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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Luddites weren’t against new technology, they were against the aristocrats using new technology as a tool or excuse to oppress and kill the labor class. The problem is not the new technology, the problem is that people were dying of hunger and being laid off in droves. Destroying the machinery, which almost always they were the operators of when working on said aristocrat’s factories, was an act of protest, just like a riot, or a strike. It was a form of collective bargaining.



  • Well, you see, that’s the really hard part of LLMs. Getting good results is a direct function of the size of the model. The bigger the model, the more effective it can be at its task. However, there’s something called compute efficient frontier (technical but neatly explained video about it). Basically you can’t make a model more effective at their computations beyond said linear boundary for any given size. The only way to make a model better, is to make it larger (what most mega corps have been doing) or radically change the algorithms and method underlying the model. But the latter has been proving to be extraordinarily hard. Mostly because to understand what is going on inside the model you need to think in rather abstract and esoteric mathematical principles that bend your mind backwards. You can compress an already trained model to run on smaller hardware. But to train them, you still need the humongously large datasets and power hungry processing. This is compounded by the fact that larger and larger models are ever more expensive while providing rapidly diminishing returns. Oh, and we are quickly running out of quality usable data, so shoveling more data after a certain point starts to actually provide worse results unless you dedicate thousands of hours of human labor producing, collecting and cleaning the new data. That’s all even before you have to address data poisoning, where previously LLM generated data is fed back to train a model but it is very hard to prevent it from devolving into incoherence after a couple of generations.


  • Didn’t happen in my life, but in the life of a family member and that makes me very happy as well. My sister got a permanent job at a place she did an internship in last year. It’s a job in her career, half the number of hours she is currently doing working at a spa, making more money, and it’s a 90% remote role. She gets to be with her 8yo son, my nephew, almost all the time he is at home now. It also means my brother in law can take more hours at his job, thus overall getting to live more comfortably.






  • Most distributions and DEs already package wine in a set it and forget it configuration. Wine by default has a system wide prefix such that clicking on any exe in the file system automatically runs it on the default prefix. This way of doing things predates wsl by a long time. It is just safer and better practice to setup a new prefix for every software, specially if they are games.








  • You can go a step further. Lemon is a cleaning agent and was used in households mixed with vinager and baking soda to scrub and clean. So people associated the lemon smell with a cleaned house. It was only natural to use lemon scents in industrialized products. Same reason lavender is also popular. Lavender flowers are incredibly easy to extract the smell and were a common homemade aroma. So it was the first smell industrialized for ambient scenters and cleaners.



  • All of them* and seen all the films as well. I’m an extraordinary fan of the series. But I’m also not delusional and can hold a critical view of the entertainment media I consume and regard them from the POV of the context that produced them. Casino Royale is still my favorite. Thunderball is still the goofiest shit Fleming wrote.

    Now you tell me your five favorite songs by the famous band and prove you are not a poser. /s

    • I haven’t read any of the post-Fleming books yet.

  • Usually campuses are the only places rationally designed to be highly accessible to people. So they can be walked. You can go from place A to place B on foot, usually under shade, either from a canopy, tree sided paths, or human scale adequately proportioned buildings. They also tend to consider and include amenities like parks, snack and drink stands, on the way. And also several cool third places like libraries, auditoriums, study halls, athleticism stadiums and cafeterias. Places where you can exist and occupy without having to consume. Finally, they usually confine cars to parking lots and prohibit their traffic inside the campus, making it a quieter and clean air space.

    My point is, college campuses are sometimes literally how humans are the happiest to live.

    Add: also consider how sometimes luxury resorts resemble the layouts and characteristics of college campuses. Self contained spaces where you can go everywhere and engage in all activities without having to sit on a car.


  • I’d love that too. But those books have become essentially a parody of themselves in today’s context. Without the 60’s mental POV, they’re nonsensical, racist, rapey and sexist. You’d end up in a unironical Austin Powers. I mean, the books are literarily fun fiction to read. But let’s not pretend they’re not cringey white male power fantasies. Spies were the coldwar’s mall ninjas. I’d rather revisit the spy kids universe.