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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • My first seagate HD started clicking as I was moving data to it from my older drive just after I purchased it. This was way back in the 00s. In a panic, I started moving data back to my older hd (because I was moving jnstead of copying) and then THAT one started having issues also.

    Turns out when I overclocked my CPU I had forgotten to lock the PCI bus, which resulted in an effective overclock of the HDD interfaces. It was ok until I tried moving mass amounts of data and the HDD tried to keep up instead of letting the buffer fill up and making the OS wait.

    I reversed the OC and despite the HDDs getting so close to failure, both of them lasted for years after that without further issue.


  • If it’s a topic that has been heavily discussed on the internet or in literature, LLMs can have good conversations about it. Take it all with a grain of salt because it will regurgitate common bad arguments as well as good ones, but if you challenge it, you can get it to argue against its own previous statements.

    It doesn’t handle things that are in flux very well. Or things that require very specific consistency. It’s a probabilistic model where it looks at existing tokens and predicts what the next one is most likely to be, so questions about specific versions of something might result in a response specific to that version or it might end up weighing other tokens more than the version or maybe even start treating it all like pseudocode, where descriptive language plays a bigger role than what specifically exists.


  • My guess is what’s going on is there’s tons of psuedo code out there that looks like it’s a real language but has functions that don’t exist as placeholders and the LLM noticed the pattern to the point where it just makes up functions, not realizing they need to be implemented (because LLMs don’t realize things but just pattern match very complex patterns).



  • Don’t get me wrong, it’s decent entertainment. It’s just disconnected from any kind of scientific or technical reality and a part of me is rolling my eyes for a lot of it. And maybe a bit frustrated because I like thinking about things and analyzing and problem solving. I prefer hard magic systems over soft magic ones because there’s no point in thinking about soft magic systems because they just do whatever the plot calls for when it calls for it while hard magic systems have to build up to it and need to be clever to surprise viewers.

    Tony uses a soft technology system that defies thought.


  • Yeah, Tony was capable of doing whatever the writers wrote him to be capable of, just like every other fictional character. And the writers wrote him doing it in a manner similar to the “programming” in Swordfish or the tech work in NCIS (or whatever show it was that had multiple people typing on one keyboard at the same time). As in difficult to tell if they had any understanding of it at all, sensationalised it for entertainment purposes, deliberately made it unlike any real programming to troll people who do understand programming, or some combination of all those.

    MCU science might as well just be another school of magic. Especially when Tony’s suit could shapeshift and convert between matter and energy because of some quantum mumbo jumbo. He just cast a quantum spell on it.

    Also every movie had multiple impacts in that iron suit that should have been worse for him than most car crashes.






  • Though even in that case, the people in the class where the material wasn’t taught properly get a pass without necessarily understanding that material. On the one hand, it’s not fair for them to be punished for the prof’s mistake, but on the other hand, it’s not necessarily a good thing to give them credit for something they don’t know. It could hurt the credibility of the degree itself, similarly to the ones where you’ll get the diploma as long as you pay the bills.

    People who hire the free pass people see they lack the skills despite having the paper saying they have them and stop hiring people with those credentials. It’s the same reason why cheating is dealt with so harshly.

    The skills and knowledge are the whole point, not getting high marks or everything being fair. That said, it would be a difficult situation to deal with because being fair should still be a part of the equation, I just disagree about it being the most important part.

    Another scenario for changing the rubric would be if the people running the course realized that something they thought was important for determining competence was actually trivial. This one could also be complex to handle fairly.


  • Even if the soil is preserved, we’ve been mining the micronutrients from it and generally only replacing the 3 main macros for centuries. It’s one of the reasons why mass produced produce doesn’t taste as good as home grown or wild food. Nutritional value keeps going down because each time food is harvested and shipped away to be consumed and then shat out into a septic tank or waste processing facility, it doesn’t end up back in the soil as a part of nutrient cycles like it did when everything was wilder. Similar story for meat eating nutrients in a pasture.

    Insects did contribute to the cycle, since they still shit and die everywhere, but their numbers are dropping rapidly, too.

    At some point, I think we’re going to have to mine the sea floor for nutrients and ship that to farms for any food to be more nutritious than junk food. Salmon farms set up in ways that block wild salmon from making it back inland doesn’t help balance out all of the nutrients that get washed out to sea all the time, too.

    It’s like humanity is specifically trying to speedrun extiction by ignoring and taking for granted how things work that we depend on.