lvxferre

lvxferre, 6 hours ago

When I wake up I notice that I was dreaming once or twice per week. It’s always weird dreams. Weird as in:

• aliens spitting on trees
• tomato fighting in the library, killing and burying the old librarian, to resurrect a god
• using a rolled newspaper as a magic wand, triggered by the word "photon"
• a vulture digging gold nuggets from my liver, a la Prometheus
• a pig praying (stupid dream bilingual pun)
• my cats preparing popcorn (I don’t even like popcorn)

lvxferre, 14 hours ago

I’ll mostly share tips regarding what you said, OK?

Quite a few programs still rely on files in ~/.config/. So if you feel like the options in a program are “missing”, give its config file a check. (To see hidden directories: Ctrl+H)

There’s another MS Paint alternative called Kolourpaint. I personally prefer it over Drawing; once you install it you’ll need to install quite a bit of stuff from the KDE environment, but I think that it’s worth.

The super key can be configured to your taste. For example mine brings up composing, so if I type Super+e+1 I get ɛ, Super+a+1 I get ɐ, so goes on. (I open the menu with Alt+F1, by the way.) As implied, as a further tip - if you need certain characters you can create custom keystrokes through a file called .XCompose.

lvxferre, 1 day ago

Yup, I also think that it’s a retention tactic. Not the first one: karma, user profiles, that new year crap etc., they all boil down to “we’re giving you reasons to consistently come back, and produce content for us for free.”

The timing hints me that the Reddit userbase is getting a lower rebound ratio nowadays. i.e. user goes there to see some junk, then forgets about the site.

lvxferre, 1 day ago

„Im so inconvenienced by the piece of trash i bought wanting to stay a single piece of trash” // Humans as they discovered they made a small continent out of trash in the ocean. If it bothers you so much then stop buying plastic trash.

People are clearly complaining about how the feature was implemented. Not the goal (to keep it as a single piece of trash).

lvxferre, 1 day ago

So? (implied: “I dun unrurrstand u’re point”)

I’m highlighting that the other user is missing the bloody point of the complain.

People want less plastic waste, sure. And yes, less consumption is a way to achieve so - no shit Sherlock “riodoro” Holmes. However, in this specific case the design solution was done so poorly that it inconveniences the user by a lot, and it isn’t even reducing (first R) the amount of plastic being used, it’s just in the hopes that people actually recycle (third R) that small piece of junk there.

Is this clear now?

lvxferre, 1 day ago

Bloody snitch. People like this are why dogs don’t talk IRL!

lvxferre, 2 days ago

I still play SimCity sometimes. The SNES version. There’s something beautiful on slowly building your city, solving problems that arrive, and when you’re don… oh wait you’re never done! (Not even with the Mario statue.)

More into colony sim territory: Oxygen not Included, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld. In special I’ve been playing the later quite a bit (1.4 version, up to Biotech), selectively breeding colonists to get superpawns.

lvxferre, 4 days ago

This would be great if Nintendo was genuinely concerned about encouraging the usage of a hostile platform. Sadly odds are that it cares about its brand way more than “those things” playing their games.

Nintendo didn’t provide one [reason], but it’s likely due to X’s increased API costs

I don’t think so. Even with the abusive costs the price would be rather small for Nintendo, in comparison with the advertisement of its games in Twitter. I think that it’s mostly a “eeeeew, Nintendo has X integration? Nintendo must be fascist.”

Either way it’s a positive.

lvxferre, 3 days ago

I think that it’s more like “Mike got a promotion *for saving our brand from unnecessary damage”. The whole thing stinks “muh brand” from a distance for me.

lvxferre, 3 days ago

My personal take is that the current generation of generative models peaked, for the reasons stated in the video (diminishing returns). This current gen will be useful, but progress-wise it’ll be a dead end.

In the future however I believe that models with a different architecture will cause a breakthrough, being able to perform better with less training. And probably less energy requirements, too.

lvxferre, 3 days ago

I don’t think that reinventing computers will do any good. The issue that I see is not hardware, but software - the current generative models are basically brute force, you throw enough data and processing power at the problem until it becomes smaller, but at the end of the day you’re still relying too much on statistical patterns behind the wrong entities.

Instead I think that the ML architecture will change. And this won’t be done by those tech bros full of money burning effigies, who have a nasty/stupid/disgraceful tendency to confuse symbolic representations with the things being represented. Instead it’ll be done by researchers in some random compsci or robotics lab, in a random place of the world. They’ll be doing some weird stuff like emulating the brain of a fruit fly, and someone will point out “hey, you see this feature? It has ML applications”. And that’ll be when they actually add some intelligence to those systems, i.e. the missing piece of the puzzle. It won’t be AGI but it’ll be better than now, at least.

lvxferre, 3 days ago

Not even another info transferring entity would solve it. Be it quantum computers, photonic computers, at the end of the day we’d be simply brute forcing the problem harder, due to increased processing power. But we need something else than brute force due to the diminishing returns.

Just to give you an idea. A human needs around 2400kcal/day to survive, or 100kcal/h = 116W. Only 20% of that is taken by the brain, so ~23W. (I bet that most of that is used for motor control, not reasoning.) We clearly suck as computing machines, and yet our output is considerably better than the junk yielded by LLMs and diffusion models, even if you use a really nice computer and let the model take its time producing its [babble | six fingers “art”]. Those models are clearly doing lots of unnecessary operations, while failing hard at what they’re expected to do.

Regarding research, my point is that what’s going to fix generative models is likely from outside the field of artificial intelligence. It’ll be likely something small and barely related, that happens to have some ML application.

lvxferre, 4 days ago

It’s a bit messy but the rule in question might be from

• the user’s instance
• the community’s instance
• the community itself

Typically when mods ban you based on violations of some global rule they’ll highlight it, e.g. “global rule 1”. And it’s good form to include the short description of the rule being violated as the reason for the ban (e.g. instead of “rule 1”, saying “rule 1 - uncivil behaviour”).

Without further clarification, however, it’s usually the community rules. Otherwise you’ll likely get banned from your account (if you violated the global rules of your instance) or from the instance where the comm is.

In the desktop, to see the community rules you check the side panel:
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/cd6ec317-acd5-44e8-91e2-ad6ad5429664.png

And for the instance you see them on the main page of the instance:
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/0482cb3f-ee8a-40e4-a29d-fa0747f8c86c.png

Props for reading the mod logs, by the way. And if you want to know who did what, this site shows exactly which mod or admin is behind which moderative action.

lvxferre, 4 days ago

If you’re referring to .ml, Rule 1 is saying anything they don’t like (criticizing an authoritarian regime, etc)

It’s a bit more complicated than that. Basically they distort every single rule, not just rule #1. Rule #1 is specially common because they label criticism against certain governments as xenophobia, but sometimes you get “rule #4” (because you insisted on a certain point) or “rule #2” (because someone said some stupid shit and you didn’t play along).

lvxferre, 4 days ago

Old English attests the word as docga. My hypothesis is that it’s dōc “bastard, mongrel” + -ga [diminutive suffix], roughly like calling it “the little mutt”. The vowel shortening would’ve been happened already back then, otherwise the modern form would be *doog /du:g/.

Note that Latin/Romance attests similar phenomena (depreciative word for animal becoming the default word + diminutives being ingrained into the main word). And typically when you see weird stuff going on in a language you’ll see it happening in other languages too.

lvxferre, 4 days ago

That sounds unlikely.

Both squalus “shark, whale” and squamatus scaled are from Latin; typically this sort of phenomenon affects the native vocab, not erudite borrowings. And this sort of word merging is rather uncommon. Plus Old English /a/ ended as /æ/ in modern English, not as /ɪ/ (sound changes are typically regular).

Wiktionary tentatively connects it with “squirt”, that sounds a bit more likely.

lvxferre, 4 days ago

Linux if I’m using the machine.

I can maintain Windows. But I don’t remember how to use it for everyday tasks.

lvxferre, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

When I adopted Siefrieda, the way that I introduced her and Kika (my older cat; she’s now 16, I think she was 10 back then) was like this:

• let Frieda in the carrier box. In the living room, so Kika could smell it.
• let cats each in one part of the house, split by simply closing the doors. In my case it was laudry room + patio vs. the rest of the house.
• switch the cats twice~thrice a day. That lets them get used to each other’s smell, plus it gives them access to both sides of the house. Typically when I went to sleep Kika would have the main part of the house, as unlike Frieda she was already used to her home.
• put their food on both sides of a glass door. At first they avoided eating at the same time, but when they were OK with it I knew that they didn’t mind too much each other.
• open a slid on the glass door, not enough for a cat to pass, but enough for a paw. Let them smell each other “on the live”. When Kika was mildly curious with Frieda instead of aggressive, I knew that I could let them in the same room and they wouldn’t fight.

Nowadays they aren’t best friends, but let’s say that Kika tolerates Siegfrieda like you’d tolerate a really annoying kid. The only main issue is that only one of them refuses to share a litterbox, but I’m fixing this.

lvxferre, 4 days ago

I think that the key difference is that plenty societies were built with the “immigration” mindset. It isn’t just the ones in USA, but mostly the whole New World. And even if the “bulk” of the immigration in the XIX and XX centuries is over, the mindset is still here.

As opposed to the typical society in the Old World where, if you were born somewhere, odds are that your grand-grand-grand-grandparents were also born there, like Japan and UK-minus-London.

lvxferre, 4 days ago

People actually say shit like “borrow me your car Friday” or “borrow me a pencil”, instead of “lend”.

That’s correct. The distinction between lender and borrower is given by the case, so the same verb works for both.

lvxferre, 4 days ago

I’m perhaps a bit biased because for me a country boils down to a government, and I’m from the new world (we tend to see immigrants differently - more like “newcomers” and less like “outsiders”), but I’d consider you British.

That doesn’t say much though. At the end of the day, “you’re British” or “you’re Polish” seem fairly minor to me, compared with “you’re human” and “you’re you”.

lvxferre, 5 days ago

Acho que participaria, sim. Dependendo dos temas; gosto de filosofia da linguagem, epistemologia e ética/moral.

…mas o que isto tem a ver com uma comu para coisas “levemente enfurecedoras”?

lvxferre, 5 days ago

Wines, cheeses, cold cuts, mutton, salmon, porcino. I’d be also experimenting different stuff here and there (casu marzu, maple syrup, etc.)

lvxferre, 4 days ago

Those concerns mostly apply to artificial general intelligence, or “AGI”. What’s being developed is another can of worms entirely, it’s a bunch of generative models. They’re far from intelligent; the concerns associated with them is 1) energy use and 2) human misuse, not that they’re going to go rogue.

lvxferre, 17 minutes ago

This was in r/linguistics, by the way. And the moderators there were doing jack shit to inform the users. Even if one of them works with NLP, so you’d expect the person to be somewhat well versed in both Linguistics and basic programming.

The worst part? It wasn’t even the only time that I saw this conflation. I think that people get caught in the words, and miss that they’re referring to different concepts.