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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2025

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  • CPU thermal protection is pretty solid nowadays. I’m also old, and I too remember Athlons you could actually cook on, but in my general experience I’ve found they did learn from that and the thermal protections are not exactly a complex system. It’s basically math, as far as calculating how much power is going in to how quickly it can heat up to where the thermal sensor is placed, and they simply shut it down before it’s mathematically possible for the heat to reach a damaging level. It’s very hard now to actually destroy a CPU due to internal overheating, at least any of the ones I’ve had various “incidents” with. They aggressively throttle down and shut down and are perfectly fine once properly cooled.


  • It is old, and yes AIs are continuously getting updated, but the principles still stand. Of course images of completely full wine glasses can and do exist (and if they didn’t it would only take a few moments to create some), and upon realizing this limitation, people (not the AIs themselves) are going to learn from this mistake and train the AIs better, give the existing or created images the necessary weighting to make sure that particular flaw is fixed and make their AI seem even more intelligent.

    But it doesn’t address the fundamental philosophical limitation and it doesn’t make them intelligent. It only fixes wine glasses in particular. and of course in the process they also fix the millions of other things they’re constantly training these AI to do. What it does NOT fix is the literally infinite number of other ideas that an AI simply can’t conceive. I’m sure we’ll add them as quickly as we come across them, but that’s still human ingenuity at work, not AI.


  • The reason AI’s results look so convincing is because it’s a plagiarism machine (and sometimes not a very good one). It cannot operate without our work which has been stolen and used without compensation because the courts have decided this is a “fair use”. Fair to whom?

    I saw a great video on Youtube illustrating this by attempting to convince it to make a wine glass full to the brim (which it simply can’t), and going into the deeper philosophy of ideas to explain why it normally appears to be able to create “completely new” concepts when really it’s just mashing two existing concepts together, but cannot actually correctly combine the separate ideas of “completely full” or “almost empty” with a “wine glass” properly. Because nobody ever does this and we use a different definition of “full” for a wine glass, there is no useful source material for it, and the AI has no idea how to do it either, while of course always being convinced it has correctly understood what a completely full wine glass looks like. It doesn’t have novel ideas, it doesn’t have an imagination, it is not intelligence. It is just plagiarism. It is using its nearly limitless database of the work of thousands of years of human creativity to appear as if it too is creative. It’s not.



  • As a senior developer, my most productive days are genuinely when I remove a lot of code. This might seem like negative productivity to a naive beancounter, but in fact this is my peak contribution to the software and the organization. Simplifying, optimizing, identifying what code is no longer needed, removing technical debt, improving maintainability, this is what requires most of my experience and skill and contextual knowledge to do safely and correctly. AI has no ability to do this in any meaningful way, and code bases filled with mostly AI generated code are bound to become an unmaintainable nightmare (which I will eventually be paid handsomely to fix, I suspect)













  • I get accused of being a bot all the time now because I still enjoy writing long-form posts and, y’know, contributing what I can to the state of human knowledge, or what remains of it anyway. I can’t blame people for being defensive about it. It’s the AIs themselves I’m offended by, they’re the ones doing wrong. We’re all just trying to cope with the avalanche of unverified garbage they’re putting out. It’s digital pollution.