lvxferre

joined 2 years ago
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago
  • some episodes of Ah! My Goddess, Kimetsu no Yaiba, Overlord, and Darling in the FranXX.
  • Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2
  • The Lion King
  • Matrix

It might look completely random, and... well, it is! I'm rebuilding my "videos" directory, that I share in my LAN. By doing so I always hit something interesting, drop whatever I'm doing, and watch it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

[Warning: I'm mostly rambling.]

As usual you need to be careful with metaphors: they break once pulled hard enough.

The metaphor implies the security layers are independent, and always addictive. Often they aren't - they interact with each other, and often the presence of one layer makes the other worse. It's like double bagging condoms - they rub against each other, so they make you less protected than if you wore a single condom.

The "holes" are often dynamic, and they might change place over time. Sometimes the vulnerability crossed a hole of the first slice, hit the second slice and stayed there, until the second slice's hole aligns with it. Then the vulnerability crosses into the third slice, so goes on. If you're dealing with human beings, that's basically any system.

"NEEDS MORE LAYERS!" is not always the solution. Sometimes you're better off - in cost and security - if you replaced a few layers with a better one. Try mozzarella instead of Emmenthaler.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

This is yet another case where people don't notice the root of the problem, because one of the branches is so fucking large it takes the whole scene.

Spot the common element between the text and the following:

  • When Internet Explorer still existed, Microsoft gave you no way to remove it.
  • Later on (Edge times), Microsoft went out of its way to ignore your browser preferences and shove Edge down your throat.
  • Google: Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect?
  • "Because we're not designing a desktop for people who like to choose their own terminal emulators." - Bastien Nocera, GNOME dev
  • Plenty pieces of software offer you a choice between "yes" and "maybe later", but rather curiously avoid the word "no"
  • "Subscribe to our newsletter!" (i.e. spam). The only negative answer is worded like "I'm braindead trash thus I don't want to subscribe".

It's always about actively disempowering users. Even if technology was expected to do the opposite.

Why this matters: because even if the image + text generators went away, or got heavily regulated, or whatever, the problem still persists. And it'll still pop up elsewhere.

Solve this disgusting "Stop treating those THINGS as if they were human beings! They're users, not humans! Those things exist to be herded!" mindset and you'll solve the problem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Ah, got it - I didn't realise you're running a personal instance. Now it makes sense what you're doing.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 days ago (3 children)

If I had to guess, most people in RVs would rather live in a house. It's just houses are not affordable in USA; I've seen posters from there talking about this in Lemmy all the bloody time.

Based on that I don't think prohibition is the right way to go. Instead make sure people can afford houses, and the problem goes away. Additionally the ones living in an RV by choice would be even freer to keep with their lifestyle - those are likely not an issue when it comes to zoning laws, as the main reason you'd want to live in a wheeled home is to travel.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (2 children)

From that, I guess you're browsing by "All"?

My approach was different: I browse by "Subscribed", and I'm subbed to ~200 comms. It takes a bit more effort but it allows me to have finer control over what I see, for example I subbed to one or two political and memes comms - it's just enough to get myself informed, but not enough to flood my feed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Recognising recurring characters is part of the charm for me, too. And also:

While your typical lemming's behaviour is not perfect, it's still leagues above your typical redditor's. For a start I used to dread the orange mail icon... as I saw it I immediately thought, "oh great here comes a dumb fuck distorting what I say". The bell icon is still a positive for me.

My own behaviour has been positively affected. [cat analogy] I didn't declaw myself, but I don't feel as much of a need to extend my claws as before. [/cat analogy] In Reddit I used to pick fights all the time, I simply don't see the need to do so here, even when exposed to the same annoyances as before.

Once your feed is curated, it's mostly fun stuff? I do see some politics, but not as much to feel like it's only political discussion here.

I actually trust the admin of my current instance to do what's the best for the users, within his capabilities. I couldn't trust the Reddit admins to die properly. And when the worst came to pass (disagreeing with how the admins of my older instance handle users), I know I don't need to either ditch everything or suck it up.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Fuck neoliberalism. I might not like those kids giving thumbs up to authoritarianism but they're less worse than neolib, it's like comparing elephant shit with cat shit.

That said: a few Hexbear users are fairly reasonable, but plenty of them remind me 11yos. Specially in groups. db0 threw the bait, in a humour community for anarchists... and they all ate the bait, with malagueta sauce. No, wait, Scorpion Trinidad sauce. While screaming "I CAN STAND THE HEAT!" amidst their torrential tears.

Eventually the thing gets old, db0 gets bored and tells them to disengage.

It was funny that the nanny - who was supposed to take care of the kids - was there too. And he's another 11yo! ~~He forgot to edit his comment and say EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER! They might've left Reddit, but they still behave more like redditors than like decent people. Also, I saw a neoliberal Anglo supremacist there. Full of gullibleness. He still didn't think on the purpose of this utterance. And yes, I'm still laughing my arse off that muppet.~~

I'm almost sure db0 knows why those kids are mostly defederated. And the reason his instance doesn't do it is because, good or bad, they're left-wing presence in the fediverse.

Hexbear users who might take offence with my comment are encouraged to address their complains about their precious feelings being violated to this form.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

It's basically my experience with translation, too: asking a LLM is a decent way to look for potential ways to translate a specific problematic word, so you can look them up in a dic and see which one is the best. It's also a decent way to generate simple conjugation/declension tables. But once you tell it to translate any chunk of meaningful text, there's a high chance it'll shit itself, and output something semantically, pragmatically, and stylistically bad.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I'm not. You can't lose trust on something if you never trusted it to begin with.

I. Talent churn reveals short AGI timelines are wish, not belief

Trying to build AGI out of LLMs and similar is like trying to build a house, by randomly throwing bricks. No cement, no foundation, just the bricks. You might want to get some interesting formation of bricks, sure. But you won't get a house.

And yes, of course they're bullshitting with all this "AGI IS COMING!". Odds are the people in charge of those companies know the above. But lying for your own benefit, when you know the truth, is called "marketing".

II. The focus on addictive products shows their moral compass is off

"They", who? Chatbots are amoral, period. Babbling about their moral alignment is like saying your hammer or chainsaw is morally bad or good. It's a tool dammit, treat it as such.

And when it comes to the businesses, their moral alignment is a simple "money good, anything between money and us is bad".

III. The economic engine keeping the industry alive is unsustainable

Pretty much.

Do I worry that the AI industry is a quasi-monopoly? No, I don’t understand what that means.

A quasi-monopoly, in a nutshell, is when a single entity or group of entities have an unreasonably large control over a certain industry/market, even if not being an "ackshyual" monopoly yet.

A funny trait of the fake free-market capitalist that O’Reilly warns us about is that their values are always very elevated and pure, but only hold until the next funding round.

That's capitalism. "I luuuv freerum!" until it gets in the way of the money.

IV. They don’t know how to solve the hard problems of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) still hallucinate. Over time, instead of treating this problem as the pain point it is, the industry has shifted to “in a way, hallucinations are a feature, you know?”

Or rather, they shifted the bullshit. They already knew it was an insolvable problem...

...because hallucinations are simply part of the LLM doing what it's supposed to do. It doesn't understand what it's outputting; it doesn't know if glue is a valid thing to add to a pizza, or if humans should eat rocks. It's simply generating text based on the corpus fed into it, plus some weighting.

V. Their public messaging is chaotic and borders on manipulative

O rly.

Stopped reading here. It's stating the obvious, and still missing the point.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago

And people who don't have bread to eat should eat cake instead. *sigh*

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

The website's quality decline has been for ten years or so. I remember well how it used to be; if I had my first account there it would be, like, 16 years old? (Good riddance.)

I'm glad people mentioned PieFed there (+10 score as of now!), as well as old style forums. (I'm hoping those eventually join the Fediverse. But even if they don't, they still have a place in my heart.)

 

In case anyone wonders about the star:

what you type what you get
=
* 💢
$
<
>
@
 

1.6 introduced two amazing features to make mad money from fishing.

Pic related - it's the first Summer, I didn't ship all the fish (I couldn't smoke all of them in time), and I'm making 20kg/day, even being bad at fishing.

The bait maker is unlocked by Fishing Lv6. It requires 3 iron bars, 3 coral, 1 sea urchin. You put a fish there, and get 5~10 pieces of bait targetting that fish.

But why would you waste fish to get more fish, instead of using bug meat for the bait? Because you can target the most lucrative fish - like I did with sturgeon there, if I used normal bait I'd be getting carps instead.

Then there's the fish smoker. The recipe is from Willy's and it costs 10kg. You need 10 hardwood, 1 river jelly, 1 sea jelly, 1 cave jelly.

The river and sea jellies are not a big deal to get. The hardwood will likely require luck in the mines or an upgraded axe. Cave jelly is a pain, you need to fish in the mines for a while. (Ideally at Lv100, but Lv20 does the trick.)

But oh wow. It's worth. It doubles the price of the fish, but it keeps quality. Check the iridium quality sturgeon, it's 1200g! Lucrative fish tend to be unruly, but if you fish at good spots you can reliably get gold quality fish; 1.5 from gold quality * 1.5 from angler profession * 2.0 from smoking = 4.5 times the original price.

It does require coal but once you got the cash rolling you can buy it from Clint, that's what I'm doing.

 

Archive link: https://archive.ph/cIz4A

It's dated to be from around 2400 BCE. The article doesn't clarify if it's a true alphabet or an abjad, but either way it's interesting.

EDIT: see also https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worlds-oldest-alphabet-discovered/ for a less pop-linguistics narrative of the same discovery.

 

[Idea] If you don't want to see huge flags taking space over actual drawings in the Canvas, pick the biggest flag that you can find to deface.

As long as a lot of people are doing that, the ones templating larger flags will be forced to reduce their layouts and give more room for actual drawings.


[Reasoning] When it comes to country flags, I think that the immense majority of the users can be split into four groups:

  1. The ones who don't want to see country flags at all.
  2. The ones who are OK with smaller flags, but don't want to see larger ones.
  3. The ones who want to see a specific large flag taking a huge chunk of space.
  4. The ones who want to see the whole canvas burning, like the void.

I'm myself firmly rooted into #1, but this idea is a compromise between #1, #2 and #4.

Typically #3 uses numbers (and/or bots) to seize a huge chunk of the canvas to their flags. Well, let's use numbers against it then. As long as #1, #2 and #4 are trying to wreck the same flag, we win.


[inb4]

But what about identity flags?

Not a problem. They're typically bands instead of thick squares, and people drawing them are fairly accommodating.

But what about [insert another thing]

Even if [thing] is a problem, it's probably minor in comparison with huge country flags.

What should be the template?

None. We don't need one, as long as everyone is working against the same large flag.

Just draw something of your choice over the flag, preferably over its iconic features.

But I'm not creative enough for that!

No matter how shitty your drawing is, it's probably still way more original than a country flag. So don't feel discouraged.

That said, you can always help someone else with their drawing. Or plop in some text. Or just void.

Why are you posting this now, you bloody Slowpoke?

I wish that I thought about this before Canvas 2024. But better later than never. (And better early by a year for Canvas 2025.)


EDIT: addressing on general grounds some whining from group #3 (the ones who want to see a specific large flag taking a huge chunk of the canvas space).

You do realise that this sort of "war against the largest flag" should benefit even you, as long as the biggest flag is not the one you're working with, right? Even for you, this makes the canvas a more even level field. Let us not forget that you love to cover other flags with your own.

 

I'm sharing this here mostly due to the alphabet. The relevant region (Tartessos) would be roughly what's today the western parts of Andalucia, plus the Algarve.

Here are the news in Spanish, for anyone interested.

The number of letters is specially relevant for me - 32 letters. The writing system is a redundant alphabet, where you use different graphemes for the stops, depending on the next vowel; and it was likely made for a language with five vowels, so you had five letters for /p/, five for /t/, five for /k/. Counting the "bare" vowels this yields 20 letters; /m n s r l/ fit well with that phonology, but what about the other seven?

 

Context: some days ago, I commented in a topic about Argiope bruennichi that I had a similar spider living on my kumquat tree, later identified to be Argiope argentata. And @[email protected] asked for an update, if she laid eggs.

So, here they are. Sadly I couldn't even notice that she laid eggs, let alone photograph the egg sac. But hey, I got little cute spiders~

Here's their mum, Kumoko:

 
18
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

This recipe is great to repurpose lunch leftovers for dinner. It's also relatively mess-free. Loosely based on egg-fried rice.

Amounts listed for two servings, but they're eyeballed so use your judgment.

Ingredients:

  • Cooked leftover rice. 200~300g (cooked) is probably good enough. It's fine to use pilaf, just make sure that the rice is cold, a bit dry, and that the grains are easy to separate.
  • Two eggs. Cracked into a small bowl and whisked with salt, pepper, and MSG. Or the seasoning of your choice.
  • Veg oil. For browning.
  • Water. Or broth if you want, it's just a bit.
  • [OPTIONAL] Meats. Leftover beef, pork, or chicken work well. Supplement it with ham, firmer sausages, and/or bacon; 1/2 cup should be enough for two. Dice them small.
  • [OPTIONAL] Vegs. I'd add at least half raw onion; but feel free to use leftover cooked cabbages, peas, bell peppers, etc. Or even raw ones. Also diced small.
  • [OPTIONAL] Chives. Mostly as a finishing touch. Sliced thinly.

Preparation:

  1. Add a spoonful of veg oil to a wok or similar. Let it heat a bit.
  2. If using raw meats: add them to the wok, and let them brown on high fire, stirring constantly. Else, skip this step.
  3. If using raw vegs: add them to the wok, and let them it cook on mid-low fire. Else, skip this step.
  4. Add the already cooked ingredients (rice, meats, vegs). Medium fire, stirring gentle but constantly; you want to heat them up, not to cook them further. Adjust seasoning if desired.
  5. Spread the whisked egg over your heated rice mix, while stirring and folding the rice frenetically. You want the egg to coat the rice grains, but they should be still separated when done. If some whisked egg is sticking to the wok and/or the rice is too dry, drip some water/broth and scrap the bottom of the wok; just don't overdo it (you don't want soggy rice). Anyway, when the egg is cooked this step is done, it'll give the rice grains a nice yellow colour and lots of flavour.
  6. If using chives, add them after your turned off the fire (they get sad if cooked). Enjoy your meal.

I was going to share a picture of the final result, but I may or may not have eaten it before thinking about sharing the recipe. Sorry. :#

 

I got a weird problem involving both of my cats (Siegfrieda, to the left; Kika, to the right).

Kika is rather particular about having her own litterbox(es), and refuses to use a litterbox shared by another cat. Frieda on the other hand is adept to the "if I fits, I sits, I shits" philosophy, and is totally OK sharing litterboxes.

That creates a problem: no matter if properly and regularly cleaned, the only one using litterboxes here is Frieda. We had, like, five of them at once; and Kika would still rather do her business on the patio.

How do I either teach Kika "it's fine to share a litterbox", or teach Siegfrieda "that's Kika's litterbox, leave it alone"?

 

Context: my mum got some keikis of this orchid from a neighbour. She managed to grow them into a full plant, it even flowered (as per pic), but she has no idea on which species of orchid it is.

I am not sure if it's a native species here (I'm in the subtropical parts of South America), but it seems to be growing just fine indoors in a Cfb climate.

Disregard the vase saying "phal azul" (blue phal), it used to belong to another orchid; it doesn't seem to be a Phalaenopsis.

If necessary I can provide further pics, but note that it has lost the flowers already.

Any idea?


EDIT: thanks to @[email protected]'s comment, we could find it - it's a Miltoniopsis. Likely from Colombia or Ecuador, not from my area.

 

I feel slightly offended. Because it's true.

(Alt text: "Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you're currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out.")

xkcd source

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