I was off the app for over a year because of the API change. Decided to make a new account and lurked for a while before there was a comment I really wanted to reply to. I wrote out the perfect reply and my phone locked when I looked away for a few seconds. I unlocked the phone and my comment was gone. I went looking in the help menu to see if there was a place to suggest features like auto-save. Nothing. So, I made a new subreddit for reddit feature suggestions and spent like an hour writing a post explaining my experience. I hit post and the app went back to home. My post was gone.

Since then, I’ve made about a dozen comments in various places. On my old account, I would get dozens or hundreds of upvotes per comment, so it’s surprising that regardless of what I say or where, my new account has only 1 upvote on each comment. Almost like my account isn’t being seen. Is this what we lost the good reddit apps for?

I’m not one of the people who downvoted you. I like your passion. But maybe this is one of those things we can deal with after we’ve got a handle on climate change.

Yeah, it’s specifically the not talking to a kid version that bothers me.

I pick up a subtext of self-importance and I think that’s what I find irksome. A mom is a parent. A momma is a special parent who will do anything for their baby, you’d better watch out. A kid is a child. A kiddo is a specific child who has a close bond with their momma or teacher that you wouldn’t understand. That’s the vibe I get.

Similarly, not a fan of when teachers and parents talk about their “kiddos.”

Feels like they’re needlessly using a more playful childish term to make themselves part of a separate “in group” who “gets it.”

I choose to take your questions as rhetorical, as I think our points do align. I quite agree.

My feelings are mixed. Everything you are saying is true. LLMs, right now at least, are a huge waste of resources. It’s triggering us to move closer to fossil fuels when we should be moving away. Every time I step outside to a nice balmy day, I think, am I going to miss this in a few years’ time? In a few decades, am I going to envy my current self who can do dishes without worrying too much about how much water goes down the drain? Are the generations to come going to look at my occasional can of tuna with contempt and jealousy? Or will they even have the luxury of retrospection?

I understand what we have to lose and how little we are doing about it. But I have also grown up being subjugated inside a capitalist hellscape. And I’ve spent the past few days having ChatGPT help me set up a CI/CD pipeline and start coding some games I’ve wanted to make for years. It’s allowed me to take a few hours of free time and make progress that I expected would have taken a week. It doesn’t have that effect on every task, but when learning new software, it really feels like having someone knowledgeable sitting next to me to answer my questions and point me in the right direction.

GPT 3 was kind of a neat party trick - sounds kind of like a person, but a pretty dumb person. GPT 4 sounded smarter, but still couldn’t code for shit. The o1 model still makes mistakes, but it retains the thread of our conversation weeks after the fact and has put together some code that I would have struggled to do myself. Even if it loses more money than it makes right now, I can see the value in progressing development until we achieve AGI.

People have expressed hopes that AGI will solve a lot of the world’s problems. That it will know just what to do about climate change. That it will crack codes in our DNA and give us endless healthy life. I am doubtful that these dreams will come to fruition. At least not in the way people think. It might have the intelligence to tell us things that we should have already known. Like that we can’t get much better yields in scrubbing carbon from the air than nature itself and we should have reforested far more land than we currently are. And that immortality will take huge amounts of resources and will come at the expense of the health of the masses. More gain for the rich. More suffering for the poor. Business as usual.

But I think there is a window of time where we can be hopeful about what AI has to offer. And we may even be able to leverage it to solve a big piece of the income inequality puzzle.

If we make a social media app that is not designed for profit but instead for the good of the people, there are a lot of problems such an app could solve.

We could design it to seek out real (non-bot) contributors. It will always be an arms race trying to sort real humans from bots but that is no reason to give up. It is a reason to get as far ahead in the race as we possibly can. We should build an app that both recognizes when someone is very likely to be real and when they have also contributed to a cause.

Imagine an application that tracks creative innovation, such as the creation of a funny video or a new meme format. When someone makes an idea and it is popular, the AI model would determine how much of a given experience is improved by their idea and give them profit residuals based on their contribution. And the more ideas that get built on top of the original idea, the more the newer contributors are rewarded for their contributions.

Think about if people could design a farm from the ground up using a socialized app for collaboration. Someone could design a camera system to keep track of livestock wellbeing and to head off diseases. They could make AI-empowered systems to track livestock happiness and find ways of increasing quality of life. And creating more humane automated methods of turning crops and livestock into food ready to transport. Some people would focus on creating ideal distribution methods. Others would create stores or restaurants. Others might work on the people themselves, encouraging them to give new more climate friendly meal options a try. Investors would be paid their dues, but there would be no CEO or board of executives. The means of production would belong to the people.

When people talk about the potential of AI, that’s what I envision. If I can make some passive income with my games and apps, that’s the next project I’ll be diverting my time towards. Because this is a narrow window we have to make this happen. The technology is here, but barriers from climate change and income inequality are only going up. We can lament the fact that AI is currently not profitable and hurting the planet, or we can put more of that energy to use by taking the tools humanity has made and using them to dismantle the systems which made this timeline so intolerable to begin with. The only way to take the current system apart is to make a new one that outcompetes our old ways of life in every measurable way.

Twice as many blank reams of paper in his healthcare plan.

Hey, that’s longer than I can run.

I had this alarm clock, meaning this series of sounds will be baked into my brain until the day I die.

It’s got your number.

Possibly. Is your husband an ass man?

Read through the Readme and it’s definitely a good tool to know about. It doesn’t fit the needs of my current problem, but I’m certain I’ll use it in the future for context sensitive searching, since grep/awk/sed/tr have definitely fallen flat for me in the past. I might also be able to study how they utilized tree-sitter CLI when I explore my own implementation.

For my purposes, I want to take a group of similar-yet-different YAML file sets (though file type should be arbitrary), and feed them through a tool that will spit out a YAML template containing everything that is shared between multiple sets.

Then, I want it to create a file for each YAML which defines which parts to pull from the template file and a list of variables to be inserted into holes in the templates. Basically creating a madlib that can recreate any file in the original group given the right list of variables to insert.

For example, if I have a hundred YAML files that are mostly similar but contain different project names, have different server types provisioned, and are pulling different product versions, I would want this script to parse all hundred files and spit out a template that could be used as the basis to build any of the hundred files. The template would be combined with a hundred variable trees that would insert each unique part of each file into the right place.

In effect, I could have a small variables file that gives only the unique portions of the equivalent YAML - in this case, it would contain only the project name, the server type, the product version. Then, these small files could be combined with the universal template to recreate the original hundred YAML files. But unlike using a simple override mechanism, I would be able to change elements of the template YAML including broad structural changes, and after some processing, the change would affect all one hundred output YAMLs.

One could track things like environment variables that are specific to a certain project version and require that whenever a project version has a particular value to insert a particular environment variable into the output YAML. Or a centralized file could be made specifying which product versions correspond to which projects, allowing the engineer to change all product versions for a given set of projects in one go. Or one could create a universal template of IaC code that’s applicable to a broad swath of use cases and quickly build out a full set of YAML manifests and Terraform files using a small file that specifies what components will be needed and where to authenticate to the server.

I’m not aware of any tool that does this, but I think tree-sitter gets me much of the way there. If I can use it to parse any given file into a context aware tree, I would then need to make a script that combines the shared features of many context trees and splits the unique features out into small variable files. Then a script to merge them back together as needed. And something to manage file system structure, such as whether to parse every file individually or to strategically merge some sets so you have one variable file that produces multiple output YAML.

Sorry I’m brainstorming at you, just trying to figure out if the tool I’m envisioning is even feasible. Seems like it is, but I’ll have to figure out how to use tree-sitter CLI before I begin.

Pirate keys for sure. Not using one is just asking for a stranger to grab your booty.

Just built my first fully dedicated Linux machine. Still keeping my old Windows desktop around purely because I play League of Legends and they use a kernel level anticheat, so it won’t run on VM.

Fun fact, ever since Riot made it mandatory to install their rootkit if you want to play their games, every time I try to eject a flash drive, it says it can’t eject because it’s in use - even if I just plugged it in. And that’s super comforting.

This is super cool. Watched the talks from Max Brunsfeld, surprised this has been around since 2018 and I haven’t heard of it.

I actually tried some complex parsing myself lately. I had a bunch of YAML I needed to maintain for various deployments in a CI/CD system. I really wanted to have one YAML template to generate the files, plus a file for each project with unique elements to be injected into that project’s generated YAML.

Probably was more of an indication that we needed to clean up the overrides we were putting on top of our Helm charts, but I wanted a way to generate our lengthy override files without having to manually keep track of where the differences were between projects. And maybe even stage changes to deployment files for when new product versions are released.

This is exciting. I’m going to look into Tree Sitter more and maybe try to contact the dev. It seems like it does everything I’m looking for, just for an entirely different use case.

Respectfully, I disagree. We’ve entered an AI boom, and right now, the star of the show is in a bit of a gangly awkward teenage phase. But already, these large data models are eating up mountains of energy. We’ll certainly make the technology more energy efficient, but we’re also going to rely on it more and more as it gets better. Any efficiency gains will be eaten up by AI models many times more complex and numerous than what we have now.

As climate change warms the globe, we’re all going to be running our air conditioning more, and nowhere will that be more true than the server centers where we centralize AI. To combat climate change, we may figure out ways of stripping carbon from the air and this will require energy too.

Solar is good. It’s meeting much of our need. Wind and hydroelectric fill gaps when solar isn’t enough. We have some battery infrastructure for night time and we’ll get better at that too. But there will come a point where we reach saturation of available land space.

If we can supplement our energy supply with a technology that requires a relatively small footprint (when it comes to powering a Metropolitan area), can theoretically produce a ton of power, requires resources that are plentiful on Earth like deuterium, and doesn’t produce a toxic byproduct, I think we should do everything in our power to make this technology feasible. But I can certainly agree that we should try to get our needs completely met with other renewables in the meantime.

Oh whale…

Everything is a meme.

Entomologist

It’s about time.