Slashme

u/Slashme@lemmy.world
13 posts · 310 comments

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on Probability · c/mathmemes · 3 pts · 1d

There is no correct answer. The reason why there's no correct answer is that it's a self-referential paradox, but imagine you saw this:

What is 1+1?

A) 9

B) π

C) 76

D) Syria

There's no correct answer, so it's not a valid multiple choice question.

I typed into Google "potatoes pressure cooker" to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn't touch them.

I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.

I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you're right on all counts. Don't salt the water.

What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.

That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.

on Have we done it wrong? · c/fuckcars · 4 pts · 5d

I moved to Munich from South Africa after having spent 3 months in New Jersey.

Munich has too many cars on the roads, but you don't need a car to get around here. I've lived here since 2013 and I have needed to drive only when moving or when I've bought furniture. A few times for work as well.

It's marvelous!

"Ed is the standard text editor."

Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.

ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!

When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!

TEXT EDITOR.

When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their "edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.

Ed is for those who can remember what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!

In British slang, if you called someone a brick, you meant a solid, dependable person. If you go onto Google Books and search for "You're a brick", you'll find lots of examples, applied to men and women.

It comes from someone asking where the walls of Sparta were, and Lycurgus pointing at the army, saying "Behold the walls of Sparta, every man a brick".

on Oppressed minority · c/twitter · 1 pts · 11d

There's a super old joke (I first read it in a Leo Rosten book), that an antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? Asks the antisemite. Why the Jews? asks the other.

Maybe this is referring to that?

Maybe the press release came out after Wikimania, but it was known to the relevant staff members at Wikimania.

I'm not on the board or the staff of any Wikimedia organisation, but at Wikimania one of the Union organisers told me in the presence of a board member that the board had requested the formal vote, and that he considered it a delaying tactic. The board member later told me that it's not that simple, that the board isn't basically anti-union, but that they're following process, and that it's complicated because there are some employees that are directly employed by the foundation in the USA, and others that are employed under local contracts in various other countries, through an agency.

I literally just did this over the past few weeks. I bought four ESP32-C3 minis on expansion boards (The expansion boards come with PH2.0mm connectors and built in battery charging management, so that I can add battery power next - already ordered the LiPo batteries. At the moment they're plugged into USB-C phone chargers) and four SHT-41 temperature and humidity meters. I then installed the espressif development environment and (don't shoot me, I was under time pressure) vibe-coded the setup for the ESP boards: they broadcast the readings every 10 seconds via mosquitto.

I also bought a barebones raspberry pi and made it subscribe to the mosquitto feeds and write the data to a sqlite database, and created a basic flask website that reads the data from sqlite and shows the graphs and the temperature readings to anyone on my local wifi.

My code is on codeberg - I'd be happy to share the link if any of this is relevant to you.