it was a bit of squeeze to add even Gemma3n:e2b onto it

statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

This is so funny, I don’t think I’ve seen this before

Like imagine a cryptobro circa 2020 being like “no, we’re not early, this is actually the honeymoon phase and it’ll just get worse”

My immediate gut reaction to a rule as general as this is that there’s fat chance it’s universally applicable, there will always be cases where active would be clunky.

Like I can’t imagine an RPG protagonist exclaiming that “Someone trapped this chest!” instead of the 100% more natural “This chest was trapped!”

This article is wild already, on the first page there’s this quote

‘Do not use the passive voice when such use makes a statement clumsy and wordy. . . Do not, by using the passive voice, leave the agent of the verb vaguely indicated, when the agent should be clearly identified.’ [Edwin Woolley, Handbook of Composition, 1907, p. 20]

Emphasis mine on… a clear usage of the passive! In active this would have to be “when you should clearly identify the agent” or something of the like, the fuck, how hard is it to not expose your whole ass like this mate

Wait what, TIL there was/is a crusade against… the passive fucking voice?

Some people just need to invent problems for their life to feel meaningful, don’t they

so businesses and employees who get real value out of the stuff.

I have really bad news about what percentage that would be

Mods when a post escapes containment: No! No!!

Sickos like me when a posts escapes containment and they get to see the worst takes humanity has to offer: Yes… Ha ha ha… YES!

I’m sorry but what the hell is a “work trial”

Retail customers prefer payment processors for the ability to partially or totally reverse fraudulent transactions, though

Wait, but again, isn’t this the main thing that banks provide? Like I can call my bank and tell them listen, this transaction was fraudulent, and that’s it, it’s gone. They sometimes even call me first to double-check that a large-sum wire was actually authorised by me.

Either that, or live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider “send money to people” to be core functionality. But here in the good ol’ U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal.

Wait what? Can people in the USA not, em, transfer money? What do the banks do then?

Ye it was a real “oh fuck I recognise this nick, this cannot mean anything good” moment

Hey mate what do you think learning is. Like genuinely, if you were to describe the process of learning a subject to me.

I wouldn’t argue with someone who said reasoning models are a substantial advance

Oh, I would.

I’ve seen people say stuff like “you can’t disagree the models have rapidly advanced” and I’m just like yes I can, here: no they didn’t. If you’re claiming they advanced in any way please show me a metric by which you’re judging it. Are they cheaper? Are they more efficient? Are they able to actually do anything? I want data, I want a chart, I want a proper experiment where the model didn’t have access to the test data when it was being trained and I want that published in a reputable venue. If the advances are so substantial you should be able to give me like five papers that contain this stuff. Absent that I cannot help but think that the claim here is “it vibes better”.

If they’re an AGI believer then the bar is even higher, since in their dictionary an advancement would mean the models getting closer to AGI, at which point I’d be fucked to see the metric by which they describe the distance of their current favourite model to AGI. They can’t even properly define the latter in computer-scientific terms, only vibes.

I advocate for a strict approach, like physicist dismissing any claim containing “quantum” but no maths, I will immediately dismiss any AI claims if you can’t describe the metric you used to evaluate the model and isolate the changes between the old and new version to evaluate their efficacy. You know, the bog-standard shit you always put in any CS systems Experimental section.

A company that forces you to write a “Connect” every half-year where you reflect on your performance and Impact™ : (click here for the definition of Impact™ in Microsoft® Sharepoint™)

There is only one True Word

Some of them are pretty spot on.

• Internet Explorer - 9/10, explores the internet, nothing to argue about
• Windows - 8/10, kinda simplistic but it does have windows
• Word - 10/10, it is for words, short, to the point

Quantum computing reality vs quantum computing in popculture and marketing follows precisely the same line as quantum physics reality vs popular quantum physics.

• Reality: Mostly boring multiplication of matrices, big engineering challenges, extremely interesting stuff if you’re a nerd that loves the frontiers of human knowledge
• Cranks: Literally magic, AntMan Quantummania was a documentary, give us all money

There’s something hauntingly beautiful in levelling “you also haven’t been touched by a woman loser” against a married man with a child

We already have this, it’s just a Tesla with “FSD” on

Setting my oven to YOLO Mode and dying in a fire 7 seconds later