operand

aeva, 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago) to random

graphics research lifehack: you can cut out a ton of paywall scams and inscrutable academic wankery by excluding "we present" from your searches

operand, 10 days ago to random

just found out that they just put a big ole stick inside double basses and call it a 'sound post'. another scam by Big Luthier if you ask me

christianp, 16 days ago to random

am I going mad? Compiling beamer slides on windows, it seems to be case-sensitive for colour names: "Blue" causes an error, but "blue" doesn't. Mac and Linux are fine with either.
How could this be???
#TeXLaTeX

operand, 23 days ago to random

just remembered that its not normal to have extremely detailed 18th century topographical maps of your entire country available online for free

operand, 27 days ago to random

hell yeah im an outcast

🧑‍🦱🏞️🐟

im always out casting my rod

operand, 29 days ago to random

i feel like the flat horizontal surface is an underrated invention. its always wheel this wheel that but you're not making or using a wheel without a flat surface

operand, 1 month ago to random

it's completely absurd that people can get papers published where the entire performance of their approach relies on being able to make cheap requests to openapi. how is that not a major methodological mistake.

operand, 1 month ago to random

tired: family relations are a good and familiar introduction to formal logic
wired: family relations are far too fluid and culturally defined to be a good introduction to formal logic
inspired: family relations are a good introduction to formal logic because they immediately show one of the most important caveats of formal logic

operand, 1 month ago to random

somebody should make an open source co-op horde shooter tbh

operand, 1 month ago to random

storming the De Lijn headquarters to capture their highly advanced technology that can make entire buses disappear into thin air

operand, 2 months ago to random

midi choir instruments my beloved

operand, 2 months ago to random

showed my music teacher newpipe because he was annoyed by ads and by only being able to slow down youtube videos by set increments

this week he thanked me because it also lets you adjust the pitch by arbitrary amounts and he was trying to teach someone a song that wasn't A440

hell yea

operand, 2 months ago to random

the most underrated feature of 1970s music is intros that are like a quarter of the song and don't sound like music at all

mcc, 2 months ago to random

Today is my birthday!

If you'd like to do something for me for my birthday, would you please reply to this with—or by other means send me— something with colors you liked? Like an image or a video or a link. Music would also be acceptable if it gives you a strong synesthesiac association with color.

If this request confuses you, here are some examples of images with colors I found striking [Artists: Laurie Barmore, Vian Borchert, Erica Aurahack]. But your reply can be whatever colors you like.

Abstract art by Vian Borchert
Abstract art by Vian Borchert

operand, 2 months ago to random

for all the problematic aspects of survival crafting games I do think its interesting how the natural state of a Minecraft server is essentially a gift economy

mcc, 2 months ago to random

Sometimes when I open up my Lenovo+Linux laptop, I find it's just sut off, for no apparent reason. Sometimes it does this even when battery is at more than 50%. I feel like this really shouldn't be happening.

jonny, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

So long before LLMs were cool, I spent literally thousands of hours training and generating with language models going back to vanilla recursive ANNs. What I was obsessed with was the uncanny valley where they would produce text that was grammatically and syntactically correct but no human would EVER produce words like that. The vastness of linguistic latent space that is terrifying and hilarious.

LLMs still have these moments too, and my eyes are finally adjusting to them to where they are plain as day. A lot of whats cool about uncanny valley text is the sense of "I dont know whats wrong about that, I just know its wrong," so its hard to articulate rules, but heres one: eager presumption of an impossible theory of mind for the reader.

Natural writing is a dialogue with a presumed reader, and that requires gaming out how they are reacting to what youre writing. The signifiers of appealing to your reader are extremely common - hedging, prefacing, literally saying "you might be thinking," etc., so are common in the training set, but LLMs eagerly signify appeal to reader when it makes no sense.

Here are two examples from an obvious LLM scamblog article about styles of cowboy boots. On the first, I certainly wasnt worrying about the continued existence of brown boots given the macro-scale norm of brown boots, but it makes perfect syntactic sense when constructing a list of colors to say {there are colors, but dont worry there are non colors too}. In the second, I may have been wondering what defined the style of boot, but I certainly wasnt wondering what the term buckaroo meant.

These are local prediction errors: the text is extremely logical - if you had no idea what culture was outside of the prior few hundred words.

operand, 2 months ago to random

do you think they'll ever run out of connector shapes

operand, 3 months ago to random

#fedicard: the land west of france

operand, 3 months ago to random

tag yourself

18+ vga256, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to art

one of the great disappointments with apple’s decline in visual design aesthetics over the past 15 years was the loss of richly textured objects and backgrounds

every month i visit my local Re-Use center, which gives away donated household junk so it can be repurposed. it’s an artist’s paradise.

today’s find was old carpet samples. i love the texture, patterns and interesting weaved colours. feel free to use ‘em for digital art.

#art #design #digitalart