🌞 Alexander Daychilde 🌞

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • My investigation into Alpha School also reveals that the massive amounts of data the company collects on students, including videos of them, is stored in a Google Drive folder that anyone with the link—even if they’ve left the company, or if it was sent to them—could access. In turn, that sensitive material is viewed by more Alpha School employees than students and parents may realize.

    Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I’m gonna stop you right there with a huge huge WHAT the removed. That is an incredible decision to have made. Stunning.

    I saw that Alpha School maintains a spreadsheet which contains a list of student names, their grade, and an archive of their recordings which shows what’s happening on their screen, their remote tutor, and a video of the student taken via their webcam. This spreadsheet is not only available to anyone at the company, but is also shared in such a way that anyone on the internet who has the link can access the spreadsheet and the videos of students.

    “If I wanted to, I could go there and just watch students. Anybody who worked in this capacity could watch the videos of students working on their laptops,” one Alpha School employee told me. “So many hours of just students’ faces […] I’m not sure parents understand exactly what’s going on with that data […] I don’t think that this is clearly communicated, because I’m sure there’d be a lot more opt outs if it was.”

    Wonder how many pedos work for the company.







  • I suppose the real issue is paying for the servers. There’s already pushback against the datacenters needed to power LLMs as it is. I suppose the capital to build would have to come from somewhere.

    It’s a pity we don’t have a good government for a project like that. That would truly be a public service.

    Did some calculations recently. If we took the cropland on which we grow corn strictly for ethanol production and put solar on it, something like 5% IIRC could power enough EVs to replace ALL vehicles in the US. Which means we could use a little more land for solar to power datacenters designed to be as environmentally friendly as possible. A government-run LLM run for the public.

    It’s a pipe dream because in our current reality, it could never happen. But like universal health care and a living minimum wage, it should exist.

    I know, I’m straying from the topic again. ADHD gonna ADHD. heh

    I suppose as long as we were able to regulate AI companies to make sure they were forced to be upfront, honest, useful… it would be a sufficient compromise. But I’m sure we can’t even have that little.



  • So kinda like an ethical LLM[1]. I’d be on board with that.

    I know it’s unpopular to say, but I’ve found the latest version of Gemini to be pretty useful. But you have to know what they’re good for and not. General knowledge? Generally pretty decent. But you have to ask for sources and check those sources, and don’t tell it what you think, ask it what it knows and to admit when it doesn’t know things. I wouldn’t put my life on the line, but for looking up random stuff, it’s pretty decent.

    I know LLMs will get worse and shittier, which I think is a bummer, because they could be so damned useful.


    1. But I get your distinctions and I’m on board with that. It’d be nice! ↩︎


  • I have two methods for scrambled eggs:

    1. Butter on the griddle. Crack the eggs on the griddle. Carefully cook the whites leaving the yolks unbroken (if possible). when the whites are basically cooked, break the yolks and scramble. The idea is to get the whites all cooked and the yolks barely/mostly cooked. Remember that heat continues to build in the egg, so pull slightly before they’re where you want them. You hopefully end up with scrambled eggs that are full of barely-cooked yolk savory flavour. Along with the salt, msg, and freshly cracked pepper put on them while cooking the whites, and the butter they were cooked in.

    2. If I don’t want to deal with that and get something almost as tasty and more uniform: Crack and scramble the eggs in a bowl until they are well scrambled and no strings of white can be detected. Melt butter on your griddle all the way across it. Pour out the eggs, which because they are well scrambled will spread out thinly across most or all of the griddle. A layer will quickly cook, as soon as it forms, start moving the egg around to make uncooked egg touch the griddle - fold it, scramble it, move it around. The idea is to get uncooked egg touching the hot surface and minimize the cooked egg doing so. It won’t take long for the eggs to cook - soon as they are almost all cooked, pull them because heat will finish the job. This cooking method should also not overcook the yolk (although it will more than the first method), resulting in very tasty eggs. I stir the sale, msg, and freshly ground black pepper into the scrambled egg before they go on the griddle.

    3. However you figure out to cook them that you like is best for you. :)

    Also, either of the first two methods works so well in a sandwich (griddle-toasted bread or soft untoasted bread) with a bit of mayo. You can also use mato+ketchup. Or again whatever you want like salsa or… whatever.


  • Knowledge rot is already a problem and has been for years – where you try to follow some links only to find they’re dead, or people deleted their content. The anecdotes of finding some old problem and someone just said “I figured it out”. Sure, archival won’t fix that specific example, but the principle is there - we lose so much information.

    It would be nice if we had a government that worked for We the People and made information archival mandatory — likr the Library of Congress already does with printed materials.


  • For me, it was my first day at Texas Instruments. I had to show up to a mandatory Outlook training session (which was hilarious as I was being hired for a helpdesk position. I’d used Outlook since the first version in 1997 and supported it…). A guy came in and turned on the televisions.

    I called my wife, who was working in the flight path of DFW airport. We also tried to get hold of my stepmother, who was working in the tallest building in downtown Dallas at the time.

    It was much chaos, as I’m sure you remember, as nobody really knew what was going on or what further attacks might happen.

    So for me, I was a young adult, married for about a year and a half when it happened - I got to live half a decade as an adult in the pre-9/11 world.

    It’s hard for me to remember that for newer generations, all this bullshit that really started taking off hardcore after 9/11 is normalized. I saw our rights being taken away, the constant fear increase, the hatred for Muslims that blossomed into racism coming back out of its dirty closet, the rise of fascism.

    It wasn’t always that way. :(


  • Hydration is good. If you hydrate a LOT, remember to have some electrolytes in there somewhere. You don’t need a lot, but some.

    Also, the “eight glasses of water per day” thing was made up whole cloth. It is not medically nor scientifically a thing. The best advise is: Drink when you are thirsty. Unless there’s something wrong, that’s your body’s way of telling you it needs hydration.

    That said, if you exercise or get your body’s signals confused, thirst might not work perfectly for you. Generally, if you’re exercising, bored, hungry - having a glass of water might be just the thing and usually doesn’t hurt anything, so give it a go.


  • '75 here. All you youngsters can get the hell off my lawn.

    Actually, what I’ve noticed is that I don’t so much feel older as I do the “kids” keep getting younger. Was I like that at their age? Yep, probably, but I felt mature and adult then. To some degree. That thing about how you never really feel like an adult? I still get that a little bit. But after three decades of being an adult, it has also set in a bit.

    Mostly, I’m opinionated, and I remember things from the past 40 years because I was alive for them, so they aren’t history to me, they are a part of the life I experienced.

    So as you guys get older, I think you’ll find that - like whatever happens after Trump, unless it does continue to get worse (which is quite possible), there will come a time when a younger generation won’t know what it felt like to live under this fascism, and you, having lived through it, will have your mind blown because it’s history to them.

    Which I guess has helped me when I think about figures from history and the past in general. While I can’t imagine living before the era of cars, I do know that whatever time frame you look at - to the people living at that time, it was all contemporary and modern. And so when you see people that had relationships with other people and arguments and such, you really do realize that we’re all human.

    Also, the older I get, the more I realize just how precious life is. And when you’re young, you really are going to live forever. But every single day that passes is gone forever. Every month takes you further forward. Each year goes by and never comes back. When your 20s are gone, they won’t ever return. Don’t let that upset you, just make sure you aren’t coasting along and wasting time, waiting for what comes next, because if you spend you life waiting for what comes next, you die without anything ever coming next. Don’t “make every moment count” - do take time to relax. Just make sure that you are not ONLY relaxing, and don’t put everything off to the future. Do what you can to enjoy the life you have as best as you can while also trying to keep improving things.


  • It really is painful to read this kind of arrogant ignorance

    You really should check a mirror, bub.

    But it’s okay, continue on and wallow in your own willful ignorance.

    Or feel ABSOLUTELY free to try and actually answer what I said.

    I’m not surprised you picked up on my lack of caring to find out the organizing body. It doesn’t invalidate the truth of anything I said. But you ignore the truth and pick what you think is a GOTCHA.

    It’s not a flex, kiddo. It just reinforces how stupid you make yourself look.

    Ignorant removed.


  • It seems you suffer from some misconceptions while being aware of some moderately obscure truth.

    First of all, good on yer that you know that IQ is normalized to 100. The problem is that this is true for some particular group of people. I’m not sure offhand what body does this normalization and what population they use, but thankfully, that knowledge doesn’t matter.

    Any particular group of people will probably not have an average IQ of 100. Only the full body of people it’s normalized to will.

    So if they normalize IQ to all USians, the average IQ in other countries will naturally be somewhat close to 100 (probably), but not precisely 100. So move people elsewhere and the average IQ of the destination country will change by some probably-relatively-small amount.

    Or, if the entire world is normalized to 100, then the average IQ in NO countries is precisely 100, and moving people around will still change the average.

    So I’m afraid you need to back up your clapbacks and take another think through on this, friend.

    this county sucks.

    You should broaden your horizons. :)