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merc

@ merc @sh.itjust.works

Posts
10
Comments
3681
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Does anyone know?

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  • I'm fine with going fast on a sled being a sport. That's cool. But, it seems like something where it's only valid if everybody involved is actively doing something on the way down, not just being ballast.

    One person sledding makes sense. But, in this sport, the guy on the bottom can't possibly be anything but ballast, can he? He can't see anything, so he can't be steering or braking, right?

    Same with bobsled, the guy at the front is steering. Maybe the people in the back help with something, but they can't be too actively involved because they can't see.

  • Man pardoned by Trump for attacking US Capitol found guilty of child abuse

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  • A key detail:

    Johnson said “he was pardoned for storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and he was being awarded $10,000,000 as a result of being a ‘jan 6er’” and would put the boy “in his will to take any money he had left over”.

    He tried to get the kid(s) to keep quiet about his molesting them by telling them that he was going to get a payout for being a Jan 6 insurrectionist, and that he was going to share his multi-million dollar payout with them.

  • A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions— Backlash against ICE is fueling a broader movement against AI companies’ ties to President Trump.

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  • Why are you so angry? I'm trying to determine if there's actually a use for these text generators, and you first say "Sorry but if you can't make LLMs useful there is something wrong with how you are using them.", and then you refuse to actually explain what you're using it for, instead making vague hand-wavey statements.

  • A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions— Backlash against ICE is fueling a broader movement against AI companies’ ties to President Trump.

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  • What do you mean by "medical help"?

  • A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions— Backlash against ICE is fueling a broader movement against AI companies’ ties to President Trump.

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  • What is it that you find useful?

  • acab

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  • I'm pretty sure that anybody who could actually become a cop would have become a cop instead of an ICE agent. ICE agents are like prison guards, they're people who don't have what it takes to be a cop. I don't think experience as an ICE agent is going to help them become cops, just like there's no prison guard to cop pipeline.

  • acab

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  • acab

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  • I really hope the message is slowly getting through that having ICE or Border Patrol on your resume from 2025 onwards is a way to guarantee you'll never be hired at most places. If there's even a gap in your resume and you look like a thumb, people will assume that you were working at ICE and trying to avoid admitting it.

    If you were stupid enough to take the job and want out, the only way is to become a whistleblower.

  • comic

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  • It works by predicting the most likely words to follow the sequence you already have, with a bit of noise added. The result is that if you ask it a question, it is effectively designed to sound as much like an answer as possible. Whether or not that answer is true is out of scope, and not something that technology could ever consider.

    I like to talk about it as if it's the world's best prop master. You ask for a prop, and you'll be given one of the most realistic props imaginable. You want a medical chart, it will give you a chart that might fool a doctor. You ask for a legal brief, it has one that might just fool a judge in court. If you ask it for a computer program, what it spits out might actually compile and/or run. But, of course, these are props. They're only designed to look good on camera. At most, someone will stream it in 4k, pause it, and try to read the prop while it's on screen.

    As someone who has been annoyed with props for decades, I love that. No more "computer code" scenes where it's just random gobbledygook. But, someone trying to use the output as if it's real is just as clever as someone who tries to spend prop money from a movie.

  • I am a lawyer, as you know, and we have a constitution and what's happening in Minnesota is wrong. There's no shades of gray. It's clear. (Team USA Curler Rich Ruohonen)

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  • He has likely ended his legal and sporting careers now.

    Suuuuuure....

  • 'What a great way to kill your community': Discord users are furious about its new age verification checks — and are now hunting for alternatives

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  • Note, this is happening for the same reason Reddit started enshittifying much harder all of a sudden. Discord wants to do an IPO and so they're going to suddenly start squeezing their users to make the numbers look good just in time for that IPO. Their bet is that they have enough momentum that enough people will stick with them long enough for the IPO to succeed, and after that happens, it's someone else's problem.

  • Trump's Disastrous Impact on the U.S. Standing in the World

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  • rate other nations on reputational factors such as trust, admiration, respect, and overall image.

    I think you can see why if those are the criteria. Switzerland may not be seen as benevolent, but they can be trusted, and they're well respected. They tend to stick to their principles, even if you don't agree with those principles, you can respect that and admire it. Also, while a lot of Switzerland's economy is finance and tech, the manufacturing industry they have isn't all that polluting. They have drug manufacturers, lens manufacturers, etc. By contrast, Norway may be a more friendly and compassionate country, but it's also an oil-based economy.

  • Trump's Disastrous Impact on the U.S. Standing in the World

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  • I like how Taiwan sneaks into the rankings out of nowhere.

    Also, Cuba and Venezuela disappeared. Does that mean that somehow they're ranked even lower than Russia?

  • Trump's Disastrous Impact on the U.S. Standing in the World

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  • Sympathy for being the target of Trump's attacks. I think even when Justin Trudeau was PM people felt sympathy for Canada as Trump was calling Trudeau Canada's "governor", etc.

    Denmark will probably go up next year just because they were targeted in the whole "Greenland" affair, and Norway will go up because Trump attacked their government for not giving him the Nobel Prize, even though the government has nothing to do with that.

  • I am a lawyer, as you know, and we have a constitution and what's happening in Minnesota is wrong. There's no shades of gray. It's clear. (Team USA Curler Rich Ruohonen)

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  • Well, I'm an IT Geek, as you know... and what's happening in Minnesota is wrong.

    If I were a lawyer maybe I could say something about how what's happening in Minnesota is illegal, which I wish this guy had done. It's far too common that something is wrong, while still being legal. It's wrong for grocery stores to throw away perfectly good food rather than donating it to the needy, but they do that and it's legal. It's wrong for garment manufacturers to destroy unsold clothing rather than give it away, but that happens too and it's legal. It's wrong for the cops to lie in an interrogation to try to get someone to confess, but that's also somehow legal.

    It would be much more powerful to say "As a lawyer, this is not only wrong, it's completely illegal. Unfortunately Trump controls the justice department, and the Supreme Court can no longer be considered a neutral arbiter of the law. So, it may be that these clearly illegal things will never be punished. But, anybody who has studied the law and is being honest will admit that the Trump admin is breaking the law."

  • I want a phone I can actually fix, and Fairphone’s record growth shows the world does too

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  • The battery is the first thing that tends to fail for me.

    My phone is a few years old now and recently I wet it down on the inductive charger overnight and missed, so when I woke up it was at 20% battery. I decided that I'd let the battery drain to 0 before charging it, because AFAIK it's still true that it's good to do that occasionally so the battery management software can recalibrate things. So I used it for a few minutes and it very quickly dropped to 9% battery, and then it hung out there for like 10 minutes without moving. I gave up on actively using it to drain the battery and just put on a YouTube live stream and put the phone down. Eventually it moved past 9% battery and slowly drained down to 1%. And at 1% it lasted at least another half an hour just sitting there playing full screen video.

    From my experience with previous phones, there's a chance that the battery management software might be able to tune things so that it is more predictable. But, if I'm unlucky it's already in its death spiral. It's a shame because it's still a fairly decent phone. I might want to upgrade anyhow, but it sucks that once the battery goes bad the phone is almost e-Waste. I've used a local guy who does repairs to change the battery in a tablet a few years ago, and it went from having horrible battery life to having good-as-new battery life. But, while the battery is still decent on it, the model is so old it's no longer getting any software updates, which means a lot of apps simply won't run on it. So, even if I replace the battery in this phone, it's getting more and more useless by the day.

    If I could load another OS on it, I could find a use for it. I have headless computers and it would be great if this could be a temporary screen / keyboard for those. It could be a dedicated bike computer. I could use its camera and monitor 3d prints. But, none of that is possible if the manufacturer says that it's too old for them to bother with and their app store no longer has apps for it.

  • I want a phone I can actually fix, and Fairphone’s record growth shows the world does too

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  • You're indirectly helping Google though. If the second hand market is better for Pixels than other devices because of Graphene, then people are more willing to buy Pixels, so Google sells more of them.

  • that

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  • They're going to consider that assault on a police officer, and might either shoot back, or at a minimum arrest you and make sure you see prison time.

  • Green Day just played "American idiot" at the Superbowl!

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  • If you don't like it, you should have edited your posts as soon as you found out they weren't Canadian. It's now what, a day since you posted that they were Canadian here, then doubled down on that here, and you still have yet to edit either of those posts to indicate you now realize you were wrong.