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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • You can do either, but you usually do neither. The best way is to throw a new exception for your situation and add the caught exception as an inner exception. Because rethrowing resets the stack trace, removing the context from an exception message that is often pretty vague, and “bouncing” with throw; doesn’t tell the next exception handler that you already handled (part of) the exception.


  • This is probably because of a lack of training data, where it is referencing only one example and that example just had a mistake in it.

    The one example could be flawless, but the output of an LLM is influenced by all of its input. 99.999% of that input is irrelevant to your situation, so of course it’s going to degenerate the output.

    What you (and everyone else) needs is a good search engine to find the needle in the haystack of human knowledge, you don’t need that haystack ground down to dust to give you a needle-shaped piece of crap with slightly more iron than average.







  • I have seen this, but with “Y”, “N” instead. That was the way the database stored it and the way the UI displayed it, but everything inbetween converted to boolean instead, because there was logic depending on those choices. It wasn’t that bad, all things considered, just a weird quirk in the system. I think there was another system that did just use those strings plain (like WHERE foo = 'Y' in stored procedures), but nothing I had to work with. We just mapped “Y” to true when reading the query results and were done with it.

    (And before anyone asks, yes, we considered any other value false. If anyone complained that their “Yes”, “y” or empty was seen as false, we told them they used it wrong. They always accepted that, though they didn’t necessarily learn from it.)


  • Torrents are already very hard to block. You don’t actually need a tracker, because all modern torrent clients support DHT (distributed hash table). You only need some way to get the initial hash for a torrent, so that’s where trackers are still useful, but once you’re connected to the swarm, you can only be blocked if the entire swarm is blocked.

    Tracking though… It’s too easy to get IP addresses for the entire swarm and I don’t see how you could ever fix that. Tor doesn’t really solve that issue either, it just moves it to places where you won’t get in legal trouble or to people who don’t mind getting in legal trouble, a bit like VPN providers.



  • I don’t think you even need the actual stuff to train a neural network to recognize it. For example, if I wanted to train a neural network to recognize pictures of lions, but I didn’t have any actual pictures of lions, I could use pictures of lion-shaped things, lion-colored things and locations where lions might appear. If a picture is hitting all three of those, it’s very likely to be a lion. Very likely is all a neural network can do, so it’s good enough for my purposes.






  • I don’t know what the difference is between downloading and sharing libraries, but check out Soulseek. It’s a little file-sharing program that lets others download directly from your music folder and vice versa. When I couldn’t find an album on any torrent tracker, some hero on Soulseek had it. The main drawback compared to torrents is that you’re limited to the upload speed of this one person, you can’t connect to a dozen people with the same files and combine their power.


  • Spotify is providing a much better service than radio and it needs the internet to function, but it also isn’t as cheap as a radio broadcast. Don’t judge the entire service by the free plan, which probably shouldn’t have existed in the first place. But that’s how most services attract their users these days, just burn money until you lock in enough people to start monetizing.

    I’m on a family plan with a few others and it costs a few euros a month for each of us. Lets you download music too, so cell service isn’t even required. I’ve never had an ad; people complain about sponsored recommendations, but Spotify is “pushing” tiny Japanese indie bands with less than 500 monthly listeners on me. All my Daily Mixes are similar deep cuts. I find it hard to believe anyone is sponsoring those and no way radio would ever have played any of these, unless it’s a short-distance pirate broadcaster in the home town of these indie bands.