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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  • Those are used with urine, not blood. Urine is yellow-ish, but since it’s just a drop, it doesn’t stain the strip; instead, the blue tip changes colour as it reacts with the glucose in the urine. Then you compare that coloured tip with a chart, and you get an idea of the concentration of glucose in your body. Picture related:

    I remember seeing those bottles in my bathroom all the time as a kid (my sister is diabetic).

    These almost look more like ph or ketone test strips…

    It is roughly the same idea as the one behind the litmus test for pH, indeed. The difference is which substance you’re putting there (Benedict’s reagent vs. pH indicators) and which substance you’re testing for (glucose vs. H₃O⁺ / OH⁻).




  • 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.


  • 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.



  • Lvxferre@mander.xyztoTechnology@lemmy.worldNeo-Nazis Are All-In on AI
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    8 days ago

    Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”

    I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.

    Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.



  • I’m not currently playing the game (lots to do and, well… it’s Cracktorio, you know), but I’m wondering about the impact of those changes on my typical playstyle. It’ll be probably neutral or positive.

    The key here is that I only use the fluid mechanics for short-range transportation, and even then I’m likely to force a priority system through pumps; in the mid- or long-range, I’m using barrels all the time, even for intermediates.

    Perhaps those changes will force me to revaluate the role of pipes, that would be a net positive. If they don’t, the changes will be simply neutral.


  • By far, my biggest issue with flags in r/place and Canvas does not apply to a (like you said) 20x30. It’s stuff like this:

    \

    People covering and fiercely defending huge chunks of the canvas, for something that is completely unoriginal, repetitive, and boring. And yet it still gets a pass - unlike, say, The Void; everyone fights The Void.

    Another additional issue that I have has to do with identity: the reason why we [people in general] “default” to a national flag, for identity, is because our media and governments bomb us with a nationalistic discourse, seeking to forge an identity that “happens” to coincide with that they want.

    But, once we go past that, there are far more meaningful things out there to identify ourselves with - such as our cultures and communities, and most of the time they don’t coincide with the countries and their flags.

    As such I don’t think that this is a discourse that we should promote, through the usage of the symbols associated with that discourse.

    Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people

    I think that this is more of a matter of worldview than where we’re from, given that some people in Brazil spam flags in a way that strongly resembles how they do it in USA.




  • Yeah, it’s actually good. People use it even for trivial stuff nowadays; and you don’t need a pix key to send stuff, only to receive it. (And as long as your bank allows you to check the account through an actual computer, you don’t need a cell phone either.)

    Perhaps the only flaw is shared with the Asian QR codes - scams are a bit of a problem, you could for example tell someone that the transaction will be a value and generate a code demanding a bigger one. But I feel like that’s less of an issue with the system and more with the customer, given that the system shows you who you’re sending money to, and how much, before confirmation.

    I’m not informed on Tikkie and Klarna, besides one being Dutch and another Swedish. How do they work?