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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • That also sounds a lot like the kind of comments that Reddit (and Lemmy, and really any social network with votes) grooms for if you prefer up votes to arguing with pedants and trolls. Eventually all your left with are boring overqualified comments or inflammatory comments when the mob rules and you are striving/solving for the most popular/engaging answer. It’s like conversational least squares analysis.

    I wonder where the LLM trolls are? Maybe they are just so subtle, we haven’t noticed them. Maybe LLMs aren’t hallucinating answers, so much as they and trolling us. And here is where I qualify my answer in an attempt to quell the fools that might think anything I’ve said here implies that LLMs are anything close to sapient.






  • You’ve just traded down votes for the report button.

    I say they are two different use cases. There is often a very wide gulf between a comment that I feel does not contribute to good discussion and one that is so heinous that it needs to be removed. Most of your comments for instance: pretty naive and banal adding little good to the discussion overall, but I don’t feel that you’ve said anything hateful, obscene, or aggressive enough to warrant total removal. Usually I just downvote and move on, especially when I don’t want to hear that person’s bad take reply on my own point of view. I’ve made an exception here for you simply because you are trolling all over this thread, seemingly inviting downvotes. But, I’m going to block you and move on because you’ve killed any interest I have in this thread or the larger discussion. I still don’t think your comments rise to the level of reporting.

    Reports and blocks aren’t a replacement for downvotes and if your instances doesn’t federate downvotes you shouldn’t use them that way.


  • I don’t disagree with you. I’m just amused that your example is printers and copiers, the tech that has been notoriously devilish to get working correctly from like the very beginning. New tech has certainly NOT made printing any easier or more convenient. Sometimes they simply require arcane incantations and a blood sacrifice. I still think people should at least try, but I totally understand why their threshold for “I’m over this shit and I want someone else (e.g. a pro like you) to fix it for me.” is so low specifically when it comes to printers and copiers.


  • I prefer to read by reflected light, not emitted light. I used to prefer real books (and I do still throughly enjoy them), but I’ve grown used to the creature comforts like waterproofness, annotations, highlighting, searching, and sheer data density of an ebook reader packed with more books than I could read in a few years. Granted I also highlighted and annotated any books I owned with reckless abandon, but the data hoarder in me loves the other aspects even more. Regarding data density, there is nothing worse than carting along a massive book while traveling only to finish it before you even arrive. If it was a book I didn’t mind leaving behind that might be okay, but now I’ve got to find a new book for the trip home too. I’ve tried to use my phone to read, but it’s uncomfortable given the small size and intense light. Also, reading in full sun on your phone will absolutely cook the internals and drain you battery, not great for something I might rely on for emergencies. So for me I read: new (usually physical) books from Indy authors or graphic heavy books (like baudy poetry from the renn-fest, comic books/graphic novels), previously loved books from thrift stores and used book shops (I absolutely love finding books in which people have left notes in the cover and margins), ebooks read on a cheap e-reader of popular stuff from disreputable sources, and listening to audiobooks from downright shady sources or podcasts on my phone.



  • By spending more on the military and the police than we do on education, science, and journalism.

    Wikipedia still isn’t a reliable source. It is a compendium of reliable sources that one can use to get an overview of a subject. This is also what these chatbots should be, but they rarely cite their sources and most people don’t bother to verify anyway.


  • I used to think coconut water tasted a little funny (odd mix of sweet, earthy, and umami, not like the coconut flesh at all). Then one day after a particularly long hot hike, I tried it again. I’d been hiking through a natural area that had lots of coconut palms. Crews had been clearing out some invasive species. This is relevant because they’d been using the same trails and had cut open and presumably drunk the water from dozens of coconuts along the way as they worked. These guys must know something I didn’t, so I looked into coconut water as a drink because I’d never heard of such a thing at the time.

    Anyway, this is all to say that I gave coconut water a second chance when my body really needed it and although it tasted exactly as I remembered it I suddenly found that it tasted fucking amazing. I’ve been a convert since then. I used to drink Gatorade, but now Gatorade just tastes salty, like Kool-aid made with ball sweat by comparison.