BluesF
@BluesF@lemmy.world
- Comment on surely your hobby can't be that expensive 5 days ago:
You are wiser than I
- Comment on surely your hobby can't be that expensive 6 days ago:
My modular synth is sitting next to me just begging me to pour more money into its gaping holes
- Comment on It will be great, they said... 2 weeks ago:
The tie is the most egregious part, if you zoom in the pattern makes no sense at all.
- Comment on You wish you WERE never born, actually. Subjunctive mood. 2 weeks ago:
Unfortunately most English speakers don’t really understand the reasons we use a lot of the weirder cases & tenses. I don’t know if the same is true when learning German as a first language, but certainly in English most people just learn past/present/future and that’s about it… You don’t really get into the nitty gritty around situations like “I had intended to go to the pub later that day”, i.e. speaking about the future from the perspective of the past.
Anyway, in the case of was/were I will do my best with an acknowledgement that I am no expert despite being fluent in the damn language.
Was/were are usually singular/plural words that take you into the past continuous rather than simple past - consider “I worked” vs “I was working”, “we worked” vs “we were working”. The former of each pair implies that the work was a distinct event while the latter implies it was ongoing (I used it again there with “was ongoing”).
The “subjunctive mood”, mentioned in the title is about hypotheticals, e.g. “If I were you, I would go to the park today”, “I wish I were taller”, . In the subjunctive the verb remains in its infinitive form, which in this case is “were”.
To be completely honest though… “I wish I were never born” might be grammatically correct, but to my ear it sounds quite old fashioned, like something a Jane Austen character might say. I don’t think the majority of people would blink an eye if you said “was”.
There’s also “had been” and “would have” to consider… “If I had been taller everyone would have thought I was pretty”, this is also a hypothetical but honestly I don’t know what the case/tense we’re using here is… I’ll just have to leave you with that :D
- Comment on Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure 3 weeks ago:
The company I work for (we make scientific instruments mostly) has been pushing hard to get us to use AI literally anywhere we can. Every time you talk to IT about a project they come back with 10 proposals for how to add AI to it. It’s a nightmare.
I got an email from a supplier today that acknowledged that “76% of CFOs believe AI will be a game-changer, [but] 86% say it still hasn’t delivered mean value. Ths issue isn’t the technology-it’s the foundation it’s built on.”
Like, come on, no it isn’t. The technology is not ready for the kind of applications it’s being used for. It makes a half decent search engine alternative, if you’re OK with taking care not to trust every word it says it can be quite good at identifying things from descriptions and finding obscure stuf… But otherwise until the hallucination problem is solved it’s just not ready for large scale use.
- Comment on The struggle is real 3 weeks ago:
Well hopefully after you use the bidet there won’t be any shit there lol, but no. The last few times I used a bidet there was TP as well, you just dab yourself dry with a little bit and put it in a bin. Less paper, not in the sewer, but you get a dry arse. Best of both worlds.
- Comment on The struggle is real 3 weeks ago:
Alternatively you could dry yourself afterwards.
- Comment on Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] 1 month ago:
Steam/Proton on android would be quite something, I would finally be able to play something decent on my phone that wasn’t originally released for the PS2
- Comment on Learning to drive 1 month ago:
Drying a dinner plate was how my teacher described turning. Starting with both hands opposite (10/2 or 9/3 would work fine) - push with one hand and slide the other one towards it until they meet at the top, then switch which hand is holding and reverse the motion, so you end up doing both, but you never cross your hands.
- Comment on Become unrecognizable 1 month ago:
I knew there was something I wasn’t doing
- Comment on card game shop 1 month ago:
Ahhh brings back memories from my YuGiOh days, sitting in the back of the shop opening extortionately expensive packs and playing game after game. I’d miss it if I didn’t now see just how much of a horrible waste of money it was.
- Comment on OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models 4 months ago:
I was initially impressed by the ‘reasoning’ features of LLMs, but most recently ChatGPT gave me a response to a question in which it stated five or six possible answers sparated by “oh, but that can’t be right, so it must be…”, and none of them was right lmao. Thought for like 30 seconds to give me a selection of wrong answers!
- Comment on An unwritten 'country code' is putting Rob's life at risk on the road, and all he's doing is turning right 1 year ago:
Why would you not use your hazards? Using just one indicator really does seem insane…
- Comment on 360 Degrees Owl 1 year ago:
I stand corrected, owls are indeed some exorcist shit
- Comment on 360 Degrees Owl 1 year ago:
That’s still not 270 in either direction, that would be a total of 540!! That’s seriously exorcist shit
- Comment on 360 Degrees Owl 1 year ago:
I really doubt they can go 270 degrees in either direction.
- Comment on Despair in Sweden as gangs recruit kids as contract killers 1 year ago:
Are you saying that despite the fact the argument is based in racism rather than reality, we should act as if it was real, because people believe it?
- Comment on Frog's Gift 1 year ago:
Musk continues to demonstrate loud and clear that he is none of the things he claims to be.
- Comment on Little dude ATP 1 year ago:
ChatGPT missing the question
- Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy 1 year ago:
Yes, and given infinite monkeys no doubt they will eventually evolve into something that allows them to escape!
- Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy 1 year ago:
A monkey could type any infinite sequence of letters if it types at random. Since infinite sequences of single letters, repeating patterns, and those containing hamlet except one letter is wrong every time are all possible infinite sequences, it’s possible that the money produces one of them.
Probability behaves strangely in infinite situations. A single monkey will almost surely produce the complete works of Shakespeare in infinite time… But this is partially a flaw of infinity in general.
As another example, let’s say your monkey produces an infinite sequence containing hamlet. What is the probability of that particular sequence arising? It’s 0. There is no chance of any particular sequence arising… And yet that one did arise! It was almost surely not going to be that one, but it was. The probability of any single infinite sequence arising is 0, but nonetheless one of them will be the outcome.
- Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy 1 year ago:
The probability is 1 but that does not mean that it will happen. There is a set of options where it does not happen. It happens “almost surely”.
- Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy 1 year ago:
One monkey may never produce it even given infinite time. It could just produce an infinite string of the letter a and never change it’s mind. That’s less likely that it writing hamlet, or even many hamlets… But nonetheless, it could. In fact all of the infinite monkeys could do that. If you repeated the experiment and infinite number of times, it’s likely that one of them will simple produce an infinite number of infinite strings of only the letter A. Or, idk, ASCII art.
- Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy 1 year ago:
No, it isn’t, that’s a misunderstanding of how independent random variables behave. Even with an infinite number of trials, there is never a guarantee that any particular outcome will happen.
Consider a coin flip, 50/50 chance of either getting heads or tails on each flip. Lets say we do an infinite number of flips, one by one, so that we end up with an infinite ordered set of outcomes, like so: {H, T, T, H, … }. Now, consider the probability of getting a particular arrangement of heads/tails in this infinite list, like the one I wrote before. You can’t calculate a probability for each arrangement - there are an infinite number - but it should be clear that each arrangement is equally likely, right? Because {H, …} is just as likely as {T, …}, same with {H, H, …} and {H, T, … } and so on and so on. In other words the probabilty of getting all heads on infinite coin flips is the same as the probability of getting any other combination.
In the same way, the infinite monkeys are doing ‘coin flips’ involving more than 2 options. Lets just assume they have 26 keys, one for each letter, and assume they hit each of them with equal probability. In the same way, for an individual monkey the probability of going {a, a, a, a, a, a, …, a} is the same as the probability of the same sequence with hamlet somewhere (in a particular position that is - the probabilities are only equal when we consider exactly one arrangement). What might make it more intuitively clear is that even after an infinite number of trials you only have one sequence of letters (or set of sequences, with infinite monkeys). It’s clear that there are other possible sequences - like only the letter a - and these all have a non 0 chance of having arisen given a different infinite set of monkeys for a different infinite time period.
It’s easy to be misled here! If we return to the coin flip example, the probability of flipping at least 1 head after infinite coin flips approaches 1. The limit of P(at least one H) as the number of flips approaches infinity is 1. But this is a limit! You never reach the limit, even considering infinite situations.
- Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy 1 year ago:
Not necessarily. Each monkey is independent, right? So if we think about the first letter, it’s either going to be, idk, A, the correct letter, or B, any wrong letter. Any monkey that types B is never going to get there. Now each money independently chooses between them. With each second monkey, the chances in aggregate get smaller and smaller than we only see B, but… It’s never a 0 chance that the monkey hits B. If there’s only two keys, it’s always 50/50. And it could through freak chance turn out that they all hit B… Forever. There is never a guarantee that you will get even a single correct letter… Even with infinite monkeys.
I get that it seems like infinity has to include every possible outcome, because the limit of P(at least one monkey typing A) as the number of monkeys goes to infinity is 1… But a limit is not a value. The probability never reaches 1 even with infinite monkeys.
- Comment on That chicken's name? Joe Rogan 1 year ago:
I really wanted to like that book, but aggressively making points I agree with just wasn’t enough
- Comment on Pretty sound reasoning here. 1 year ago:
10/10 callback to smooth sharks at the end there.
- Comment on Please be patient. 1 year ago:
No Peter, this isn’t an electron, this is the power of the sun
- Comment on Some explicitly single-user ActivityPub software to check out 1 year ago:
Rhyming slang isn’t really supposed to be funny, rather obfuscatory. It’s almost like a cipher, so that anyone not in the know doesn’t understand. That’s a theory, anyway.
- Comment on I hate that that happens 1 year ago:
Inspired by the story, another landlord decides to name their pub “Pig and And and And and Whistle.” Lo and behold, the sign was cramped… Ther needed more space between Pig and and and and and And and And and and and and and And and And and and and and and Whistle.