adespoton
@adespoton@lemmy.ca
- Comment on The Dead Economy Theory 1 day ago:
Very few people want to be on the receiving end of violence. Quite a few people want it to exist.
- Comment on Why have we as a society just accepted the increasingly blinding bright lights of cars? 1 day ago:
The poll closed 20 April: tc.canada.ca/…/canadian-experience-vehicle-headli…
I seem to recall it opened in February. There were lots of news articles on Lemmy about it at the time.
- Comment on Why have we as a society just accepted the increasingly blinding bright lights of cars? 1 day ago:
In Canada, the federal government just put out a nationwide poll for input on this exact subject, as it’s coming near to the time to review the related legislation. It’s very possible that some of the headlight implementations currently on the road will soon be illegal nationwide.
- Comment on 1 day ago:
Personally, I prefer browsers that by default disable most of the stuff on modern websites unless I explicitly enable it.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve visited a public website that ran exactly the way the owner planned on my browser — but that’s a good thing. I browse for the most part without ads or scripts or tracking. It’s fast, reasonably secure, and when a page fails to load what I’m expecting, I have to make the decision on whether it’s worth lowering my privacy, security and resource posture to make it work.
One solution that works pretty well is to use a web gateway that takes any website and makes it mostly functional on any browser back to the original Netscape Communicator and NCSA Mosaic. That way, you can use a very lightweight browser and let a server somewhere do the heavy lifting.
- Comment on What are the memory usage of various types of processes? 2 days ago:
Why not do something retro and base it on classic Mac OS apps? Each one has a defined minimum and preferred memory allocation (reserves its memory at launch and has to stay within that allocation).
Otherwise, if you’re using a modern OS, most processes will allocate memory as they need it, depending on use. If there isn’t enough available, background processes will be dumped to virtual memory to make room for the active process. If all memory is used up, the active process will start moving not-recently-used data onto storage as well.
Classic Mac OS lines up much better with your scenario, and is easier to populate as you can just go on infinite mac, boot an OS version, load up some applications and get info on them to see how mich they allocate.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
What does it mean when you don’t?
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
The backwards facing Grasshopper, who, As we look up now, Gathering into the LEAP, Is arriving to become, Rearrangingly, Grasshopper.
Of course, you lose most of the meaning writing it like that, which is why he didn’t.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
It’s a famous poem by e e cummings. And it’s a literary work of art. Stare at it for a while and you’ll figure it out.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r who a)s w(e loo)k upnowgath PPEGORHRASS eringint(o- aThe):l eA !p: S a (r rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs) to rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly ,grasshopper;
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
Writing is like any art form.
Lots of people do it badly, a few do it pretty well, and a very select few are masters of the art.
But making money at it and becoming famous for it are different circles in the Venn diagram from being good at it. It takes some level of skill, business acumen and luck to be successful at all three.
Some people are natural storytellers but can’t write a clear sentence. Other people know the meaning of all their words and how they interact, but can’t hold a reader’s attention.
Popular writing styles change over time. What you like and what popular culture prefers may vary immensely. Be humble, open to criticism, but find out what YOU value about your writing as well — it’s what makes it unmistakably yours and not somebody else’s.
People like flowers, but part of the beauty in flowers is that they’re all flawed. Same goes for vocal musicians. And the same goes for writing. You need to be self aware enough to realize what your weaknesses are in writing and use them as a tool to shape what you write.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
ee cummings?
- Comment on Do people really "need" friends? 4 days ago:
Can an individual survive without friends? Definitely.
Can the human species survive without friends? Probably not.
- Comment on Can we possibly experiment with the DNS on our own, at a micro level ? 6 days ago:
Yes. You could experiment with DNS on a DOS laptop with an i286 processor.
The hardware doesn’t really matter as long as it can run a TCP stack and a DNS server, which your reference machine should be able to do handily.
- Comment on Can we possibly experiment with the DNS on our own, at a micro level ? 6 days ago:
Anyone is free to se up their own DNS, which they can tweak however they want.
An interesting thing about DNS is that there is absolutely no validation done that requires the server you talk to to have a chain of authority back to the official root servers.
You can use DNSSec to add validation and encryption layers, but nobody’s forcing you to use that at this point.
So go ahead… set up your own virtual lab and play around. Get a feel for how it all works, and what breaks/works unexpectedly when you tweak a component.
Just don’t mess with an authoritative server.
- Comment on If AI is so smart, how come it doesn't track the time and date? 6 days ago:
Despite how the information is presented to you, LLMs aren’t reasoning engines. They don’t come to conclusions based on the information fed to them; they don’t learn. They’re complex probability sieves that try to predict the expected output based on a set of input tokens.
So they have no concept of anything, including time. They look at a prompt, compare it to the prompts they were trained on, and with a bit of random path selection thrown in, try to find the best path to the goal.
My guess is that up until now, this hasn’t required taking time into consideration. It would definitely be possible to create a model that valued time context, but apparently that hasn’t been an important variable to this point in time, at least for frontier models.
- Comment on What do you think goes through an animal’s mind and POV? 1 week ago:
Fruit flies have been studied very thoroughly in this manner. A lot of their brains are hardwired to sensory inputs and motor control, but the interesting thing is that their thoughts aren’t just made up of the connections between nervous tissue; the connective tissue itself is also used to store and modulate information.
What they don’t have is a highly developed cerebral cortex; so while they can feel pain and anxiety and probably anger and frustration, they don’t have much ability to reflect on any of it after the fact.
Animals that can do that include cats, whales, elephants, octopuses, parrots, ravens and jumping spiders.
- Comment on Would it be possible to model 9/11 using hot dogs for the planes? 1 week ago:
I watched the plane crash into the building, then witnessed through media reports the cleanup and demolition?
There was definite structural damage, as I said, but the impact didn’t bring the towers down.
What Wikipedia says doesn’t disagree with that.
- Comment on Would it be possible to model 9/11 using hot dogs for the planes? 1 week ago:
What level of accuracy are you looking for? The towers weren’t destroyed by the jets; they punched holes in the side and damaged the overall structural integrity while starting massive fires and causing glass to shatter.
The towers were demolished after the fact via controlled explosive charges because they were no longer safe to enter.
- Comment on What character is the king of plot armor? 1 week ago:
Walker, Texas Ranger, or Michael Knight in Knight Rider?
Or how about Jean Luc Picard in ST:TNG? It even got so bad that they kept him going by rebooting the universe.
Looking at it a different way: the lead character from Infinity Blade: no matter how often he died, he was resurrected on the table until he actually won (at which point he essentially became the man he had spent eternity attempting to destroy).
- Comment on What character is the king of plot armor? 1 week ago:
Bobby in Dallas.
- Comment on What character is the king of plot armor? 1 week ago:
First season?
My books didn’t come in seasons?
- Comment on Students Are Learning Less and Getting Higher Grades Because of AI, Study Finds 1 week ago:
No, it really isn’t. It’s one method of exercising critical thinking, but someone can go through life never having written an essay and still develop and demonstrate their critical thinking skills.
It’s when we get the vehicle confused with or fused to the concept that we run into trouble in cases like handling LLM use in education.
Should students learn how to craft an essay? Definitely. It teaches all sorts of additional skills that are required to write in that format, assuming you have to generate the entire written work yourself.
Similarly, long division is a useful skill to learn, as are Riemann sums. But so is using a graphing calculator to do your dividing and differentiation for you. LLMs are a tool, not much different from a graphing calculator.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
You’d need to provide us a LOT more information, probably more than is wise to provide.
To narrow things down a bit: Is your name Melania?
- Comment on Is it true that asshole bad boys are generally more likable than other guys? 2 weeks ago:
I think you might be confusing likeable with attractive.
As others have said, some women (and men) find guys like that attractive because they’re a challenge to conquer or are more exciting than someone more predictable and safe.
But they generally aren’t likeable. Women who are attracted to them don’t like them; they like the sense of inherited power.
- Comment on Students Are Learning Less and Getting Higher Grades Because of AI, Study Finds 2 weeks ago:
Is breadth of learning always the goal though? Sounds like students are learning to work smarter, not harder.
Now, if they aren’t learning the core competencies in their field of study, that’s a problem. If they just aren’t learning how to write an essay or remember some shortcuts they’ll never need once they graduate, I fail to see a problem.
- Comment on Why doesn't more software support ODF / ODS files? 2 weeks ago:
Format support is available in all the software for which it is the native format. And the people who use those documents have that software, so support elsewhere doesn’t matter that much.
- Comment on My brother wants to for Father's Day is volunteer at the local women's shelter. Not really a father but has two dogs. But is afraid to even ask because he is male. How does he go about this? 2 weeks ago:
He’s going nowhere near a women’s shelter without a cr check.
- Comment on My brother wants to for Father's Day is volunteer at the local women's shelter. Not really a father but has two dogs. But is afraid to even ask because he is male. How does he go about this? 2 weeks ago:
The women’s shelter likely needs volunteer work done that’s not specifically at the shelter. This would be a good way for him to volunteer.
Generally, you’re not going to find random men actually volunteering AT the shelter; that would be triggering for some of the abused women who pass through it.
Make sure he has his criminal records check up to date.
- Comment on When I retire I can I get a decent home for about 200k in canada with about an acre to live on that is out in the boondocks, and grow some weed and vegetables? Other questions inside. 2 weeks ago:
First question: do you have Canadian citizenship or a route to it? Because if you don’t, the answer to your question is a hard “no”.
If you do have a route to citizenship: if you’re living north of 60, unless you’re in a populated area, you not only will be limited to satellite Internet access, you also won’t have electricity or water or road access — you’ll have to come up with your own solutions, which usually involve someone flying in gas, propane and other supplies a few times a year for an exorbitant price.
Property values in most parts of Canada seem to be doubling around every 10 years. So you’ll want to go on to realtor.ca and look for property currently selling for around $50,000.
When I went looking around 15 years ago, I found a property for that price in southern Manitoba that had Internet, power and a well, a nicely renovated house and 2 acres of land. Today of course, it would sell for about $200,000, and you’re looking at no less than $400,000 in 10 years. The nearest populated area was in the US.
Your best place to start looking is realtor.ca, combined with Google Earth. Then once you find some places for $50k or less, ask a chatbot questions about cost of food, availability of water, etc. in that area.
- Comment on If you could make a magic wish so that your crush liked you, would you do it? 2 weeks ago:
I’ve been married to my crush for over 25 years. I’m happy with what we’ve already got. Even when they don’t like me all that much. There’s usually a reason and it’s me that has to change.