Please be careful, while the thrust of your statement is correct (not a substitute for a real professional, it can give dangerously bad advise on some occasions and there’s no way besides personal knowledge and expertise to distinguish when it messes up besides hard study and real research), the meme that LLMs are glorified autocomplete is factually incorrect. Don’t be like the D.A.R.E. program and try to scare people away from things with bad facts and lies.

It is disingenuous to say that because the AI system that trains the AI system that becomes the LLM uses “next word prediction” as its success metric, that the LLM itself is nothing but autocomplete. Here’s an example of a next word predictor: a fully fledged intelligent human being who is asked to predict the next word of a sentence. And I’m not saying that an LLM is that, or equivalent, or even close, just that being a next word predictor doesn’t rule that out, and claiming or implying so is simply wrong.

True, use of LLMs is not guaranteed to be correct, and in areas where correctness really matters and you lack expertise to check it, you really should not use an LLM. But let’s not lie to make it sound dumber than it is. It’s plenty dumb enough already.

I suspect they’d include “cups, glasses, canteens, water skins, etc” in the category of “water bottles”. :p

I would suggest “without good cause” instead of “without meaning”. Related for sure… things without good cause can often have no purpose. But I think it’s the lack of just cause that makes it BS to begin with.

I don’t think Blackmist has a hot take here. The Ubisoft formula is: navigate to a tower. Tower gives you a checklist of things to do. You do the things, then look for a new tower.

Breath of the Wild is different. Yes, you start by navigating to a tower, but then… no checklist is given. You look around, you explore, you find things to do. Maybe you find everything, maybe you miss things, maybe you miss everything. You can always come back and explore more later… and when you’ve done everything, you can’t really be CERTAIN that you got it all. The lack of a checklist dramatically shifts the gameplay from doing a list of events, with little difference from selecting them from a menu, to actually having to explore the world and look around.

To call it the Ubisoft formula is to vastly misunderstand what the Ubisoft formula is. The formula is a list of things to do. BotW does not have that. Not even slightly. The towers are just something to aim for to get you started, and a place you can use your eyes to look around from, also to get you started.

The panic at the existence of additional options you don’t use and will never use is, unfortunately, strong in some people. It is what it is.

I also have an iPhone and absolutely would love a 2nd store. I’m trying to figure out how to side load as it is, so I can get a version of YouTube that can keep playing audio while the screen isn’t on. I’d love that. My mother would be in fits of panic at the thought.

I absolutely and completely agree with you. I’m just saying, my aging mother does not. Having the option, to her, would make the iPhone a far inferior product. She is not alone in her opinion.

I actually have seen the closed garden nature of Apple be listed amongst its attractive features between laypeople. There’s no fiddly bits, everything is simplified, almost no configuration required, and the closed garden means there’s some implied quality control going on. For people for whom computers and technology is scary, the closed garden is a feature, not a bug.

So, once upon a time, the radio airwaves were free for anyone and everyone to use as they liked. There were incompatible protocols, congestion, crowding, and so on and so forth. One day, the Titanic sunk, and a major contributor of it was the fact that there were no standards for ships to be listening for distress signals on the radio.

So international regulations were established be treaty, the Radio Act if 1912 in The US, and the International Radiotelegraph Convention of 1912. These laws and treaties not only established mandatory radio watch for ships at sea, but also sought to reduce crosstalk and bandwidth hogging by people— you’d need to get a radio license to transmit on a specific frequency for a region.

A public spectrum was established for anyone to use, and another spectrum was reserved for dedicated amateurs to advance radio technology (requiring a test to prove dedication— HAM radio), another spectrum was dedicated for government use (such as police), another for hospitals, and another segment for commercial usage.

If you violate the licensing requirements, you are a pirate radio station… and this is actually taken quite seriously. Regulators will actually take measures to track you down. One thing that the HAM radio community does is something called a “fox hunt”… it’s basically like a region-wide game of hide and seek, where the hider is repeatedly broadcasting a radio signal, and the seekers use whatever technology they can muster to track the hider down. The hiders also use sophisticated means to hide their location, such as bouncing signals off of water towers to hide the origin and other even sneakier tactics. Fox hunts are a lot of fun, but always end up with the fox getting caught.

Pirate radio tends to end up the same way.

That would be Winamp… ~unless I missed the joke?~

It also wouldn’t work, nor would it likely trigger his delusions any more than not doing it. My understanding is that fundamentally, schizophrenia is when someone’s running internal monologue gets cross wired and confused with external input. Your stray random thoughts gain as much, or more, validity as actual events that you can see, hear, taste, touch, etc. Sane people know they have imaginations and random BS thoughts, and we have the ability to distinguish those from reality… but even so, sane people can be disturbed by their own random thoughts too. Now imagine if you physically COULDN’T distinguish them, or even a subset of them.

Adding additional external inputs isn’t going to do jack shit when the problem is actually the internal inputs. Not unless your external inputs are really able to make him start thinking, and thus generate more internal thoughts.

Beavers fuck up habitats and ecosystems about as much as humans used to before factories, which accelerated what we could fuck up. Beavers wreck shit up. Sometimes elephants do too, for that matter. And let’s be clear, the modifications these animals cause can have overall eventual benefits for an ecosystem, but they change the ecosystem extensively over a huge area, and any benefits you can ascribe to their actions could as easily be applied to human ecosystem modification too. “Oh yeah, the forest is completely gone, but now there’s new homes for different kinds of creatures that couldn’t live there before.” This sentence applies 100% to elephants, beavers, and yes, humans.

Some animals change their environment. We are one of them. Our tool use and brains allow us to do so on a pretty wide scale, but the destruction the elephants caused was pretty darn huge too. Humans also have the capacity to do with intention towards actively helping an ecosystem… elephants don’t have the ability for that kind of intentionality.

Of course, humans are also fully capable of acting without that intentionality too. It is pure coincidence that new ecosystems appear in the wake of elephant or beaver devastation— they weren’t actively trying to help other animals, they just wanted what they wanted. Our destruction can also have unintentional new ecosystems arise in our wake— the problem is that often we don’t LIKE the new ecosystems (bacteria and viruses, for example), and we often DO LIKE the stuff we destroyed.

But it’s not really different from what animals do. Because we aren’t separate from nature, we are nature. If we are bad, nature is bad. If nature is good, we are good. But this kind of binary thinking is too simplistic, life is more complicated than that, and we as humans have an ability to make value judgements and moral distinctions in a way that most animals cannot. We shouldn’t use that power in such a reductive way.

Not to me. Sounds more like someone who’s been in a lot of social media arguments, has a vague understanding of the counter arguments, and is trying to solidify their answer to it.

Can piefed be accessed through voyager? I heard people talking about it as a good way to avoid all the tankies, but I couldn’t find it on the instance search within voyager.

Ironically, I think it’s actually rooted in the same cause of what makes trans people exist in the first place. Identity, who you are, is core to… well, who you are. It’s important. And gender is important to who you are. Not being who you are hurts, a lot. It can hurt so much that it can drive someone to suicide. We know this— this is the whole reason that accepting trans people is important, right? Not doing so can literally kill them in this way.

So is it so strange that non-trans people hold the same depth of conviction about keeping their same gender? “Oh, but why can’t they just accept that other people need to align their mental gender with their biological sex?” Because they don’t understand or believe that this is what is happening. Really. You know the thing where not having these thing aligned can KILL you? Well, they view being trans as actively CAUSING this state, deliberately inflicting it on someone. And that social pressure and acceptance of trans people is encouraging and/or driving more people to this horrible state of affairs. It’s killing more people!

It doesn’t help that it’s been hijacked by the culture wars to distract you from the class war and authoritarianism. But it being hijacked doesn’t mean there’s not a core misunderstanding, and it’s not a misunderstanding that can really be corrected or educated by simply saying “trans people exist”. Identity runs too deep, and threats to it are too scary— they can kill you, and kill you in a way far more terrifying than a bullet. Mere words and slogans are not going to cut through that fear. You need a foundational framework of understanding the world.

And that’s where the hijacking and red vs blue political nonsense comes into play. The culture wars doesn’t create the visceral fear of trans people— but it sure as heck makes it harder or even impossible to fix.

I mourned, legitimately mourned Terry Pratchett’s death. I don’t even have a parasocial relationship with him in the sense you get with streamers and YouTubers and whatnot. He was just a man who brought wonderful ideas into the world, who focused my understanding of life and so much more, and to hear of his end hurt me bitterly.

No, but you were replying to someone who gave a single specific response that was not bad.

But the AI said that was not a good resting heart rate, and only many for during exercise if you’re young, which is not wrong?

No, your farts are not what propel your poop. Squeezing and relaxing of the tube propels the poop, which is not a pneumatic process.

My understanding is that infidelity is very nearly binary in its commonality.

There are groups of people for whom infidelity is normal, it is the norm. They believe that everyone cheats, and in their experience everyone does, because they are cheaters and are friends with cheaters. They believe that fidelity is impossible, and claims to the contrary is just social posturing

Then you have groups of people for whom infidelity is basically unthinkable. That it is the greatest breach of trust possible. It is not just not normal, it is non-existent— you don’t cheat, your partner doesn’t cheat, your friends don’t cheat, no one you know cheats. If someone you know cheats, or someone known by someone you know cheats, it is legitimately horrifying: this is not merely social posturing, it is literally shocking to you, because in your world, cheating simply does not happen. It is horrible.

Cheaters think everyone cheats. Non-cheaters believe no one cheats, or only horrible people cheat. These two groups tend to self sort themselves into groups. Bad things happen when the two groups intermingle, in fact.

What’s also a tragedy is when someone who would naturally be in the non-cheating group ends up, mistakenly, in a cheating group. They will begin to feel like everyone ELSE in the world cheats, while they themselves never would. They keep getting hurt, they keep getting betrayed, and they don’t understand why. They need a better friend group… and let me be clear: non-cheating groups ABSOLUTELY EXIST. Those groups simply don’t interact with cheating groups— they basically don’t even know that the cheating groups exist, and would be horrified to find out. So if you’re caught up in a cheating social circle, getting out is really hard! You need to find people who have literally nothing in common with the people you already know!

It kinda sucks. I don’t know a solution.

The color screen used waaaay too much battery life, making it untenable for a handheld console. The game gear’s battery problem was a huge contributor to why it didn’t do very well.