palordrolap

DuckDuckGo currently provides free access to four different LLMs. They say they don’t store user conversations, but I’m not sure I trust that, or that that won’t change at some point even if they don’t right now.

Most of them have the strawberry problem (or some variant where that word is explicitly patched(?)), fail basic arithmetic and apologise repeatedly and often without being able to better themselves when mistakes are pointed out. Standard LLM fare for 2024/5.

Certain molecules have “handedness”, and life on Earth is based around one of the two possible states.

Scientists experiment with the other handedness because there’s no reason it shouldn’t work that way around and it was just by chance that it happened the way it did on Earth.

The two forms are largely incompatible, and so no-one really knows what would happen if a wrong-handed life form was to escape the lab. Maybe nothing. Maybe really bad things.

Feel free to write your own apocalypse movie.

Pretty sure it’s a Debian family key-binding, so Ubuntu and LMDE also have it. And yeah, I use it all the time.

I love(d) the drop-down console in Quake-like games but have always preferred my command windows to be floating boxes for whatever reason.

This doesn’t add much to what others have already said, but there’s a useful saying that applies extremely well to low online prices:“If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

The tricky ones are the ones that are between, say, 10% off and full price. Some are legit, others are scammers hoping you’ll pick their slightly cheaper option. And you still need to figure out why the legit one is cheaper. They rarely do it out of the good of their heart.

I’m genuinely confused how my advice to minimise harm has itself caused harm. And sometimes, someone’s “best” isn’t much at all. That’d be me most days.

I should probably have put a conditional on “Look at yourself” to tie it in with the “might” in the lead sentence, though, that’s on me.

In the sense of one day you’re there, the other day you’re not, may I suggest not realising that you’re not looking after your mental health, having a total meltdown and finding yourself walking erratically up the road away from the place in a roughly homeward direction, followed by not being OK ever since?

Actually, no, I take that back. I suggest doing the polar opposite of that. Once that particular Prince Rupert’s drop pops, it’s an impossible task to put it back together again.

Also, when back looking at it, you’d begin to realise that the warning signs were there all along, so maybe everything wasn’t so sudden, or isekai, as you put it, at all.

Unrelated: I can’t not hear “he’s a guy” when I hear “isekai”.

Male loneliness is as much a symptom of the “suck it up” toxic masculinity that pervades your comment as it is the content of your comment.

Men are taught to be stoic, to rely only on themselves, to suck it up and get on with it, and for some, they’re trying desperately to conform to something that seems frighteningly easy for others. They’re expending all their energy on that unnatural - for them - attempt to conform rather than being able to simply exist as they might otherwise be.

Your instinct might be to attack me for pointing this out. That’s toxicity at play. Look at yourself.

But I haven’t made my main point yet. It’s this same toxicity and trying to “be a man” that turns men into the monsters that women fear, and so it becomes a vicious cycle of negativity breeding loneliness and on and on.

My advice would be “Do better. And if you can’t do better, do your best. And whatever you do, minimise harm.”

Some countries have only banned it on paper. Don’t ask how rich countries in the middle east get their buildings built, for example.

And then there’s always the loopholes that allow unscrupulous employers to pay employees less than minimum wage. Not quite slavery, but it’s pretty damn close.

For example: My country has a scheme whereby some unemployed people have been forced to take on work in order to qualify for, get this: their unemployment benefits. The employer won’t then take them on because then they’d have to pay them, and pay them minimum wage to boot, rather than get free workers from the government.

Shiii- I was blanking on answers (trauma response maybe), but this reminded me of the Minecraft horse I lost one time. I mean, I am, and was, a grown man playing a block game for fun, but that horse dying. Oof.

Objectively wrong for your part of the world maybe.

I guess my part of the world probably doesn’t have a word for the distinction because here it can mean either.

Either that or it’s a case of common parlance versus learned parlance, like, for the sake of any example, when people say “theory” but mean “hypothesis” and in learned parlance “theory” has a different meaning.

Right verb or wrong verb, it doesn’t really invalidate the point I was making. If all you do is stand by the barbecue, put things in it and flip the food occasionally while everything else magically happens around you, you’re only doing the fun bit.

What is the right word for indirect heat cooking anyway? “Smoking” in that context doesn’t necessarily imply making it hot for close-to-immediate consumption, and “cooking” seems far too general.

Likewise, “barbecuing” could mean grilling, so that’s too general as well.

When real-world horrors are too existential and complex to implement, more tangible, definite horrors must be created to make a game world a better approximation of reality.

At least one of the levels is practicality: The acts of buying and/or preparing every other food, condiment and implement that will be used for the barbecue, then cleaning everything up afterwards without implicitly relying on anyone else.

The grilling might be the fun bit, but there’s a lot else either side.

You don’t just hand someone a grilled meat patty, however beautifully it’s cooked and seasoned. The required bun has to come from somewhere. So did that plate. Maybe there’s butter on the bun. Maybe there’s salad. Maybe the meat needed marinating, etc.

This would undoubtedly backfire just like that TikTok “hack” that happened a while ago. (If you’re out of the loop, it boiled down to writing yourself a bad cheque for a ridiculous amount, and then spending the money that appeared in your account before it bounced. Presto! Cheque fraud! Bad things are coming to you soon!)

“We’re sorry to inform you that you have spent money wrongly credited to your account. You now owe us all that money back and we’ve slapped on a 100% interest rate for good measure. You could fight this in court, but we have more money than Croesus, so you’ll lose. Sincerely YourBank Inc.”

This is more programmer humour than a Linux meme, but I’ll bite.

Over a decade ago I worked for a company where I was in customer support, and very much not on the dev team. A customer suggested a feature be added to one of the online tools the company provided. I figured it could be done with a simple bit of HTML and JavaScript, and mocked something up to send to the dev team as an example of what such a feature might look like and how it might work.

My crappy code was copy-pasted wholesale into the site. I have no idea if it’s still there as, for obvious reasons, I don’t have access to that system, but at least one of their other interfaces - one where I retain an account - hasn’t changed visibly since I worked there, so it’s definitely possible.