Recent comments in /f/technology

RamsesThePigeon t1_jdq115l wrote

Reply to comment by BobRobot77 in Silicon Valley Elites Are Afraid. History Says They Should Be by Mynameis__--__

I wrote a couple of (not especially good) poems the other day.

There were a small number of users in the comments who immediately accused me of having tasked a glorified algorithm with drooling out what I’d written.

Now, had said accusations been meant as insults, that actually would have been less distressing than the truth, which is that people on the Internet are proving themselves to be even less literate than I’d assumed. I mean, fine, most folks don’t know how to use hyphens, and I’ve come to terms with that… but the idea that a person genuinely can’t tell the difference between human-written text and program-written text really, really saddens me. It’s the equivalent of being unable to distinguish between a chef-prepared meal and something with the Lunchables logo on it.

Chat-bots produce painfully average offerings; works that check all of the surface-level boxes, but that are completely flat. They still scare me, though, because they’re revealing the fact that people who are willing and able to recognize as much are apparently in the minority. Put another way – and reusing the idea of flatness – it’s starting to seem like much of the Web (and therefore the world) is populated by individuals who lack the ability to see in three dimensions… and as such, they’re conflating actual structures with façades.

In short, I’m not worried about ChatGPT ever being better than a real writer; I’m worried about the humans who are letting themselves be convinced that it will be. The façades will eventually fall over, I’m sure – a chat-bot can only ever be as good as the best content fed into it, after all, and it can’t actually innovate – but until that happens, there are going to be millions of people consuming shallow, empty junk and not understanding why they hate reading.

1

Waaypoint t1_jdpzelg wrote

Reply to comment by jxx37 in America needs immigration reform, or it risks losing an entire generation of tech workers to countries like Canada, the UK, and Japan by TakeOffYourMask

I've seen some really exaggerated comments about Americans all landing 200k a year jobs after taking a few online classes.

The reality is that the average pay is around 113K USD for a role like SW developer. Further, most of the high salaries are if you work in the bay area. (San Francisco, Sunnyvale, San Jose, etc, California, USA)

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

​

By state views.

https://www.statista.com/chart/22030/average-tech-worker-salary-in-us-cities/

One thing you will notice is that these cities are the ones all our "red" state Americans complain about. e.g. Shit in the streets, zombies on meth, crap.

Two things about that.

  1. There are very large homeless populations in these cities (and growing). I live in one of these cities and the only place with income disparity worse is Brazil.
  2. The cost of living in those areas is very high compared to other US states. I can buy a house for 100k in my midwest hometown. The same size house in the city I live in now is over 1M. A two bedroom 700 sf house with no parking goes for 500K on the low end.

Looking at the UK the average pay for a SW developer is 65K pounds (79,300 USD with Google's current conversion rate).

So, lets say there is a 35K difference is pay on average. Again, this is probably skewed by CA, but meh.

I pay around 25k out of my salary for my retirement in the US and about 15K in health insurance. That is not unusual and it is much more if you have a spouse who does not work. Anyway, that extra pay disappears quickly because we do not have a safety net or universal services in the US.

TLDR: You might feel like you have more money in the US, but the reality is that that money disappears quickly because America is mostly a fast food restaurant pretending to be fine dining.

1

ptd163 t1_jdpx8h3 wrote

Reply to comment by TheFriendlyArtificer in Microsoft reportedly orders AI chatbot rivals to stop using Bing’s search data by OutlandishnessOk2452

>Which is Bing's only redeeming feature.

I know this is a meme, but Bing is really not that much better any another search engine anymore. What Bing is good (at least they were at the time I tried this which was many years ago so don't quite me) at is hiding that you're watching porn by using their videos tab. Your traffic won't say you're on PornHub for example, it'll say your on Bing.

2