palordrolap

Sometimes a person’s brain is only capable of operating in a conversation mode. Full, natural language sentences. Or sentence fragments (like these), I guess.

Then there’s the fact that some people can’t discern the line between the artificial and the real, or else are able to ignore it where they can see it because the LLM makes that easy.

I occasionally bounce ideas off free LLMs and I’ve been mostly conversational when I’ve done so, but I’m aware of things like 1) it’s a crutch 2) they’re mostly wrong about a lot of things and 3) any praise they give is invalid, so I’m not yet into the trap of thinking they’re people.

… but I still feel kind of bad if I drop a conversation when I’m done with it without saying goodbye.

For me it’s not about trusting the hotpatching; I know it can work. What I don’t trust is my own ability to not only do it properly but also to do it in less time than it takes to carefully close all my programs, reboot and then get them all started again. And so, reboot.

And to save making another comment elsewhere: About a week. It would have been longer, but I was having a configuration issue and a reboot seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Sugar free” on things that are mostly sugar because the serving size given isn’t great enough to overcome a rounding down to zero.

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE

VLC.

But then I’m one of those strange people who doesn’t listen to music much, so maybe I’m missing a trick.

The French word is more akin to the English C word, at least etymologically, which makes me wonder how high it ranks in terms of French profanities.

I think most English speakers know where the B word falls with respect to the C word (and say, something like the worst racial slur), but I have no idea where on that scale the French word falls.

Either way, I’ve definitely heard both English translations be called misogynistic, and I think that would qualify those words for “slur” status. I can’t imagine the French word is thought of any differently.

Pros: Little screens on every key!

Cons: Looks awful and costs a fortune!

Get one today!

Yeah. Right Control should be where Fn is for sure.

And as an ISO keyboard user, I need my right Shift key, so that Control has to be a Shift instead. On ISO, left Shift is small and right is large. For that and other reasons I use the right one way more than the left. And if that’s not possible for deep technical reasons, hard-wire it to the left one bypassing all of the trouble. It wouldn’t be the first time a keyboard did something like that.

… and what do you know, there’s a even little space there with no key where they could put the Fn key omitted by those changes.

Everything else I could deal with. Even the otherwise US layout. It’s been a while since I used one, but occasionally there’s a hiccup and I’ll reach for double quote or at-sign in the opposite places, so that muscle memory is still there, maybe waiting for mangling into typing on something like this.

As it stands, it doesn’t look like there is one. It appears to be a recreational mathematical toy for the creator to learn things more than it is for others to play with. It’s kind of neat nonetheless.

I think I might have made different choices for the reversal calculations, but I haven’t really thought about how I’d implement those choices, nor about nigh-insurmountable edge cases, and I’m only vaguely thinking about the “c = a OP b” case, not anything more extreme. The creator may have wanted to make the same choices but found themselves forced down a different path.

Verbatim from the creator: “it is imperfect”.

I seem to remember a story about how something - a neural net, or an early reinforced learning experiment - ended up accidentally exploiting a physics bug in a chip to achieve a result that should have gone through the chip’s expected circuitry instead.

It was specific to that one particular chip, and swapping it out for another supposedly identical chip caused the calculation, or simulation, or whatever that was running on the larger system, to fail.

That is, it wasn’t supposed to be exploiting physics glitches but that’s what happened.

… I think I found it. It happened all the way back in the 1990s if this story is to be believed: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

I’m a hoarder who refuses to buy more stuff because I can’t bear to part with the stuff I’ve got. So all of it, I guess?*

But if you want a simpler answer, there are a couple of old stuffed animals that I’d mourn as much as I would a living pet, so probably those. They’re a lot lower maintenance than an actual pet though, which is a big plus.

* Actually I can think of a few things that I don’t want, but they need to be disposed of properly (broken electrical; dead batteries) and I don’t really have the means to do that.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to bring the court case forward, and when he inevitably doesn’t turn up (not that he would have if everything ran to the original timetable), make the finding in absentia, presumably “guilty” but at least worse than it would be if he’d bothered to turn up, and then…

Sanctions? Heck. What else do we have to hold him to account? An ever bigger tariffs war? Forcibly close US embassies and consulates? Seize US assets?

It’d be a fine line to prevent the Big (cutter of) Cheese from bugging out and declaring war.

In before Microsoft break out the FUD tactics and a year or two of cheap licenses.

Any where stress doesn’t affect me negatively.

People with a serious criminal record. Murderers and worse. Those who leave their victims alive but scarred mentally or physically.

Then those with less serious criminal records. Fraud. White collar crimes. That sort of thing.

Then other “undesirables” depending on who isn’t liked by whoever’s in charge.

And then the goalposts for what’s desirable will start to move.

And the scope won’t just be limited to social media. Websites will be categorised further. Some might remain open access to all people (except the ever increasing list of those to be protected and those who shouldn’t have access) but others? No. Those sites themselves are undesirable.

Who’s next to be blocked?

I mean, now that the infrastructure and policies are in place, it’s only a matter of time.

Sigh. At this rate I can see a day where I end up switching to WebKitGTK’s MiniBrowser as my main rather than having it as a “secret” backup.

4’33" by John Cage

Preferably with me as far from the stage as possible. In fact, I’m staying home. Enjoy.

Because he’s been on Russia’s payroll for a while (and likely his dad too), so like a stopped clock being right twice a day, when Don Jr. suggests that the US is thinking about not supporting an enemy of Russia, it might be worth thinking there’s some truth to it.

Tea. Specifically, what’s known in other parts of the world as “English Breakfast (Black) Tea”. Because I’m British and grew up with it.

Although I vary quite a bit from average. Mine’s usually decaffeinated with sweetener and soy milk for health reasons.