The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • The only time that I remember dreaming with my phone, I was trying to turn it off, while its real life counterpart rung furiously.

    I’ve dreamt some times with my desktop though. Such as:

    • my cat pulling out the mouse from my computer, sitting in its place on the mousepad, and then meowing loudly (she does this a lot when she’s play-hunting)
    • throwing potatoes on the screen, so I could get some French fries in return
    • keyboard gardening: the keys were subbed with small pots full of dirt, some with small versions of plants. A lot of them were pepper plants and I was trying to cross-breed them.


  • If this is your first time installing Linux, keep it simple.

    what partitions do linux distros need to function ?

    One is enough for Linux alone. Two if you want to dual boot (one for Windows, another for Linux). Everything else is optional.

    what linux distros support secure boot with nvidia drivers ?

    I don’t have a full list, but I’m reasonably certain that Linux Mint supports secure boot UEFI, and I’m sure that it supports NVidia drivers.

    Note that you can disable secure boot to run other distros if necessary/desired.

    is it bad idea to install linux on a single drive in its own partition ?

    As in, single boot? It’s only a bad idea if you need Windows for some reason. But then you could run Windows from a virtual machine, as the other poster said.

    I have heard some linux distros like linux mint and ubuntu have a habit of touching other efi partitions when being told not to, are there any other distros that do that ?

    I’m really unsure if this actually happens; I’ve dual booted Windows with Ubuntu for years, and to my knowledge Ubuntu never touched the Windows partition without my permission.

    Plus if this happened I bet that a lot of people would be raging.

    Is there anything else I should be aware about ?

    Don’t look for exact copies of the software that you typically use with Windows. Instead, look for software that fills the same purpose.

    When possible, let your distribution install software for you, through its own package manager. Downloading and running random executables from the internet is a last resort.

    The Arch wiki is a godsend even if you don’t use Arch. (I don’t use Arch BTW.)

    When asking people for help, make sure to include which distro you’re running, and which version.




  • This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:

    1. Assuming that the current machine learning development will lead to artificial general intelligence. Will it?
    2. Assuming that said AGI would appear in time to reduce power consumption. Will it?
    3. Assuming that lowering the future power consumption will be enough to address issues caused by the current power consumption. Will it?
    4. Assuming that addressing issues from a distant future means that the whole process won’t cause harm for people in a nearer future. Will it?

    Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:

    “Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.

    The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.


    If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:

    Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.

    What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)

    …I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.




  • I thought about this a while ago. My conclusion was that the simplest way to handle this would be to copy multireddits, and expand upon them.

    Here’s how I see it working.

    Users can create multireddits multicommunities multis as they want. What goes within a multi is up to the user; for example if you want to create a “myfavs” multi with !potatoism, !illegallysmolcats and !anime_art, you do you.

    The multi owner can:

    1. edit it - change name, add/remove comms to/from the multi
    2. make the multi public or private
    3. use the multi as their feed, instead of Subscribed/Local/All
    4. use the multi to bulk subscribe, unsub, or block comms

    By default a multi would be private, and available only for the user creating it. However, you can make it public if you want; this would create a link for that multi, available for everyone checking your profile. (Or you could share it directly.)

    You can use someone else’s public multi as your feed or to bulk subscribe/unsub/block comms. You can also “fork” = copy it; that would create an identical multi associated with your profile, that then you can edit.


  • If I were to watch Dragon Ball Z now, I’d probably drop the series. I still remember it fondly, but it’s too slow.

    The first two seasons of the Pokémon anime aged well for me. Individual games, too. But the series as a whole felt from an “I know all 386!” to “…it’s a Tentaquil”.

    Chrono Trigger went from “it’s okay, it’s fun” to “…I spent my whole life underrating it, didn’t I?” So did Final Fantasy VI.

    Same deal with Dostoyevsky. I guess you need some maturity to understand things.

    Baudelaire, though? Hard pass.

    I still love 1984 and Animal Farm, but I want to drown 90% of the muppets talking about them.

    I can’t stand Legião Urbana any more. Pink Floyd on the other hand aged well, so did Nenhum de Nós.

    To be honest I was never too much into movies. There’s one or another thing that I like (Modern Times, 8 1/2, The Shining), but it’s mostly unchanged.


  • Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

    That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

    For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

    It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).




  • All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.

    What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.

    For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:

    • compounding - pick old word, add a new root, the meaning is combined. Like “firetruck” - a “truck” to deal with “fire”. You can do it recursively, and talk for example about the “firetruck tire” (the space is simply an orthographic convention). Or even the “firetruck tire rubber quality”.
    • affixation - you get some old word and add another non-root morpheme. Like “home” → “homeless” (no home) → “homelessness” (the state of not having a home).

    The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).

    Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.




  • Ah, got it.

    The relevant root is Proto-Germanic *walhaz. If I got it right it was used by PG speakers first to refer to a specific Celtic tribe, then other non-Germanic Europeans. (Proto-Slavic borrowed the word but changed the meaning - from “any speaker of a foreign language” to “Latin/Romance speaker”.)

    Latin never borrowed that root because they simply called any non-Roman “barbarus”.