lvxferre

lvxferre, 5 months ago

I’ve seen even people in their 40s using them. I don’t think that it’s a big deal, or that it’s too late for that.

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Lunix sucks so much that it got stuck into the version 2 for years.

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Don’t feel discouraged by the Karen above, that should’ve stayed in Reddit alongside their peers. Thoughtful contribution is often verbose, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Calcium chloride exists, it’s CaCl₂. You need two chloride anions for each calcium cation. [see note*]

It’s safe to eat as long as food grade. In fact it’s used in cheesemaking. It’s salty and bitter. It’s also used to dehydrate stuff in laboratory, since it absorbs water like there’s no tomorrow.

It doesn’t behave like metallic calcium at all. Just like sodium chloride (aka table salt) doesn’t behave like metallic sodium (warning: loud noise).

*Note: technically CaCl (one chlorine) exists, as a diatomic molecule. Rarely found in stars, you won’t find it in Earth.

lvxferre, 5 months ago (edited 4 days ago)

Neither, but if I must choose it’s probably slightly more like muscle than like cartilage. If prepared properly it’s really soft and a bit chewy, distantly reminding me meat from stews.

(That reminds me a local pub that prepares some fucking amazing breaded and deep-fried tripe. Definitively not doing it at home - it spills and bubbles the oil like crazy.)

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Musk being an assumer (note how he’s vomiting certainty on future events) doesn’t surprise me a tiny bit.

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Translation:

• when you’re walking alone
• don’t you ever feel
• like being observed?
• [God saying] you bloody paranoid

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Oh “great”, more crap between Ctrl and Alt.

[Grumpy grandpa] In my times, the space row only had five keys! And we did more than those youngsters do with eight, now nine keys!

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Complexity does not mean sophistication when it comes to AI and never has and to treat it as such is just a forceful way to make your ideas come true without putting in the real effort.

It’s a bit off-topic, but what I really want is a language model that assigns semantic values to the tokens, and handles those values instead of directly working with the tokens themselves. That would be probably far less complex than current state-of-art LLMs, but way more sophisticated, and require far less data for “training”.

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Not quite. I’m focusing on chatbots like Bard, ChatGPT and the likes, and their technology (LLM, or large language model).

At the core those LLMs work like this: they pick words, split them into “tokens”, and then perform a few operations on those tokens, across multiple layers. But at the end of the day they still work with the words themselves, not with the meaning being encoded by those words.

What I want is an LLM that assigns multiple meanings for those words, and performs the operations above on the meaning itself. In other words the LLM would actually understand you, not just chain words.

lvxferre, 5 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

The source that I’ve linked mentions semantic embedding; so does further literature on the internet. However, the operations are still being performed with the vectors resulting from the tokens themselves, with said embedding playing a secondary role.

This is evident for example through excerpts like

The token embeddings map a token ID to a fixed-size vector with some semantic meaning of the tokens. These brings some interesting properties: similar tokens will have a similar embedding (in other words, calculating the cosine similarity between two embeddings will give us a good idea of how similar the tokens are).

Emphasis mine. A similar conclusion (that the LLM is still handling the tokens, not their meaning) can be reached by analysing the hallucinations that your typical LLM bot outputs, and asking why that hallu is there.

What I’m proposing is deeper than that. It’s to use the input tokens (i.e. morphemes) only to retrieve the sememes (units of meaning; further info here) that they’re conveying, then discard the tokens themselves, and perform the operations solely on the sememes. Then for the output you translate the sememes obtained by the transformer into morphemes=tokens again.

I believe that this would have two big benefits:

1. The amount of data necessary to “train” the LLM will decrease. Perhaps by orders of magnitude.
2. A major type of hallucination will go away: self-contradiction (for example: states that A exists, then that A doesn’t exist).

And it might be an additional layer, but the whole approach is considerably simpler than what’s being done currently - pretending that the tokens themselves have some intrinsic value, then playing whack-a-mole with situations where the token and the contextually assigned value (by the human using the LLM) differ.

[This could even go deeper, handling a pragmatic layer beyond the tokens/morphemes and the units of meaning/sememes. It would be closer to what @njordomir understood from my other comment, as it would then deal with the intent of the utterance.]

lvxferre, 5 months ago

Aaaaah. I really, really wanted to complain about the excessive amount of keys.

(My comment above is partially a joke - don’t take it too seriously. Even if a new key was added it would be a bit more clutter, but not that big of a deal.)

lvxferre, 5 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Apparently my method is a mix of those listed in the text.

I’m in a similar situation as OP, some of my income is irregular. So my monthly budget isn’t directly based on the last month income, I use the average of the last six months, relying on a checking account for that. (I keep it with enough money to last me one or two months.)

Then I split that budget into four categories:

• savings - I aim for 25%. Into the saving account it goes.
• monthly fixed expenses - periodic, somewhat predictable, monthly. For example bills, cornmeal and rice, cat food, etc.
• variable expenses - they’re necessities like the above, but there’s some wiggling room. Like, if necessary I don’t mind eating eggs four lunches a week and walking instead of taking a bus, but I’d rather not to. Usually split into four weeks, so I expend it gradually.
• **"fluff"***¹ - avoidable expenses that I still want for some reason like “it improves my mood”. Things for my hobbies, going to a restaurant, buying nicer clothes or hardware, etc. Unused fluff gets transferred to my savings account in the following month.

Then here’s how I address some complexities:

• periodic expenses for things that I buy every few months (e.g. gas canisters) - I include a fraction of them into the monthly fixed expenses, and only remove the money from the checking account when buying it
• erratic but large expenses (e.g. house repairs) - I usually “borrow” this money from the savings, then “repay” it in the following months, as a fixed expense*².
• high income multiple months in a row - I cap the budget and send the overflow to the savings.
• low income multiple months in a row - cut down fluff, then reduce variable expenses, then reduce monthly fixed expenses, then reduce savings, in this order.
• really low income multiple months in a row - if really necessary I borrow from the savings, keeping in mind that I’ll need to repay myself.

Notes:

1. The actual name that I give to this category is “imposto das lombrigas”, or roughly “roundworm tax”. That’s from from my family jokingly referring to cravings as "to have roundworms for [something].
2. Some people might use a credit card instead for that, to build credit; that also works, but it depends a lot on the government that you pay taxes to. I do have a credit card but I tend to avoid it, as often there are discounts for paying things in cash.

lvxferre, 5 months ago

I don’t understand, why are you calling the other poster racist? I’m so confused… everything that he said is true. Source: I’m a gratch.

lvxferre, 6 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

One potential regression that I see is that the current generative models are abandoned, after being ruled as “infringing copyrights” by multiple countries. The tech itself won’t disappear but it’ll be considerably harder to train newer ones.

The most problematic part is however if one of them survives; likely Google. That would lead to a situation as in your second paragraph.

lvxferre, 6 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

It’s less complicated than it looks like. The text is just a poorly written mess, full of options (Fedora vs. Ubuntu, repo vs. no repo, stable vs. beta), and they’re explaining how to do this through the terminal alone because the interface that you have might be different from what they expect. And because copy-pasting commands is faster.

Can’t I just download a file and install it? I’m on Ubuntu.

Yes, you can! In fact, the instructions include this option; it’s under “Installing the app without the Mullvad repository”. It’s a bad idea though; then you don’t get automatic updates.

A better way to do this is to tell your system “I want software from this repository”, so each time that they make a new version of the program, yours get updated.

but I have no idea what I’m doing here.

I’ll copy-paste their commands to do so, and explain what each does.

<span style="color:#323232;">sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc
</span><span style="color:#323232;">echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo apt update
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo apt install mullvad-vpn
</span>

The first command boils down to “download this keyring from the internet”. The keyring is a necessary file to know if you’re actually getting your software from Mullvad instead of PoopySoxHaxxor69. If you wanted, you could do it manually, and then move to the /usr/share/keyrings directory, but… it’s more work, come on.

The second command tells your system that you want software from repository.mullvad.net. I don’t use Ubuntu but there’s probably some GUI to do it for you.

The third command boils down to “hey, Ubuntu, update the list of packages for me”.

The fourth one installs the software.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

Frankly in this case even a simple bash script would do the trick. Have it check your distro, version, and architecture; if you got curl and stuff like this; then ask you if you want the stable or beta version of the software. Then based on this info it adds Mullvad to your repositories and automatically install it.

lvxferre, 6 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I like them, even for software installation. Partially because they’re lazy - it takes almost no effort to write a bash script that will solve a problem like this.

That said a flatpak (like you proposed) would look far more polished, indeed.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

Ah, got it. My bad. Yeah, not providing anything is even lazier, and unlike “lazy” bash scripts it leaves the user clueless.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

In response to such critiques [concerning the decline of quality], Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.

My sides went into orbit. It’s a Reddit spokesperson acting like the worst of the Reddit userbase: being passive aggressive and using appeal to ignorance, at the same time.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

You probably know it, but just in case that you (or anyone reading this, who might agree with you) don’t: give the texts of The Fabian Society a check. They’re rather close to what you’re proposing with a peaceful transition; I have my criticisms against it as a Marxist strictu sensu, but I bet that you’ll have a blast with it.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

So why isn’t my glass of Campari drifting randomly across the table, under Brownian movement??? [/shitty drunkard joke]

Serious now. On economic matters I think that you’re right.

lvxferre, 6 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I’m proposing to check their texts out because it’s a good way to get theoretical background to back up your beliefs, if you believe in a peaceful transition. (Here’s a link to a good one, by the way.)

It’s also useful for Marxists, given that Marxism always interacted with other left-wing trains of thought. So by reading this stuff you get a better historical context on why Marxism defends some policies instead of other policies.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

This will probably not help OP, as he’s asking for an Android client.

Desktop users: install Firefox, uBlock Origin, then add reddit.com to your personal user filters. This way you can still access Reddit if you really want to, but it’ll make you think twice before proceeding.

lvxferre, 6 months ago

I looked for it for, like, a hour or so, but couldn’t find the scanned copies. The nearest that I’ve found was the online version of the lexicon, claiming that it contains all six volumes.