Plumber by training, but these days I work as a self-employed general contractor / handyman.

My thinking is that companies looking for employees get flooded with nearly identical applications, so it’s hard to stand out. I’d rather just email, call, or even show up in person and ask for work - whether they’re actively hiring or not. It shows initiative.

Honestly, I didn’t even want the position - I only applied to keep my unemployment payments going. I spent maybe five minutes writing the application and still got the interview.

Last time I was looking for job I just looked up companies from my field and sent them an email. I sent two emails and got 1 interview. Didn’t get the place though, so I just employed myself then.

Why do you need to be such a mean jerk about it? I’m familiar with the saying - I just misunderstood you at first, and I already acknowledged my mistake. What more do you want?

We seem to be finding our way into echo chambers just fine without algorithms or big tech as well.

Fair enough. “This is gonna twist so many incel knives” just made it sound like that’s what you were refering to.

Incel violence isn’t really the epidemic you’re making it sound to be. There have even been papers written about the lack of it.

I’ve only broken up with my ex-partners.

I don’t feel like their wealth changes the equation that much. I don’t expect them to just hand me money just because I’m their biological child - and since I’m doing fine on my own anyway, I wouldn’t really need them to.

No, it generates natural sounding language. That’s all it does.

The models definitely have some level of consciousness.

Depends on what one means by consciousness. The way I hear the term used most often - and how I use it myself - is to describe the fact of subjective experience. That it feels like something to be.

While I can’t definitively argue that none of our current AI systems are conscious to any degree, I’d still say that’s the case with extremely high probability. There’s just no reason to assume it feels like anything to be one of these systems, based on what we know about how they function under the hood.

LLM “hallucinations” are only errors from a user expectations perspective. The actual purpose of these models is to generate natural-sounding language, not to provide factual answers. We often forget that - they were never designed as knowledge engines or reasoning tools.

The fact that they often get things right isn’t because they “know” anything - it’s a side effect of being trained on data that contains a lot of correct information. So when they get things wrong, it’s not a bug in the traditional sense - it’s just the model doing what it was designed to do: predict likely word sequences, not truth. Calling that a “hallucination” isn’t marketing spin - it’s a useful way to describe confident output that isn’t grounded in reality.

LLMs have more in common with humans than we tend to admit. In split-brain studies, humans have been shown to invent plausible-sounding explanations for their behavior - even when scientists know those explanations aren’t the real reason they acted a certain way. It’s not that these people are lying per se - they genuinely believe the explanations they’re coming up with. Lying implies they know what they’re saying is false.

LLMs are similar in that way. They generate natural-sounding language, but not everything they say is true - just like not everything humans say is true either.

The whole ETF thing is partly a grift

Are you mixing up ESG and ETF by any chance?

Why? We already have a specific subcategory for it: Large Language Model. Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence aren’t synonymous. Just because LLMs aren’t generally intelligent doesn’t mean they’re not AI. That’s like saying we should stop calling strawberries “plants” and start calling them “fake candy” instead. Call them whatever you want, they’re still plants.

I haven’t revealed the darkest one to anyone for a good reason and I sure aren’t going to do it here.

However, another one came to mind which I’m not sure is dark or just weird but you know that noise a panicing pig makes? I get some weird enjoyment from it. Not when it comes to any other animal but only pigs. In all other situations seeing an animal or human panic that way would make me want to stop what ever is causing it and I do consider myself overall highly empathic person but pigs get none of that. It’s not that I have some urge to hurt them but rather that squeaking just doesn’t get any empathy from me.

Admittedly though, I sometimes want to stomp small yapping dogs as well so there’s that too.

To contrast this: I don’t hurt spiders, I catch flies alive and take them outside, I euthanize silverfish on my glue traps because I don’t want them to suffer more than necessary and I don’t trap mice from my attic because I don’t want to kill them. Go figure.

Well, not quite. I don’t (obviously) charge my customers for learning on the job. If it’s something that takes longer for me to do due to lack of experience then I charge less.

In many cases, yes - but my work also involves a lot of things that I’m doing for the very first time.

I’m a general contractor, and I think a lot of my customers assume I know everything about construction work - that whenever I’m doing something, it’s something I’ve done dozens of times before. But quite often, that’s not the case. Sometimes, all I know about the task at hand comes from a YouTube video I watched the night before, or I’m just following the manufacturer’s instructions step by step.

People don’t realize how often I’m just winging it and hoping it turns out fine. The fact that someone hires me usually means they know even less about the job than I do, which creates the illusion of much greater expertise. But in reality, the main difference between me and them often just boils down to the fact that I’m not afraid to try.

It’s abstract and doesn’t sound like anything. I’m not literally hearing anything just like I’m not literally seeing anything either when I’m visualizing things despite my ability to do so.

Independent of what anyone is actually saying, the mere fact that someone is commenting on social media at all makes it highly likely they’re one of the people the article is talking about. As the saying goes, a tiny number of users produce nearly all the content. Most people don’t post comments online. The average person doesn’t. So if someone does, that alone already marks them as unusual in some way.

This becomes especially obvious on Lemmy, where you can see people’s moderation history - and it takes only a few seconds to notice how many users are spouting mean, violent, and extremist views. You might not see those views as extreme because this is an echo chamber and you probably agree with them, but they’re extreme nonetheless when compared to what the average person would say.

Nobody ever thinks of themselves as the problem - we all have some story about how our behavior is justified and how those people over there are the real issue. Nah, you’re probably part of the issue as well. I am too.