Bistable multivibrator
Non-state actor
Tabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment
410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS

  • 24 Posts
  • 584 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • LLMs are quite impressive as chatbots all things considered. The conversations with them are way more realistic and almost as funny as the ones with the IRC markov chain my friend made as a freshman CS student.

    Of course, out bot’s training data only included the IRC channel’s logs of a few years and the Finnish Bible we later threw in for shits and giggles. A training set of approximately zero terabytes in total.

    LLMs are less a marvel of machine learning algorithms (though I admit they might play a part) and more one of data scraping. Based on their claims, they have already dug through the vast majority of publicly accessible world wide web, so where do you go from there? Sure, there are a lot of books that are not on the web, but feeding them in the machine is about as hard as getting them on the web to begin with.






  • I just met with a great-aunt who has been a bit distant until now. A rare time for me meeting with relatives of her generation since I ran out of living grandparents about a decade ago (though thankfully I at least hear from most of them from mom occasionally).

    We talked about some of our common relatives of her generation and some have dementia-related anterograde amnesia not quite unlike the OP’s mother. At least some of them can at least remember “new” things like the very fact that their memory doesn’t work right, but a lot of it is down to luck and conditioning, and even then it’s really hard to always consider that something might have happened hours or minutes ago, but you just forgot about it.

    Memory is hella complex is what I’m saying.







  • Trump managed to win over Gen Z men

    …in the sense that more Gen Z men voted for him than in the last election. I am seeing this spin a lot and it honestly seems like a deliberate scapegoating ploy.

    The exit poll stats seem to tell a different story.

    Data from NBC News considering “key states” (apparently Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin)

    Exit poll result charts, subsection "Age by gender". Men 18-29 (7%): Blue 47%, Red 49%. Men 30-44 (12%): Blue 43%, Red 53%. Men 45-64 (16%): Blue 38%, Red 60%. Men 65+ (12%): Blue 44%, Red 55%. Women 18-29 (7%): Blue 61%, Red 37%. Women 30-44 (12%): Blue 54%, Red 43%. Women 45-64 (19%): Blue 49%, Red 50%. Women 65+ (16%): Blue 54%, Red 45%.

    Yes, young men favored Trump. So did all other men (and even Gen X women, if narrowly). Among both genders included in the data, Gen Z was the least likely to vote for Trump and the most likely to vote for Harris.

    Granted, these stats are only from the aforementioned states and can’t represent the full picture, but they are the only relevant statistics I have seen posted on the matter and the best data I could quickly find. If anyone can show me the data that the darn kids these days are to blame, I’d like to see sime data.



  • Losing every swing state and failing to even win the consolation trophy of the popular vote after even Hillary fucking Clinton managed that much is something I’d call getting your ass handed to you. The US election system is terrible, but it’s the game they were playing and Trump won hands down.

    Also, not that it’s the point but I have to note that technically most election victories are decisive, in the sense that they resolve the winner with little to no ambiguity (which is usually the case, even when the margin is narrow). In that sense, the only way Trump’s victory is not decisive is if you contest the legitimacy of the whole election.




  • My expectation is that the overton window lurches rightwards in Europe again. We might pretend to be oh so above the boorish Americans and their two right-wing parties, but you will see our very online right wingers from libertarians to fashies emboldened act as if normal boring moderate social democracy is unhinged turbo communism. As the US Dems continue to bury their heads in the sand and act as if Harris lost because she didn’t cozy up to the right enough, the European left will be forced more and more on the rhetorical defensive. At least we still have openly pro-immigration, pro-queer, pro public spending politicians, but just like last time Trump won, the media is already scrambling to bring in the ultraliberal (economically) think tank shills to Magasplain why Trump is actually normal and fine and that world politics is not incredibly fucked to let him even near the possibly most powerful position in the world.




  • My prediction begins with a confession, for I have sinned. Seven years ago a younger, more foolish me purchased a small sum of Bitcoin out of curiosity. I had forgotten about this until just recently, when I found an old notebook where I had recorded the keys to access the accursed asset. The news about the price peaking after the election made me decide to take at least some advantage out of the result, so I cashed out, earning a tidy profit, which I dutifully reported to the state revenue service.

    My prediction for the rest of the year is that as a penance for my transgression, I will spend the ill-gotten gains from my destructive action to poison my body and mind with concoctions of ethanol.