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lapsis_beeftech

110 karma · joined April 2, 2021

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lapsis_beeftech··on Do the thinking models think?
Inference means synthesizing new facts from facts already known. A large language model only knows facts about language elements in its training corpus, therefore any reasoning based on such a model can only ever derive facts about language.
lapsis_beeftech··on Archive or Delete?
Archive: Nothing

Delete: Everything

lapsis_beeftech··on Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k
This sounds like a problem where cryptocurrency could actually be the solution. Next time I want to make a charitable donation I will ask for an XMR address to preserve my privacy and work around commercial payment processor issues.
lapsis_beeftech··on Denmark's government aims to ban access to social media for children under 15
Child abuse is already illegal, the law needs to be expanded to cover these new forms of harm to children. It seems reasonable that I am held criminally accountable if I expose my child to harmful Internet content like social media.
lapsis_beeftech··on Female spies are waging 'sex warfare' to steal Silicon Valley secrets
Male and female are preferred terms because they are objective and emotionally neutral while avoiding the sexism of misusing the word "man" to mean male human.
lapsis_beeftech··on YouTube is a mysterious monopoly
I was a daily, active, and paying Youtube user until recently and am quitting entirely. I was still able to work around many of Google's dark patterns – like the aggressive bot and adblock measures – but it was a chore I do not care to continue, and the emotional distress caused by the extreme hostility and toxicity around everything Youtube is too high a price to pay for content. I support content creators on Patreon but unfortunately many of them still use Youtube for hosting and those videos are not accessible to me any longer.
lapsis_beeftech··on Twenty Eighth International Obfuscated C Code Contest
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lapsis_beeftech··on The Unreliability of LLMs and What Lies Ahead
Large language models reliably produce misinformation that appears plausible only because it mimics human language. They are dangerous toys that cannot be made into tools that are safe to use.
lapsis_beeftech··on Study finds a 50% decline in the use of semicolons over the last two decades
The semicolon has always been the neglected underdog of punctuation; I try to sneak one in wherever I think I can get away with it.
lapsis_beeftech··on Memory-safe sudo to become the default in Ubuntu
Those should be closed WONTFIX. Neither doas nor sudo can protect you from the consequences of running untrusted code and must not attempt to do so because it adds needless complexity to safety-critical software.
lapsis_beeftech··on Google is deleting inactive accounts. Here's what that means
It is more like phone based 1FA at this point. My Google account cannot be recovered at all even though I know the password and still control the recovery e-mail because at one point I made the mistake of adding a (now inaccessible) phone number.
lapsis_beeftech··on I tested four NVMe SSDs from four vendors – half lose FLUSH'd data on power loss (2022)
Is nitter.net still functional for you? The service was accessible earlier this year from my location but now it is all 403 Forbidden.
lapsis_beeftech··on Ask HN: What is the least obnoxious way to ask for cookie permissions?
The answer is always no, please don't ask!
lapsis_beeftech··on US Senate’s email system melts down in face of security test and reply-all chaos
Seems trivially easy to solve since all the users are already carrying tracking devices with GPS.
lapsis_beeftech··on Today I learned you can pause the Windows Task Manager moving apps around
I prefer to keep the task manager processes sorted by PID, that way the order is stable with new processes appearing at the end of the list.
lapsis_beeftech··on Firefox engineers discover a Windows Defender bug that causes high CPU usage
Windows Defender is worse than nothing but in recent versions of Windows it is enabled by default, very difficult to disable, and may get re-enabled at any future software update.
lapsis_beeftech··on The effects of wealth on (Swedish) marriage and fertility
I had one of those accounts and it was very much a lottery and not something a financially literate person would open.
lapsis_beeftech··on How we boosted our marketing email open rate
A reasonable and safe default is to use the same channel for sending me marketing information that I used to request it. Unsolicited marketing is never acceptable.
lapsis_beeftech··on 3M to end 'forever chemicals' output
It's harmless. The sensation is electrolytic in origin rather than caused by taste receptor activation; it's like when you put a 9 V battery to your tongue except much less potential and therefore weaker feeling.
lapsis_beeftech··on Physicists rewrite a quantum rule that clashes with our universe
If the supposed experimental conditions cannot plausibly occur in nature I don't think it's a valid thought experiment.
lapsis_beeftech··on Blocking web fonts for speed and privacy (2016)
These benefits are all secondary; the main reason I block web fonts is that I cannot find a way to make my browser render text legibly using web fonts. With web fonts disabled through uBlock Origin text is rendered readable and never a blurry mess. Some poorly made web sites display alien glyphs for navigation with web fonts disabled but that is a minor annoyance I can usually work around.
lapsis_beeftech··on Finally fixed my PC’s persistent graphics and audio stutters
I too had issues with loud pops and crackles from my speakers and tried just about everything except picking apart the speakers (hardware is scary). Eventually I did investigate the speaker internals and the culprit turned out to be a bad potentiometer on the back of the subwoofer; I bypassed it with a wire which fixed the problem completely.
lapsis_beeftech··on Religion as an Ego-modulator
Religion and science are fundamentally incompatible and mutually exclusive belief systems: religion requires belief in the absence of evidence while science requires the opposite of this.
lapsis_beeftech··on Skin exposure to UVB light induces a skin-brain-gonad axis and sexual behavior
What might be going on here is that the UV induces radiation damage, which leads to endorphin release as part of the body's response to injury and pain. I have experienced this effect myself at times after getting a sunburn; the endorphins blocked the pain entirely and it was moderately euphoric. I know how dangerous sunburns are but if I was a rodent I would likely seek ways to repeat the experience.
lapsis_beeftech··on A group of activists got leaf blowers banned in the nation’s capital (2019)
Frequent leaf blowing is very much an issue where i live in Sweden. Where can I move to escape the leaf blowing? I despise the energy waste and pollution, especially the noise. The leaf blowers never seem to be doing useful work anyway; all they do is to move small amounts of organic matter a couple meters.
lapsis_beeftech··on Ask HN: How are young people getting rich these days?
Same way as always, through inheritance.
lapsis_beeftech··on Cloudflare had a partial outage
You may also want to consider that this is how the web looks all the time for those of us blocked by Cloudflare.
lapsis_beeftech··on Linux Threat Hunting: ‘Syslogk’ a kernel rootkit found in the wild
Certainly viable but your non-modular system might not support all the features you want. The Linux system I am using to post this comment is running without CONFIG_MODULES and have been so for years, but I am not using ZFS nor anything from NVIDIA.
lapsis_beeftech··on Estonia clocks fastest inflation in the Eurozone at 20.1 percent
CPI is worthless as an inflation measure for several reasons but the most obvious one is that it is too simplistic; it tries to model spending of some average consumer but actual consumers vary a lot in both their habits and ability to adapt.

For a sense of inflation recently in Sweden, look instead at PPI [1]. Consumers can expect 100% of the cost increase producers see now to get passed on to them eventually.

[1] https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/pris...

lapsis_beeftech··on Plain Text Calendar
Which cal? It is a relatively simple program that has seen many implementations and extensions. The cal I had in mind was the version from the util-linux package, it is commonly found in Linux distributions and supports full or abbreviated month names as arguments.
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