Probably a mix of trolls and people too stupid to realize they’re being trolled. Like flat-earthers (although I think some flat-earthers are just people hoping for some rich dude to give them a free ride to space to “prove them wrong”)

Yeah, I’m in SF Bay Area. Not many other places in the US I’d move to and the other ones I checked have similar prices.

The market over here is ridiculous. For $1m I got a 3 bedroom townhome with not much of a backyard and $470/mo HOA. It’s about an hour to the city (not during rush hour). Anything cheaper than that is either in a bad school district or about to collapse. I used to live next to a mobile home park and I just checked now - those sell for over 330k.

Prices here have been going up since 2020. There was a dip at the end of 2022, but already almost back to highest 2022 prices.

In my area I saw a house that was selling as a fixer-upper, needed a lot of work, the bank wouldn’t even approve mortgage for it. It was listed for $800k and it eventually sold for an all-cash offer of $1.26m. They flipped it and sold for $1.87m in less than a year.

Out of curiosity, are those numbers real somewhere in the US, or just a random example? Because houses went for $1m+ in my area 2 years ago and the market has been constantly going up since then.

I use it both ways. As a software engineer I use it for various packages, which don’t even need a releases page. But also as an end-user of open source software, I use it to download pre-built binaries of said software. Idk if you know, but there’s a lot of open-source software out there. And github is the most popular platform for hosting it. And when I say software, I mean the kind where you don’t expect your users to know how to build it from code themselves.

Why would your company use that? Did they use github for public applications targeted to non-techincal users? Because that’s what that page is for and what a huge chunk of Github users do.

So when you just needed software to run on your machinr, you built it yourself. But first read every single line of code to ensure that it’s safe. Did I get that right?

Because if you don’t trust the developer to provide safe binaries then you wouldn’t trust the same developer to provide safe code either.

If you use it as a developer you don’t care about the releases page. You want to see the code and for latest version you just need the git tags. But I’ve also used it for stuff I just needed to run on my machine as an end-user. And for those you turn to the Releases page. That’s where pre-built binaries go.

But it also depends on the target audience. Some projects, even if meant more as software to run than code to import, still target mainly developers or tech users in general and will not have more than just instructions on how to build them. Others, say a Minecraft launcher, or some console emulator, will target a wider audience and provide a good Releases page with binaries for multiple platforms.

Christians literally go door to door trying to covert people.

That’s the problematic statement. You use the word “Christians” to refer to certain American denominations that represent a small fraction of Christians globally. The funny thing is, those denominations were seen by most people in my native country (about 90% Christian population when I was growing up) as heretic sects that should be avoided. I believe that was (and probably still is) the case for most Orthodox or Catholic Christians (who are the vast majority of Christians outside of the US).

Deep learning did not shift any paradigm. It’s just more advanced programming. But gen AI is not intelligence. It’s just really well trained ML. ChatGPT can generate text that looks true and relevant. And that’s its goal. It doesn’t have to be true or relevant, it just has to look convincing. And it does. But there’s no form of intelligence at play there. It’s just advanced ML models taking an input and guessing the most likely output.

Here’s another interesting article about this debate: https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines

What we have today does not exhibit even the faintest signs of actual intelligence. Gen AI models don’t actually understand the output they are providing, that’s why they so often produce self-contradictory results. And the algorithms will continue to be fine-tuned to produce fewer such mistakes, but that won’t change the core of what gen AI really is. You can’t teach ChatGPT how to play chess or a new language or music. The same model can be trained to do one of those tasks instead of chatting, but that’s not how intelligence works.

Any type of content generated by AI should be reviewed and polished by a professional. If you’re putting raw AI output out there directly then you don’t care enough about the quality of your product.

For example, there are tons of nonsensical articles on the internet that were obviously generated by AI and their sole purpose is to crowd search results and generate traffic. The content writers those replaced were paid $1/article or less (I work in the freelancing business and I know these types of jobs). Not people with any actual training in content writing.

But besides the tons of prompt crafting and other similar AI support jobs now flooding the market, there’s also huge investment in hiring highly skilled engineers to launch various AI related product while the hype is high.

So overall a ton of badly paid jobs were lost and a lot of better paid jobs were created.

The worst part will be when the hype dies and the new trend comes along. Entire AI teams will be laid off to make room for others.

See the sources above and many more. We don’t need one or two breakthroughs, we need a complete paradigm shift. We don’t even know where to start with for AGI. There’s a bunch of research, but nothing really came out of it yet. Weak AI has made impressive bounds in the past few years, but the only connection between weak and strong AI is the name. Weak AI will not become strong AI as it continues to evolve. The two are completely separate avenues of research. Weak AI is still advanced algorithms. You can’t get AGI with just code. We’ll need a completely new type of hardware for it.

https://www.lifewire.com/strong-ai-vs-weak-ai-7508012

Strong AI, also called artificial general intelligence (AGI), possesses the full range of human capabilities, including talking, reasoning, and emoting. So far, strong AI examples exist in sci-fi movies

Weak AI is easily identified by its limitations, but strong AI remains theoretical since it should have few (if any) limitations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence

As of 2023, complete forms of AGI remain speculative.

Boucher, Philip (March 2019). How artificial intelligence works

Today’s AI is powerful and useful, but remains far from speculated AGI or ASI.

https://www.itu.int/en/journal/001/Documents/itu2018-9.pdf

AGI represents a level of power that remains firmly in the realm of speculative fiction as on date

All progress comes with old jobs becoming obsolete and new jobs being created. It’s just natural.

But AI is not going to replace any skilled professionals soon. It’s a great tool to add to professionals’ arsenal, but non-professionals who use it to completely replace hiring a professional will get what they pay for (and those people would have never actually paid for a skilled professional in the first place; they’d have hired the cheapest outsourced wannabe they could find; after first trying to convince a professional that exposure is worth more than money)

That would be a danger if real AI existed. We are very far away from that and what is being called “AI” today (which is advanced ML) is not the path to actual AI. So don’t worry, we’re not heading for the singularity.

I kept scrolling for this comment. Writing in assembly means you can only write for one specific instruction set. The innovation of programming languages was not just making things easier to write, it was the compiling step which could take the same code and produce machine code output for different systems, making it much easier to support multiple platforms.

I’m not even sure thinness was something consumers ever would have demanded

Something popular back in the removable battery days was to replace them with thicker extended capacity batteries. So no, battery life was more important to a lot of comsumers.

That’s why you see units like “US cup” instead of just “cup” when doing conversions in a lot of places.

You’re saying the same thing I am. Racists usually consider their race superior and all the others inferior. And in that case the solution in the comic would just add another inferior race to the list of inferior races.

It’s not like racists are racist against a single race and if you give them a new race to be racist against they’ll stop being racist against the first one.