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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • I distro hopped about every 4 months from ~12-22, never really feeling like I’d found the right platform. Sometimes I would dual boot (or just run) Windows, and for a while I had Windows XP in a state I could tolerate.

    For several years after 22, I ran Windows at home, and kept Linux for work. I basically just wanted to game, and Windows was good enough for that. Finally, something came up that I needed a home server for, and I chose Arch, based largely on my experiences from several years ago. Arch had been more stable for me, and when it did break, it always felt like the tools to fix it existed. Ubuntu and derivatives broke for me mostly in “Oops, system is dead. Maybe reinstall?” ways, which I didn’t want on my server. Other distros gave me an assortment of problems, from updates taking too long, to lacking support for a WM I enjoyed, to driver issues.

    Once I was regularly SSHing from Windows to Arch, I missed the things I could do on Linux (more than just games), and steam had made Linux support from a lot of games better, so I reinstalled my gaming PC as Arch too.

    I added a lot of things to my server, and had more problems with some third party tools every time e.g. elasticsearch, mongodb, or postgres updated, so I added a kubernetes cluster with an immutable OS. I tried 3 before settling on Talos, and now when a workload on the server breaks, I move it to kubernetes. That pace has worked out for me, but now the server does no heavy lifting, so I’m experimenting with local LLM on it.



  • 1970 was during the cultural revolution. In that year, the world population was 3.68 billion, and the population if China was just shy of 830 million - China had 22% of the world’s population, so if they held (only) 20% of the world’s prisoners, they’d have a lower than average incarceration rate.

    The same is not true for the US today, we have less than 5% of the world’s population today.




  • The belt and belt loops go all along the top row. If there’s only one row, the matrix can only wear a short-shorts version. There’s a crotch in each space between columns, and a leg on every column of length greater than 1.

    Sparse matrices have their own special pants that are more efficient, of course.



  • It could be a case where 1 7-Eleven car crash per day is the median, but not the majority, with 0 and 2 or more combined being more than 50%, so they mean (but communicate poorly) that most days have 1 or more cars crash into 1 or more 7-Elevens, but they couldn’t say that most days have 1 car crash into a 7-Eleven. The only additional information that that would give above simply reporting the 1.14 average is that it’s not highly concentrated on a few days, like if 300 of the annual car crashes into 7-Elevens all happened on 7/11 when people jostle over free slurpees.

    In short, “average” has too many meanings for its average use.





  • Real everyone-eats-ice-cream-and-dances-all-day hasn’t been tried either. Just because you describe a set of circumstances doesn’t mean those circumstances can exist, and it especially doesn’t mean they can be stable long term.

    Scarcity is a fact of nature. You cannot rationally distribute scarce things without knowing people’s preferences, so you either need to continuously solve the economic knowledge problem (which requires a huge state apparatus, which will be taken over by a dictator), or a means of exchanging goods between people to better suit their preferences (at which point you have invented capitalism).


  • prime_number_314159@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzshrimp is bugs
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    2 years ago

    Like today’s computer scientists, early biologists sucked at inventing new words, and simply reused existing ones. “Berry” in common language is a small, usually sweet and edible, fruit. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries are all berries.

    Then biologists came along and decided, actually, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are out, but watermelon and bananas are in, because the size of the fruit doesn’t matter, only the placement of the seeds decides whether something is a proper, scientific berry.

    A similar thing has happened with “fruit” and “vegetable”, where scientific fruits include cucumbers, eggplants, and pumpkins. Luckily, all three of these are also berries.

    I say we ignore them, and use words to mean sensible things.



  • There’s a lot of answers here, but I don’t think anyone said the magic words. To reseason cast iron, you need an oil high in poly-unsaturated fatty acids. Those are the kind that can chain together, and form a good polymer coating.

    The thing that trips me up most about this subject is that 140 years ago, pork fat was very good for seasoning cast iron. Today, it isn’t, because the composition of the fat has changed significantly.

    The best seasoning coats will be thin, not appear or feel oily, give the pan a dark color slightly more glossy than an eggshell, and resist mild detergents, metal spatulas, and heat high enough to sear a steak on. If you have a layer of loose stuff in the pan, that’s just a layer of gunk, and is probably adding some weird flavors to anything you cook.


  • The (really, really, really) big problem with the internet is that so much of it is garbage data. The number of false and misleading claims spread endlessly on the internet is huge. To rule those beliefs out of the data set, you need something that can grasp the nuances of published, peer-reviewed data that is deliberately misleading propaganda, and fringe conspiracy nuts that believe the Earth is controlled by lizards with planes, and only a spritz bottle full of vinegar can defeat them, and everything in between.

    There is no person, book, journal, website, newspaper, university, or government that has reliably produced good, consistent help on questions of science, religion, popular lies, unpopular truths, programming, human behavior, economic models, and many, many other things that continuously have an influence on our understanding of the world.

    We can’t build an LLM that won’t consistently be wrong until we can stop being consistently wrong.