if they really do go downhill to such an extent.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3mo ago
Strongly disagree. Going that fast compared to traffic is way more dangerous than going normal speed (which is anywhere with 5mph of the speed limit in my experience).
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3mo ago
The only time I have a problem with it is when someone does that in a parking garage. It takes some finagling to back in, and while you do that there tends to be a whole line of cars waiting behind you. I think that's pretty rude and people should just pull in normally in those situations. Otherwise, whatever.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
3mo ago
Oh yes it is, when a lot of those people will be doing 65 or less. Nobody has any business going 15 mph over the speed limit.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
- Yes
- Yes, although at a stop sign it's acceptable to not fully stop only if visibility is good and there's nobody else. It's still illegal though and don't complain if you get a ticket from a well hidden police officer.
- Largely followed but doesn't have to be to the letter. 5 mph over is fine, 10 is iffy, 15+ you shouldn't be on the road.
- Yes the left lane is for passing only, no it's not ok if someone cuts you off and rides your bumper. I have no idea why you tied these two together because they are very different.
- Absolutely not. Better to miss an exit or get forced into the wrong exit than to do shit liable to cause accidents. Again if someone does this they shouldn't be allowed to drive.
- No
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
Nobody says you have to make a flowery effortpost. There are plenty of topics that get posted where someone has two or three sentences saying what they think about the topic. That's all you need.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
Bit of both. The car she had when we got married died because she was never changing the oil, and that caused the engine to seize. Was quite a shock to me that she was never changing the oil, but I guess I should've asked at some point rather than assume. The car we got to replace that was totaled by the insurance company after a hailstorm, after only two years of us having the thing.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
I have had two whole cars. A 1997 Dodge Intrepid, which I owned from 2003-2011, and a 2001 Ford Mustang, which I got in 2011 and have to this day. To be honest I would like to have a new car (or even a decent used car), but my wife's cars keep dying and so we keep having to put our car money into her vehicle.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
I think you might be confused as to the purpose of a discussion board.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
As you can see from my flair I'm Christian.
Off topic but... why would one take that away from you flair? I suspect that very few people here can read Greek, so most probably have no idea what it means. I definitely don't, anyways.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
She's probably right but damn if that isn't the most autistic thing ever. It is not new that people will treat anything short of maximal condemnation of child porn as being pro-child abuse. I don't think that it should be that way, because it's better for said abused children if we can rationally discuss ways to better disincentivize what's happening to them. But for better or for worse that's how people are, they can handle zero rational discussion on this topic and I would say she should've known that.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
Sorry, I genuinely can't understand what your point is. I'm guessing because I don't work in finance so I'm missing a reference. Can you please clarify?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
I have to say I find it hard to understand why you care so much. Even if she does smell bad (which neither of us can know one way or the other, as we will never see her in person), what's it to you (as you will never experience the bad smell)? If her hygiene practices don't inflict any actual cost upon you, I don't see why it matters one way or the other to you.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
Walmart Labs, for data science and engineering, is as prestigious and as lucrative as a FAANG job currently.
Lucrative perhaps, but I dispute the claim about prestige. I've never even heard of Walmart Labs, whereas everyone in the industry knows of the FAANG companies and the high status that comes from working for one.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
IMO the best way to keep Discord pleasant is to not join public servers. It works best for small groups of people who know each other, like an MMO guild or similar groups of friends. I've joined large public servers before and they are kind of miserable.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
If you are decently competent programmer working in an industry where things like accuracy, precision, and security are core concerns, LLMs start to look anti-productive as in the time you spent messing around with prompts, checking the LLM's work, and correcting it's errors, you could've easily done the work yourself.
I think this fairly nicely summarizes how I feel. Not that I do work in one of those industries to be fair, but it's part of my personal work ethic I guess you might say. I want computers (and programs) to be correct first and foremost. Speed or ease of development don't mean much to me if the result can't be relied upon. Not only that, I want my tools to be correct first and foremost. I wouldn't accept a hammer where the head randomly fell off the handle 10% of the time or even 1% of the time. So I similarly have very little patience for an LLM which is inherently going to make mistakes in non-deterministic ways.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
I have not tried that, but it also seems like kind of a failure of the tool if I have to, you know? The whole point of a tool that can understand natural language is that you can just talk to it normally. If one has to figure out how to word the incantations just right to get a useful result... I'm not sure how that's better than just figuring out the code myself at that point.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
Thanks. And for my part I'm sorry that I blew you off unjustly; I really thought I had explained myself in detail but I was wrong.
And yeah, the tech might improve. I imagine you can see why I'm skeptical of the strong predictions that it'll do so (given that I don't agree it's as good as people say it is today), but I try to keep an open mind. It is possible, so we'll see.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
Oh for heaven's sake, dude. When did I ever say I consider myself better than anyone else, that I would deserve such a litany of sarcasm directed at me? I don't think that and certainly haven't said it. I am just an ordinary programmer - I doubt very much that I'm better at programming than anyone here except the non-programmers, and I'm sure I'm worse than more than a few. Not only did I say "hey I'm not trying to litigate this right now" and that got ignored, now I get people dogpiling me saying I'm a troll or think I'm better than everyone else or whatever.
But fine, since you and @SnapDragon are insistent on pressing me on the topic (and since I apparently didn't say to him what my experience was, my bad on that, but I know I have posted this in a previous thread before), I will reiterate the things that I personally have seen LLMs fall flat on their face with. This is of course in addition to the various embarrassments that are public, like Microsoft's ill-conceived attempt to let Copilot loose on PRs.
- Tried to get ChatGPT to help me generate a fluentd config file that would process logs in a way I needed to do for work. It gave me a config file that not only didn't do the thing, it didn't conform to the schema and caused the software to crash
- Tried to get it to help me order CloudFormation resource delete-and-recreate in a different way than the default order. It first gave me options that didn't even exist, then it gave me options that did exist but didn't do what I asked for. I had a similar issue with the AWS-trained model they provide, which also suggested options that don't do what I asked for (and are documented as such).
- A coworker used ChatGPT (a custom one trained on our API docs) to generate a script to run against our API. Again it hallucinated methods that simply do not exist.
These were all within the last year, though I couldn't tell you exactly when or what model or anything. And I've been honest that sometimes it has done good work for me, namely in generating short snippets of code in a language (or using an API) that I know well enough to recognize as correct when I see it, but not well enough to produce without laborious reading of docs. I've never claimed that LLMs work 0% of the time (if people have taken that away, I've done a poor job communicating), but the failure rate is much too high for them to be considered viable tools in my book. Most frustratingly, the things that I actually need help on, the ones where I don't know really anything about the topic and a workable AI assistant would actually save me a ton of time, are precisely the cases where it fails hard (as in my examples where stuff doesn't even work at all).
So those are again my experiences with LLMs that have caused me to conclude that they are hype without substance. Disagree if you like, I don't mind if you find it useful and like I have tried to say I'm not actually trying to convince people of my views on this topic any more. Like I tried to say earlier, the only reason I posted in this thread was to push back on the idea that one simply must be ignorant if they don't think LLMs are good at coding (and other things). That idea is neither true, necessary, or kind (as the rules allude to) and I felt that it deserved some sort of rebuttal. Though heaven knows I wish I had just left it alone and had peace and quiet rather than multiple people jumping down my throat.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4mo ago
Right, and I gave it then. Which is why I am not going to bother doing it this time. Like I said, nothing has changed.
Yes! I will grant you that the Perrin chapters are a slog (as they are through that whole region of the series), but the Mat/Tuon chapters are peak Wheel of Time. Honestly one of my favorite parts of the series because of that.
More options
Context Copy link