• House Rat
• The Honkeys
• Shaboogey
• Moldplay

Weener

(Wiener would be better, but I only get one letter. Oh well.)

Not always true. Sometimes you major in what you love, graduate, get a job doing cool stuff, (get fucked over by an asshole boss, change companies, kinda hate working there every day, find out through the grapevine the asshole fomer boss had been fired for being an asshole, return to the company you liked working at), well paid the whole time, and continue to love what you do so much you don’t get enough of it at work and do it more every evening and weekend as a hobby.

But then, my experience is a) a bit dated (I graduated college before 2010) and b) most likely atypical.

You’re not wrong, but…

The arabic numererals we use in our primary base-10 system are very arbitrary. There’s no connection between the around-a-tree-around-a-tree numeral “3” we use to represent the number after the candy-cane-with-a-shoe numeral “2” and the concept of the number 3.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if the numerals in our base-60 system themselves followed a pattern.

One of the simpler and more straightforward ways of doing that (that might not work well in practice, at least not for hand-written numerals) would be just to make each numeral in our base-60 system be a vertical line of 6 marks, each either a dot or a dash. We could use that then to encode a single digit in our base-60 system using base-2 digits.

For instance:

 . .
 . .
 . _
 . .
 _ _
 . .

Would be (1*2^1)*60^1+(1*2^3+1*2^1)*60^0 = 2*60^1+10*60^0 = 120+10 = 130.

Viola! Base-60 with (handwave, mutter, qualify) only 2 numerals!

There are downsides to this as well. For instance, you’d have to not consider certain patterns valid. Six base-2 digits can encode numbers up to 63, so you’d just have to throw away the last four and say you’re not allowed to put a 60, 61, 62, or 63 in a single digit. (Also, we’d need language to differentiate between the base-2 digits and the base-60 digits in the same exact number system.)

Not the only way it could be approached, but it’s an option.

Akshully, though…

The thing with base 60 is that 60 is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Also, notably, 12. And 10.

It’s pretty trivial to divide anything in base 10 by either 2 or by 5, right? That’s specifically because 10 is divisible by 2 and 5.

But try to divide some nice round number like 10 by 3 and you can’t even represent that in decimal without stating that “oh, and by the way, these threes go on forever.”

Ever wonder why so many things come in dozens? It’s largely because 12 is evenly divisible by 2, 3, and 4.

10, though? When was the last time you needed to divide things evenly by five? It’s so much more common to want to divide by 3.

So in short, base 60 honestly has some significant benefits over base 10.

But, really, haha “sex”, am I right?

I suspect the error it’s making is that it knows that pi is approximately “3.14159265359…” and it knows (maybe) how to just look at the last digit of a number represented as a string, so it just grabbed that “9” at the end before the ellipses.

Though, that kinda makes it funnier/wronger given that that “9” is actually rounded up from an 8. 3.1415926535897932…

Now ask it what the last digit of pi that starts with the letter “B” is.

(There’s a guy named “Magnus Carlsen” who is arguably the best chess player of all time.)

Yeah, I’ve written about my experience with long COVID once or twice. I’m one of the lucky ones who has finally gotten to “mostly recovered”. Lots of people have had it much worse than me. Dianna Cowern/Physics Girl for just one example.

I’m still iso-fuckin-lating like it’s August 2020, though. I have no idea what would happen to me if I got COVID again.

I’m not sure what else I can say about it. Bluesky is a shareholder-owned company started by Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s co-founders. Current CEO of Bluesky has promised not to “enshittify” Bluesky with ads, but there’s nothing really holding them to that. There’s no federation, yet. Well, there is, but not the kind that makes platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy decentralized. That kind will require at best a lot of work and funding. There’s no guarantee it’ll happen. And no guarantee of interoperability with the Fediverse.

At any time, they could decide they’ve locked people in well enough that they can change all the rules and fuck over the users without any negative reparcussions to them. Just like Reddit and Facebook and every other platform that has enshittified lately. They could flood Bluesky with ads, sell your data, align politically with fascists, sell to Twitter, just straight shut down, or any number of evil things that leave their users with the choice to quit the platform and lose all their connections or grit their teeth and bear it.

On the Fediverse, if you don’t like something about your instance, you can switch instances and mostly still have contact with all the same content and other people. (For instance, on Mastodon, you can switch instances and keep your followers. The first Lemmy instance I joined shut down permanently, so I switched to Lemmy.World with basically no problems whatsoever.)

Nvidia:

• ✅ AI
• ✅ Religious
• 🚫 Red scanning visual sensors

Cylons:

• ✅ AI
• ✅ Religious
• ✅ Red scanning visual sensors

They’re only one step away, people, and I’m not even sure about the 🚫 on red scanning visual sensors.

Thank you for this. I haven’t been any sort of sysadmin in a good long time and when I was, I didn’t manage more than three or four servers. But I am fed up enough with SystemD to finally go to the trouble of switching back from Arch to the Gentoo I used to run and love. And it’s a breath of fresh air dealing with OpenRC (and generally the whole Gentoo ecosystem) again.

Unit files are a pain to deal with. I love that with init scripts, if I can write Bash scripts, I can write init scripts without having to look up every little thing in Google and in man pages.

Text without the “rule”:

Macaroni and Cheese

Yeah, I got that.

Ah! Cool! Always good to be expanding the fediverse.

I’m out of the loop. What’s this “Reddit thread from earlier today”?

Also, yes, welcome to former Reddit users. I’m also a former Redditor, but I left during the API pricing fiasco.

Cryptobro logic right there.

His proficiency with math is a little ruff.

Nice! Thanks for clarifying that. It definitely puts some of the hypotheses to rest. I imagine some of the people saying it was staged were just too swept up in the AI bubble hype to admit to themselves or others that their Lord and Savior Generative AI could be so dumb as to do that sort of thing without a human faking it.

Sure, but LLMs are also sufficiently prone to spontaneously doing weird stuff like that that it’s very believable that it’s authentic/organic. And there’s definitely Python code in Gemini’s training data.

I don’t think this is Gemini trying to run some of its own code to save facts about the user and whoops displaying the code it was trying to run to the user rather than running it or anything like that. That’s not how software works, and not how LLMs work.

More likely somewhere in Gemini’s training data, there’s one or more code examples (specifically Python code examples, by the looks of it) that have something to do with the user’s prompt. The relationship between Python code examples and the user’s prompt may well be extremely nonobvious, but there’d have to be something about the prompt that made Gemini hallucinate that.

Source: Am software engineer. Though I don’t have any hands-on experience with generative AI to speak of. I do think generative AI is a bullshit hype bubble, though.