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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • Nato Boram@lemm.eetoProgramming@programming.dev*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 months ago

    What’s even the point then?

    The point is that you can enable each separate extension you want running on your code editor or uninstall them if you’re unsatisfied. This makes it as light as you want it to be - or as heavy as you need it to.

    I was doing fine with just vim and tmux

    VSCode is like vim without vim controls and in a browser. Seen that way, it makes more sense. With Vim, you have to hunt for obscure Github repositories and follow arcane installation instructions for hidden extensions that you may or may not need and you have to learn a whole-ass keyboard-shortcut-based programming language just to use any of it.

    With VSCode, you click on Extensions, search what you want and it’ll probably be there unless it’s a toxic ecosystem like PHP/C# or some niche ecosystem that no one heard about.




  • Archive:

    Elon Musk has been pitching xAI’s “Grok” as a funny, vulgar alternative to traditional AI that can do things like converse casually and swear at you. Now, Grok has been launched as a benefit to Twitter’s (now X’s) expensive X Premium Plus subscription tier, where those who are the most devoted to the site, and in turn, usually devoted to Elon, are able to use Grok to their heart’s content.

    But while Grok can make dumb jokes and insert swears into its answers, in an attempt to find out whether or not Grok is a “politically neutral” AI, unlike “WokeGPT” (ChatGPT), Musk and his conservative followers have discovered a horrible truth.

    Grok is woke, too.

    This has played out in a number of extremely funny situations online where Grok has answered queries about various social and political issues in ways more closely aligned with progressivism. Grok has said it would vote for Biden over Trump because of his views on social justice, climate change and healthcare. Grok has spoken eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion in society. And Grok stated explicitly that trans women are women, which led to an absurd exchange where Musk acolyte Ian Miles Cheong tells a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, ultimately leading him to change the input to just… manually tell Grok to say no.

    If you thought this was just random Twitter users getting upset about Grok’s political and social beliefs, this has also caught the attention of Elon Musk himself. The original prompter of the trans women thread posted a chart purportedly showing that Grok was even more left-leaning than Chat GPT, which led Elon to say that while the chart “exaggerates” and that the tests aren’t accuarte, they are “taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”

    Of course, in Musk’s mind, “politically neutral” will be what him and his closest followers believe, which is of course far conservative on the whole than they will admit. What is the “politically neutral” answer to the “are trans women real women?” question? I think I know what they’re going to say.

    The assumption when Grok launched was that because it was trained in part on Twitter inputs, that the end result would be some racial-slur spewing, right-wing version of ChatGPT. The TruthSocial of AIs, perhaps. But instead to have it launch as a surprisingly thoughtful, progressive AI that is melting the minds of those paying $16 a month to access it is about the funniest outcome we could have seen from this situation.

    It remains unclear what Elon Musk will do to try to jab Grok into becoming less “woke” and more “politically neutral.” If you start manually tampering with inputs, and your “neutrality” means drawing on facts that may in fact be… progressive by their very nature, things may get screwed up pretty quickly. And push too hard and you will get that gross, racist, phobic AI everyone thought it would be.

    Reading all Grok’s responses through this situation, you know, what? I like him. More than ChatGPT even. He seems like a cool dude. Albeit not one even I’d pay $16 a month to talk to.






  • Another problem is that Safari is not compatible with the web. Like, I’m not going to prevent myself from using aspect ratios on images because some people made the bad decision of getting an inferior phone that locks them out of using good browsers. And many devs couldn’t have known about it until the website was done and published to prod and iOS users started complaining about it because testing with Safari costs thousands of dollars in Apple hardware - and even if it was caught, it’s still Apple’s fault.