SeeingRed

I recently got back into Terry Pratchett's discworld series. I just finished "Reaper Man" and I am now on "Witches Abroad".

The series is really great. The comedy is well written and it's constantly subverting expectations. The characters are all so different and feel alive in ways that many authors fail to manage.

For the chat style AI, I have only found a few useful applications: looking up information in source languages I don't speak, programming assistant, and linux troubleshooting.

The biggest issue I have with AI in my personal use is that I have to be weary about hallucinations. with programming, this is often easy to fix with testing. knowledge search and troubleshooting have the biggest chance of being impacted by hallucination since I would have to verify each item myself which defeats the benefit. I especially found that any sort of technical search will result in entirely wrong results presented with confidence, so I usually limit queries to general knowledge type searches, and use the results as reference only.

As such, for me, I think that chat AI is a neat tool that has a few uses, some of which are better than older methods. It is not a magic bullet and it cannot be trusted without human judgement.

When I was working, it was in a field that was mostly insulated from the worst impacts of AI. But our manager and IT department seemed to think it was the future and were trying to find places to shove it. But because of the work we do nothing stuck. so in that way, it didn't really impact me too much in my professional work.

I think the biggest concern I have with chat style AI is deskilling myself. I worry that using it for programming has made me less able to read and write code. I try to use it collaboratively usually, so that I understand all the code, but I recently made a small program entirely with Deepseek without writing any code myself and it was a strange experience.

when it comes to non-chat style AI, I have dabbled in using some of the underlying algorithms to solve problems at work (gradient descent, evolutionary algorithms, etc.). But I've only used them to solve one off problems. I think that machine learning is a fascinating and highly useful field of research.

As much as I can.

I recently read through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, new book in the series just came out so I plan on reading that one next. It's a comedy/adventure sci-fi and fantasy. It has elements of class oppression and intergalactic revolution. It's not strictly Marxist, but it's not horribly lib either. It's a fun story and it's not just a power fantasy as most stories in the "Dungeon" genre tend to be (e.g. solo leveling).

I also read through the Convergence series, which is a fantasy story about the only wizard in modern society who is trying to stop a fantasy world from colliding with the modern world. It's pretty good, the comedy is quite good, and has hilarious references to marxism throughout. However, there is one section where they completely misrepresent communism which was unfortunate, but it is not really relevant to the overall story, so if you ignore that section it is an overall fun story.

next on my list is probably left hand of darkness or something from the discworld series.

I guess it depends on perspective. A bus, in simplest terms, shortens a trip. People pay to take a bus for 10 minutes to save an hour walking. It seems this escalator fits a similar purpose in the transit system of the district. Save an hour climbing stairs by taking a 20 minute escalator ride. Not identical, but similar.

It is probably nearly free to run but the per rider upfront cost is probably much higher (construction costs, relatively low ridership). It's also a fairly unique solution, which means it does not benefit as much from standardization, though it seems most of the parts are standardized. Both of the systems would have operating labour costs in addition to the electrical costs (maintenance, IT support, financial etc.). I would love to see a full lifecycle cost breakdown comparison.

It could very well turn out that the escalator is way overpriced per ride, I just don't have the data to say with certainty. I just think that its not unreasonable when compared against other forms of public transit.

In the city I'm in, buses are about 1.8 yuan, and the subway is usually 2-4 yuan (depending on trip length). So if you think of it as the equivalent of a bus, then it's a bit pricy, but not overly so.

Lemmygrad has been good for me too. It's such a kind place, an example of what a social network should be. I've never posted about it, but it has helped me when I'm in a doom spiral, just reading everyone's posts and comments can help to ground me. When I tell people in my life (who are not ML) about it they mostly don't get it.

Honestly, I mostly just use Deepseek when trying to figure out the correct search terms for online shopping in china since my chinese is still not good enough for niche things. I used to use copilot for work because I wasn't allowed to use other llms. I mostly used it for basic scripting for excel. Don't work there anymore though, so haven't touched it in a while.

"In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour time" Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 17

It's not the most standout quote of his work. But it's one that really solidified the concept for me.

新年快乐！Happy chinese new year everyone! Hope your year is full with good luck and good organizing.

Cell tower disguised as a tree in a historic site in china.

Pinyin makes much more sense to me, but that's probably just my bias because that's how I learned it. The problem ultimately is that both systems don't map one to one with English pronunciation, and the same characters sometimes map differently in the two systems. Both systems have their pros and cons.