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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • It can do that for school level stuff because that material is present in it’s input dataset in a redundant manner. For anything niche or domain-specific, it will hallucinate or fail.

    I typically don’t have an issue getting a grasp on fundamentals, so most of the things I want to ask it about might be beyond school-level. My main way of learning is to ask questions to make sure I understand the material - which means more potential hallucination points, and maybe worse impact because I’ll think I get it, but I’ve just been confidently lied to that I understood.

    For example, I’ve wondered for a while if patches of space with less gravitational curvature “age” faster than patches that are more heavily distorted by gravity wells, and what the implications of that might be. Makes sense, we know that gravity slows down subjective time. But I can’t get a productive answer out of an LLM because I can’t trust it, and it’s not worth bothering my physicist friends about.


  • Ah-ha, now there’s an interesting use case. I’ve had occasion in the past to work on PCB design - to be clear I didn’t do the design myself, I have no idea wtf I’m doing there, but I’m capable of reading spec sheets and soldering - and when I had to sub in components, I managed to find what I needed by filtering down for specs on DigiKey using their search. I think an LLM could have saved me a bit of time there if I could’ve just fed it the BOM and asked for alternatives, and over the course of all the subs I had to do for the particular project I’m thinking of (it was during Chinese New Year so it was tough getting answers from suppliers) that would have added up.


  • “I only ask questions to LLMs if I already know the answer”

    Not a developer here. I’ve been thinking about this because I hoped LLMs would be able to help me learn things at first, like a patient tutor I can ask all my stupid questions and it’ll never get annoyed with me. Since it can’t do that though, because it lies all the time, I don’t think I have a use case for it at all… About all it can do for me is rewrite or summarise English, and it doesn’t even do a particularly good job of that most of the time so I end up saving time by doing that work myself anyway. I suppose it’s pretty good at translating, but I haven’t tried it for that as I don’t have a lot of call to speak foreign languages.



  • voracitude@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat is the most delicious rock?
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    7 days ago

    Sorry, no, water is not a mineral because it doesn’t have a characteristic crystalline structure, and if a dictionary says otherwise it’s wrong: https://geology.com/articles/water-mineral/

    However ice can be, if it forms naturally - the definition of mineral is:

    A naturally occurring, homogeneous inorganic solid substance having a definite chemical composition and characteristic crystalline structure, color, and hardness.

    And yes, this means that if you grow a crystal like a diamond for example in a lab, technically it’s not a mineral (it’s just sparkling rock).


  • Just here to echo the sentiment that you’re still pretty young, so if you decide that’s what you want then absolutely go for it. But also I’d like to ask: I know you said the relationship cooled off, but how do you actually feel about her? Would you lose her entirely in the divorce, and would that make you sad/does that really matter (maybe not)? Just trying to get a better picture of your feelings for her and if that’s shifted.

    It’s pretty telling that she’s okay with you having “a woman on the side”, that’s a pretty big change if it wasn’t okay before, and I wonder why that changed. Did you get any clarification on how exactly her “outlook on life has changed”?


  • Framework are standouts in customer service and warranty; I recommend them because their ethos is repairability and re-use. They design their products for maximum interoperability of parts - so for example of you got one of the original laptops, you could upgrade the internals to new framework parts and buy (or build, or 3d-print) an enclosure for the original parts that still work, and turn it into a file server or whatever. You won’t run into this situation you have now, where you can’t get a part a few years later because the company themselves can’t get one. And, it’s all open source, so you can build and modify as you like… and equally if not more importantly, so can everyone else. Robust ecosystems are nice to have!


  • If it’s a Razer, it was probably pretty expensive. Is a Framework (https://frame.work/) in the budget? If so, he’ll have a great work machine capable of gaming, and upgradeable too.

    Another option is a lower-spec laptop supplemented with a GeForce Now subscription for demanding games. If you have a decent internet connection, the service actually works really well - far better than earlier services which tried to sell gaming on the cloud. You can try it for a day for $4 (or $8, for the top-tier hardware) to see how you go with it on your home connection.










  • A good mattress is indeed one of the best purchases you can make! Online stores with a lot of marketing (Purple, Casper, etc) tend to be more expensive to make up for all the marketing though, and I’ve heard stories of off-gassing despite basically everyone claiming “our mattresses don’t do that!”. Did yours smell at all when you first got it?

    Not trying to shade your choice at all, I’m just mentioning because I read a lot of threads like this when I was looking for a new mattress. I’ve gotten my last three mattresses from https://comfortoption.com/ and they’re more comfortable than anything else I’ve tried (including my old Serta memory foam block), and a few hundred bucks cheaper than the YouTube/influencer-marketed brands. My sister likes the one she got on my rec too.




  • I was skating at the local ice rink, and tripped. I think it was an Olympic-sized rink, but that might have been the pool… it was pretty big, anyway. I bounced my head off the ice so hard I saw blue and red fireworks (only time that’s ever happened to me), and slid half the length of the rink on my face wherein I crashed into the barrier. That shit hurt, I still remember it vividly 30 years later, but luckily nothing broken. My mum was simultaneously aghast, and relieved and amazed I wasn’t more injured. She was convinced I’d have fractured something in my face when she saw me fall.