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Sternhammer

@ Sternhammer @aussie.zone

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22
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Left-Wing Science Fiction - PM Press

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  • Iain M Banks should definitely be on any list of leftie SF authors. There’s a reason The Culture is sometimes described (rather reductively) as luxury space communism.

  • Illegalism Community

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  • The popular association of ‘anarchism’ with ‘chaos’ and that organisation is anathema to anarchists has long been a source of humour. It’s a convenient misdirection for the ruling class who are directly threatened by an idea that humans can live without, you know, rulers.

  • Woman says faecal transplant saved her and could help many more like her

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  • Good sir/madam, I read the whole thing thinking the very same and didn’t come to my senses until reading your comment. Thank you.

  • Kanye West officially banned from entering Australia

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  • Post-apocalypse Australia is the setting for hotly anticipated video game - Death Stranding 2

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  • The first game is set in North America but mostly looks like Iceland. I don’t have high hopes that Kojima’s Australia will be recognisably Australia.

  • We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent

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  • Sounds wonderful. I recently had my writing—which is liberally sprinkled with em-dashes—edited to add spaces to conform to the house style and this made me sad.

    I also feel sad that I failed to (ironically) mention the under-appreciated semicolon; punctuation that is not as adamant as a full stop but more assertive than a comma. I should use it more often.

  • We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent

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  • I’ve long been an enthusiast of unpopular punctuation—the ellipsis, the em-dash, the interrobang‽

    The trick to using the em-dash is not to surround it with spaces which tend to break up the text visually. So, this feels good—to me—whereas this — feels unpleasant. I learnt this approach from reading typographer Erik Spiekermann’s book, *Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Laughs in Queensland

    Plus there is a tiny little Texas inside Queensland.

  • Covid․gov now points to a ‘lab leak’ conspiracy website

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  • Training AI Using ‘Pirated’ Content Can Be Fair Use, Law Professors Argue

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  • LLMs don’t ’remember the entire contents of each book they read’. The data are used to train the LLMs predictive capabilities for sequences of words (or more accurately, tokens). In a sense, it develops of lossy model of its training data not a literal database. LLMs use a stochastic process which means you’ll get different results each time you ask any given question, not deterministic regurgitation of ‘read texts’. This is why it’s a transformative process and also why LLMs can hallucinate nonsense.

    This stuff is counter-intuitive. Below is a very good, in-depth explanation that really helped me get a sense of how these things work. Highly recommended if you can spare the 3 hours (!):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI&list=PLMtPKpcZqZMzfmi6lOtY6dgKXrapOYLlN

  • Trump announces $500B funding for Stargate AI project following Biden executive order on AI safety - Collaboration between OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle.

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  • Every single thing Trump does is about the grift.

  • What's the endgame when the rich have all the money?

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  • I don’t think there’s any coherent end game for global oligarchs, just the habit of acquisition and growth without limit. It’s a kind of mental illness, in my opinion. As they say, the world has enough for everyone but not enough for the rich.

    In terms of population and the ruling class it’s interesting to consider feudal Europe. Lords had complete control over those who worked their land. Serfs even needed permission from their lord to leave their village for any reason, they had no freedom to look for a better life elsewhere. (Incidentally this is why there are so many accents in the places like the UK—isolation lead to language differentiation.)

    The Black Death destroyed the feudal system due to population collapse (on a scale that’s difficult to comprehend) and the nobility suddenly had to compete for workers, offering better pay and conditions to lure them to work their land. This lead to increased social mobility and the rise of the middle class.

    We may be heading towards a new feudalism but it’s difficult to predict what it might be like, especially if there’s a population crash. Capitalism needs consumers no matter how much automation is employed to produce goods.

  • New oven and they lock the air fryer functionality behind wifi.

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  • To each his own, of course, but coy swearing is still swearing.

    Actually I do sympathise. I swear too much (but not more than the average Aussie) and wish I could train myself to use some other intensifiers in my language but most of them lack intensity. By Jove! My word! Sweet zombie Jesus! Drokk!

  • For the first time, humans were exposed to a deadly combination of heat and humidity. Here's how long they lasted - ABC News

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  • I think it’s pretty good for what it’s trying to do, which is relay scientific data to non-technical readers.

  • But how will people know what size the pp is?

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  • The one on the right is an “Emotional support vehicle”.

  • Today I Learned that letters with round tops (Q, O, S, etc.) are drawn a smidgeon higher than letters with flat tops (E,T,F, etc.). This 'overshoot' makes them appear equal to our perception

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  • This is known as optical alignment. It’s very common in font design.

  • Aww crap

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  • Some Australian cockroaches definitely fly but don’t seem to do it very often. They’re quite noisy when they fly—kind of like the propeller sound you make if you trill your tongue—and there’s nothing worse than hearing that sound suddenly stop very close to you. ‘Oh fuck! Have I got a cockroach on me?’ I hate them.

  • Galaxybrain

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  • Still, the world’s most successful African American. /s

  • Apple limits third-party browser engine work to EU devices

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  • Indeed. Apple always gets criticised for the 30% ‘Apple Tax’ but the console manufacturers get a free pass for the same thing. Bizarre.