colkassad

I had a 17 year old account that got shadow banned so I went ahead and deleted it. All comments I've ever made there were in good faith and respectful and I avoided hot topic discussions (i.e. the entirety of the front page). It's no big deal. I'd say up until 2014 or so the site was pretty decent. The decline in quality in recent years is especially remarkable. Maybe they are trying to do something about this, resulting in people getting caught in the crossfire. I've moved to old-school forums for niche topics of interest. Even niche subreddits have really poor discourse these days. I'm tired of interacting with random user names as well. It's nice to recognize who you are talking to.

Vespers is great. I also recommend the classic Lovecraftian adventure, Anchorhead.

I suppose that's debatable but the point is the site is heavily moderated, something the owners can manage without volunteers for now because it doesn't appeal to the mainstream. I think your post is interesting and should have stayed, for what it's worth. I think it's a topic worth discussing but alas, many people just thought you were a bot as well. It really highlights the state of things.

This post went from #2 to #91 in an instant, maybe that has something to do with it?

I've started using old-school forums where I can find them for communities I care about (e.g. music production forums like vi-control...sometimes Hans Zimmer shows up!). It's a joy when you find one, kinda feels like the old days. The only annoying thing is the never-die threads. Some threads on these forums are over 15 years old. But honestly, I've really soured on the voting mechanic.

The same thing happened to my extremely old account (17+ years). A few weeks ago I noticed I stopped getting replies and taking a look in incognito mode verified my suspicion. I had stopped existing. I think it was because I had started the habit of deleting my older comments. Oddly enough, the hundreds of comments I had deleted had returned (only visible to me of course...other uses clicking on my profile would see an "account doesn't exist" message). At that point I just deleted the account in disgust.

I've setup a test website for my father's business. We own the domain which was bought separately and we just point it to the servers for our WordPress plan (I didn't want to be bothered with self-hosting). The main reason to go with WordPress was setting up WooCommerce to start selling some stuff online to augment the main business. I can't say I enjoy the experience of getting the look and feel right, and it hasn't really changed in twenty years. It's as enjoyable as formatting a Word document.

I did the same with an Atari 400 that had a cassette tape. I remember it would take 30 minutes or so to load/save games I copied from magazines. The keyboard was torture. I then moved on to very rudimentary text adventures of my own once I felt a bit comfortable with BASIC. I'm very glad my father bought that for me...he was a painter and we didn't have a lot of money then. It was extremely formative.

That's a great idea. Good luck with the project!

Cool project. I would think the killer use case for this is when you don't have internet access and you are forced to deal with something like an openssl man page when having to do something non-standard. With internet access I enjoy getting commands from ChatGPT directly and reading any ancillary information like explanations and alternatives (EDIT: I notice you support that to some extent). Have you tested this with local llms? I imagine it would be challenging to get something reliable from them beyond the most basic commands. For my part, I would never have the AI run a command for me and would be wary of that functionality even existing.

This also has a great audiobook version. Simon Prebble really brings the characters to life.

Years ago after getting one I was messing around in settings on Amazon's Alexa website and noticed a log of commands/messages sent to Alexa. I reviewed them and was horrified to see "why does daddy always beat me". Best to let your daughter win at Uno in this age of always-on connectivity. Or just unplug it, which is what I did.

I've never heard that one. Thanks for pointing it out. They remind me a little of The Connells...check out Scotty's Lament and Stone Cold Yesterday with my favorite being Fun & Games[1]. I think they were five years too early...I was obsessed with them in high school.

Another early one-hit-wonder is from Deee-Lite, "Groove is in the Heart" (1990). I still watch the video from time to time...the woman can dance like no other.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHFvG0KGcWc

Thank you for reminding be of the band's name. Hearing that one four times a day was painful. It's stuck in my head now again and I haven't listened to it in twenty years.

The spike in one-hit-wonders during the 90s wasn't surprising to me. I had the unenviable position of working as a line cook and construction worker during the 90s and listened to the radio 6+ hours a day. It's actually fun to listen to those hits these days. There are so many songs that I've forgotten about that I would listen to over and over again before they were overtaken by a new hit. Superman, burning beds, seether (whatever that was), bands named after boxes and chairs, ten different Eddie Vedders with arms wide open...listening to them now brings back a lot of memories so it's hard to hate them today as much as I did then. I remember exactly where I was (sitting in the parking lot of a Shoney's in Charlottesville, VA) when I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit. Typical FM radio before that was hair metal and classic rock.

My favorite, though, was Seven Mary Three. I saw them in Virginia Beach in a bar with no air conditioning, it was miserable but they had some seriously catchy tunes. Less then a year later I was painting a high school in Orlando and the song Cumbersome came on the radio with the announcer stating "can you believe these guys are unsigned???". Not too long after they were all over MTV. Second place goes to seeing No Doubt open for a forgotten band in '91. They were incredible. When I heard I'm Just a Girl for the first time on the radio I knew who it was before being told.

At thirty I quite my job as an industrial painter and sandblaster and started as a temp data entry clerk at a local government for $8/hour. Worked hard at what I did, made connections, and moved into field-work, then GIS. From there I moved to the private sector in Civil Engineering, still doing GIS. I then made a tangential career change into geospatial software development after moving to DC, as I spent a lot of time learning programming on the job as a GIS Analyst. Now I do DevOps. I think the key for me was to put myself into an environment where I could get the opportunities that I wanted, and working hard towards those goals.

I downloaded the demo for Factorio last night and suddenly it was two in the morning. Amazing game, I'm scared to buy it.

This is great. It's interesting how two very remote dwarf planets with widely different orbits are so close to each other right now (90377 Sedna and 2012 VP133).

EDIT: On further thought, I noticed another kind sorta nearby. I wonder if this is just a matter of looking for them in that area and that there could be a lot more that are undiscovered?

There is also Cardinal, a GPL fork that you can run as a plugin directly in your DAW of choice (I believe you need the paid VCV Rack to do that):

https://github.com/DISTRHO/Cardinal

There is this: https://www.kompoz.com/

It's geared more towards collaboration and there is some system to share any income that gets derived (not sure how it worked). You find someone's song page, download the existing tracks (stems) and work on your own, uploading to the collection when you are finished. I collaborated with some artists and it was fun and I met some folks. They set up payments but I never expected anything to come from that. I thought finding projects that are interesting to collaborate on was difficult. It's just a big pile of music of varying quality and genres.

First sentence of the book needs some editing:

"When thinking about where a book dedicated to computer RPGs might come from, one might Germany, Canada, UK or the US."

DevOps

I call them agents just because. I'm just doing function calling with custom system prompts for the most part. It's hardly complex, I wrote most of it in a few days.

EDIT: I should add that the first step is used to cut down on the number of function definitions I need to send to the model on each user prompt. Navigating a map can be done with as few as four function definitions but styling a map gets out of control fast (google "Mapbox Style Specification" if you want to see why).

Depends on your definition. I created a mapping application that allows one to navigate and style the map with natural language (more or less) as well as some prototype database interaction. When the user inputs a prompt, it gets sent to an "agent" whose sole purpose is to send a request to the API with a custom system prompt with few-shot examples stating something along the lines of "determine which agent should handle this request...only respond with one of [NavigationAgent, StyleAgent, ...]". When the response comes back, the prompt is then sent to the proper agent to handle the request. Each agent has function definitions for properly returning parameters to use to manipulate the map. I don't use any special libraries like langchain or anything, it's just regular API calls organized into classes that have specific system prompt behavior defined, function definitions, and some user prompt context ingestion when required (e.g. the current extent of the map).

Indeed: https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/flux?share=e7e98018-fd69-45c0-9...

I use Apple TV through the website (laptop driving the TV). They are the worst with bugs and UI design choices, at least on Chrome. Will the space bar pause the movie when I press it? Maybe!

Grew up in Cicero, NY

I'm from upstate NY, my mother used to sing this song to me as a child.

I've always understood Moldovan wine to be quite respected. I love the wine from that general region...my favorite is Crimean wine, the semi-sweet variety.

I remember Tiny Elvis from the 90s. He would sit in your tray and pop up once in a while and say something like "whoa...get a load of the size of that pixel" and then he would pinwheel his arms with the classic stance and dance his way back to the tray.