My poor, sweet summer child

English makes no sense.

Too true!

Isn’t “blend” related to light?

You can use blend for anything, especially if you’re creating a mix of two original things. And you could mix light too (you have things like mix() for colors in CSS).

In cooking, I would call something you use to mix dough a mixer, and something you use to make a smoothie a blender. I guess there are some subtle differences in “feel” but the words are almost interchangeable.

At the point where they are running a custom ROM, this feels like a bad faith argument. It’s like claiming someone running Linux is clearly a Microsoft supporter when they bought a laptop preinstalled with Windows and replaced the OS day 1.

Exactly what alternative are you proposing? They don’t buy any hardware at all? It materializes out of thin air?

So you’re saying the problem is that it’s infeasible to distribute the source code, which they already distribute to all of their developers with no problem, while there are numerous platforms that will host it for you for free if it’s public FOSS?..

In many parts of the US it’s typical to start driving several years earlier than that, and realistically there is no way to get anywhere other than by car. Until kids can drive, they might quite literally be unable to go anywhere or do anything without an adult to drive them. It’s sprawl to an absurd degree.

Even where bikes could theoretically be used from a distance perspective, it would likely be way more dangerous and way less practical (no bike lanes and every road is full of cars, no bike parking, you’re never getting to a bike shop for repairs without a car, …)

That feels remarkably intellectually honest. I doubt if I would have replied again in that case, so I don’t know why anyone was downvoting this

Ah, I see. That makes sense, but to be fair I think that was expected. I suspect they also pull the same data from every page where adsense is embedded regardless of browser, e.g., and every other company out there is aggregating the same sort of data every possible place they can get it from (shared sign ins, etc etc)

Edit: It’s definitely a particularly bad look when there are several things in there that representatives for Google have apparently lied about over the years.

Forgive me for not reading all 2500 documents, but I haven’t heard anything to suggest there was a bunch of sinister stuff in there – and there’s nothing implicitly evil about having docs leaked.

Exactly the same here. Since I swipe type, I have to imagine that would be a nightmare on Dvorak with all the vowels clustered together.

I use Dvorak, but it has nothing to do with statistics for me. When I switched to Dvorak, it felt more comfortable on my hands. My typing speed is essentially the exact same, for example, and I don’t think you could find a measurable difference depending on which I use. But qualitatively – it feels more comfortable.

While the conversion is appreciated, there’s no reason to be an ass about it. OP labeled it, so it’s not like it was confusing or making unnecessary assumptions about the audience. So really you’re the one who just comes across as completely culturally insensitive.

I think the trouble is, what baby are we throwing out with the bathwater in this case? We can’t prevent LLMs from hallucinating (but we can mitigate it somewhat with carefully constructed prompts). So, use cases where we’re okay with that are fair game, but any use case (or in this case, law?) that would require the LLM never hallucinates aren’t attainable, and to get back earlier, this particular problem has nothing to do with capitalism.

This is a thing that is true of all LLMs, but it seems like you’re misunderstanding the core issue. It CAN give outputs like that sometimes. What we CAN’T do is force it to give outputs like that ALL the time.

It will answer “I don’t know” if its predictive text model guesses that the most common response to this would be “I don’t know”. To do that, to simplify a little, you could imagine that it reads your question, compares that to all the text in its training data, and tries to find the conversation that looks most like the question you asked, then answers whatever the person in the training data answered. But your exact question wasn’t in its training data, so if you took that mental model, and instead had it compare to 1000 similar looking things in its training model and average them, then it would hopefully do a better job of coming up with something at least close to what you actually asked. Now take it to a million, or a billion.

When we’re asking questions about the real world, we would prefer for it to answer based on knowledge about the real world. But what if it “matches” data from a work of fiction? Or just someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about? Or true information, but about a different subject?

It doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t understand anything you say. It just looks at patterns that it learned from the training data and tries to guess what words are most likely to be said in that case. In other words, “here’s one case where it didn’t hallucinate” and “it will never hallucinate” are not the same thing at all.

Edit: To clarify, it doesn’t search its training data to answer your question, so asking “was this in the training data” is impossible. By the time you interact with it, the data is long gone. It was just used for training.

I think the bigger factor is, someone who already thinks they’re great probably isn’t working on noticing and improving their weaknesses. Someone who thinks they still have a lot to learn is putting a lot of effort into improving.

So, especially if they’ve felt that way for any significant length of time, it’s no wonder which person will end up being better.

One problem it has is that it can be REALLY slow sometimes. Like any turn based strategy game, map size has an exponential effect on how long a game takes, but the mechanics of wesnoth lean a lot more towards larger maps.

I’m mostly talking about multiplayer though. For singleplayer there’s about a hundred million campaigns to play so you could probably play it forever.

TWENTY WHOLE DOLLARS

TWENTY BUKAROONIES LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, TWENTY O’ DEM BIG ONES

XP-based progression isn’t always padding. It definitely isn’t hard to find examples where it is, but it’s also a pretty good solution to a common problem: you want the game to present a hero’s journey, where you start out weak and eventually become powerful, but you want a generic way to handle the players’ progress.

It’s really the same as the debate in TTRPGs like D&D, where the DM could either reward levels based on XP earned from killing monsters, or could forego that altogether and award levels at set points in the story. In a video game setting where you intend things to be really open ended / the player should have a lot of freedom about what tasks they do and in what order, it’s hard to handcraft exactly what each player’s adventure and progression should look like, so an XP system is a really simple way to generalize it for everyone.

It’s only padding if it requires you to engage with a lot of content that you otherwise wouldn’t want to do, before you can progress the story you’re actually interested in. But that’s not the fault of the system itself, it’s in how the designers chose to use it.

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Both of the examples you give are Id - and to be honest, I feel like this was always more of an Id thing than it was an overall trend

I agree in general, but 20 years ago, people were using email to actually talk to each other. There are problems with the protocol, but those aren’t related to the way it is federated imo. The reason people stopped using email to talk to each other was because the features of newer options were better – things like IMs and Skype, which have continued to evolve into stuff like WhatsApp or whatever people use now. But, unlike email that was devised in an era when things were still being driven largely by the education sector etc, all these other solutions were made by post-dotcom era profit-driven companies.

So I agree that email has lots of problems, and some of those are certainly related to its federation (e.g., the protocol has not really been able to advance in significant ways since making changes to it is nearly impossible). But I still think it’s the best example of a federated messaging protocol we have today.

Anyway that’s all a bit afield, as you said. I think the bottom line for me is that whichever protocol it is, if one of these current attempts at federation is going to meet my goals, then eventually there should be a large number of commercial entities participating. I know that’s not everyone’s goal though, but there’s a reason I don’t use IRC for example.