AnIndefiniteArticle

rsync?

How often do your vim plugins have updates? What are the value of these updates?

I use a pretty vanilla/minimalist vim setup and my simple plugins haven’t changed really at all in the past decade.

Pathogen seems like maybe what you want? Everything is stored within your ~/.vim/ directory, so you can copy that over with your ~/.vimrc for seamless migration.

America’s role in WWII is too “woke” for the current administration.

Right.

The 16oz can says 130 calories.

So we’d expect the 23 oz can to have 190 calories.

But it says 150… so is it watered down?

So, the bigger can is watered down? Or is the point that the calorie labels aren’t trustworthy?

What’s this about a grocery order? Powerade??

Improv is an important part of acting.

Trump’s white house chose to broadcast that conversation. That was a conscious choice.

Right.

EDIT: Yeah, I got rid of it. I had some poor and unclear word choice. I was just trying to say that Zelenskyy’s face is very communicative. He’s a skilled actor who can emote with his face and body language to communicate his position to the audience, at times without even having to get a word in edgewise. His time on TV as a comedian gave him a lot of practice. Communication is a great skill for a leader; subtle communication is a great skill during war. He clarified Ukraine’s position, and got Trump to clarify America’s change of course. He could have handled America’s heel turn in many different ways. He chose not to rise to the aggression and barbs being flung. He just clarified his country’s position and got Trump to focus on how much he wants the “raw earth”. Zelenskyy did a great job with what little he could say to guide the short exchange to expose America’s position behind Putin, and that we are only interested in Ukraine to plunder its mineral wealth.

Word to the media: don’t bother us with this shit until they have a working idea on how to monitor and regulate the shit so we can all have flying cars and not just one dude’s stupid prototype. The hard thing isn’t making a car that can fly. That shit is relatively easy. The hard part is figuring out how air traffic would work if everyone was up there. It’s already a PITA and there aren’t a helluva lot of planes compared to cars.

If they’re all automated and coordinating, NASA has put a lot of effort into researching how to coordinate a swarm of airborne agents with diverse goals.. I’d imagine that these prototypes have gotten further development and a reality-collision as drone systems have been deployed and evolving in the Ukrainian theatre. The tech for this might actually finally be ready.

Here’s an archived version of the article to get past the paywall. The hackers went to the network tab of their browser’s developer console and noticed that the API calls to write to the database weren’t password protected.

steam locomotive

rolling down the track

Try asking one to write a sentence that ends with the letter “r”, or a poem that rhymes.

They know words as black boxen with weights attached for how likely they are to appear in certain contexts. Prediction happens by comparing the chain of these boxes leading up to the current cursor and using weights and statistics to fill in the next box.

They don’t understand that those words are made of letters unless they have been programmed to break each word down into its component letters/syllables. None of them have been programmed to do this because that increases the already astronomical compute and training costs.

About a decade ago I played with an LLM whose markov chain did predictions based on what letter came next instead of what word came next (pretty easy modification of the base code). It was surprisingly comparably good at putting sentences and grammar together when working at the letter-scale. It also was horribly less efficient to train (which is saying something in comparison to word-level prediction LLMs) because it needs to consider many more units (letters vs words) leading up to the current one to maintain the same coherence. If the markov chain was looking at the past 10 words, a word-level prediction has 10 boxes to factor into its calculations and trainings. If those words have an average of 5 letters, then letter-level prediction needs to consider at least 50 boxes to maintain the same awareness of context within a sentence/paragraph. This is a five-fold increase in memory footprint, and an even greater increase in compute time (since most operations are at least of linear order and sometimes more).

That efficiency hit would allow for LLMs to understand sub-word concepts like alphabetization, rhyming, root words, etc. The expense and energy requirements aren’t worth this modest expansion of understanding.

Adding a General Purpose Transformer just adds some plasticity to those weights and statistics beyond the markov chain example I use above.

I agree with your final sentence applied to any corporate-owned website operating for profit, as long as you remove the word “developing”.

The solution isn’t to ban kids, it’s to ban the toxic sites, practices, and incentive structures.

I’m also talking about 15-20 years ago.

The influences I had were furries (queers), science/scifi nerds, academics, service members of the military who were otherwise separated from community, etc. The internet brought us together.

It was that or rural Florida where if you went outside and got stabbed by one of those poison palm you’d just get told that those have to be there because they kept the slaves from escaping the circus in the good old days.

What you’re talking about with kids today is what I mean about them being canaries.

I disagree with this point.

I used the internet extensively as a minor to socialize and find friends and to be exposed to viewpoints different from those of my peers. If I only had my peers to socialize with, things would have been much worse off for me. I found kind and supportive influences as a minor that kept me away from the hate/conservatism/fascism that many of my classmates descended into. I learned about the world and gained skills that made me a more well-rounded person. I even met up in person with thousands of strangers and had a grand time.

I see the gatekeeping of minors from internet spaces and worry about the impact that would have had on me and my development as a young person. If I hadn’t been welcomed as a minor online, I would not have been welcomed anywhere.

That said, I stayed the hell away from corporate spyware like facebook and twitter that only serve to reinforce existing problematic systems, expose people to the toxic IRL social environments that they may otherwise be trying to escape, and amplify the kind of hatred and bigotry that I personally was evading.

I miss the old internet where kids were safe. I don’t think that the solution is to ban kids; the solution is to ban platforms and profiteering incentive structures that create unsafe environments. The kids are the canaries in a coal mine. If the canary isn’t doing well, you don’t just ban it and keep digging: you get the hell out and find somewhere else to be.

Sharing data with the plebs is the true crime.

This article’s preamble cites this news story as the motivation for writing the rebuttal presented.

Literally the news story that this author cites as motivation for writing this article in the preamble to the article.