anotherandrew

joined 2 weeks ago
[–] anotherandrew@mbin.mixdown.ca 4 points 20 hours ago

This is something I am eternally grateful to my mother for teaching us. I am no Michelin chef, but I have managed to develop a few "signature" dishes that friends and family rave about. It's pretty easy too; it's actually pretty hard to fuck up a dish in such a way that it's inedible.

There's something really relaxing about cooking -- the ingredients changing the overall look and texture as they cook, how you can alter the flavour entirely with just a tweak of the spices... and the best part is that you (almost always) get to eat it. And there is something very calming in the knowledge that you can make something edible if not delicious with just a few inexpensive ingredients.

[–] anotherandrew@mbin.mixdown.ca 2 points 20 hours ago

I'm on the fence.

I've used Perplexity to take a javascript fragment, identify the language it was written in and describe what it's doing. I then asked it to refactor it into something a human could understand. It nailed both of these, even the variable names were meaningful (the original ones were just single letters). I then asked it to port it to C and use SDL, which it did a pretty good job of.

I also used it to "untangle" some really gnarly mathy Javascript and port it to C so I could better understand it. That is still a work in progress and I don't know enough math to know if it's doing a good job or not, but it'll give me some ability to work with the codebase.

I've also used it to create some nice helper python scripts like pulling all repositories from a github user account or using YouTube's API to pull the video title and author data if given a URL. It also wrote the skeleton of some Python scripts which interact with a RESTful API. These kinds of things it excelled at.

My most recent success was using it to decode DTMF in a .WAV file, then create a new .WAV file using the DTMF start/end times to create cue points to visually show me what it saw and where. This was a mixed bag: I started out with Python, it used FFT (which was the obvious but wrong choice), then I had it implement a Goertzel filter which it did flawlessly. It even ported over to C without any real trouble. Where it utterly failed was with the WAV file creation/cue points. Part of this is because cue points are rather poorly described in any RIFF documentation, the python wrapper for the C wave processing library was incomplete and even then, various audio editors wanting the cue data in different ways, but this didn't stop the LLM from lying through its damn teeth about not only knowing how to implement it, but assure me that the slop it created functioned as expected.

I've found that it tends to come apart at the seams with longer sessions. When its answers start being nonsensical I sometimes get a bit of benefit from starting over without all the work leading up to that point. LLMs are really good at churning out basic frameworks which aren't exactly difficult but can be tedious. I then take this skeleton and start hanging the meat on it, occasionally getting help from the LLM but usually that's the stuff I need to think about and implement. I find that this is where LLMs really struggle, and I waste more time trying to explain what I want to the LLM than if I just wrote it myself.

[–] anotherandrew@mbin.mixdown.ca 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

for me, I wish there were a reasonable sized, 2 door EV pickup with an 8' bed. I don't want an SUV with a tiny bed but it seems that even in ICE vehicles, they only want to make gigantic 4 doors with small beds. You can find actual pickups but they're kind of rare.

You could use KaraKeep (formerly Hoarder) with the Hoarder's Pipette extension maybe?

[–] anotherandrew@mbin.mixdown.ca 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A full archive of the Japanese TV show Supreme Skills. I can find bits and pieces but I don't think I even have one complete season.

I'm presently reading a book called the Botany of Desire which discusses the relationships between plants and humans and perhaps who evolved for whom. Pretty interesting read so far.

Canadian living in LA: Crossed from LAX -> YVR and back about 6 weeks ago. Zero issues in either direction. Back in February went from LAX -> YYZ and back. I landed exactly 24h before that DC9 flipped on its roof in Toronto. Other than bad weather coming in to YYZ, zero issues. Went from SNA -> YYZ and back for Christmas. Zero issues.

My wife flew from YVR -> LAX and back last week. Zero issues, although she was really nervous from everything she'd read.

IMO there are zero issues crossing the border, at least through airports. I believe most of the goofiness I've heard about was at land crossings, although I've heard from friends that they've had zero issues at land crossings either.

FWIW I'm a 50 year old white guy, and at least half the time I've got one or two teenage boys with me, the rest of the time just me. I work with another Canadian "import" but he's originally from Iran. He said that while he was nervous, he did not notice any increased scrutiny for himself or for his wife, who flew separately recently to Toronto and back.