monotremata
@monotremata@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Has anyone here built their own printer? 3 days ago:
I built one, but it was a (top-down) resin printer, so I don’t think I have any useful advice to offer. Also, I kinda burnt out on the project after I came in one morning and found the resin had melted the vat and leaked onto the floor–somehow I just totally failed to consider that the solvents in the resin could obviously dissolve a lot of plastics. Huge mess, huge pain to remediate. At least it was a concrete floor. I got a replacement vat in glass, but I never worked up the will to work on it again. It did basically print before that, but I had a lot of off-layer curing and didn’t get to do much work on tuning that in before the accident.
- Comment on I prompt injected my CONTRIBUTING.md – 50% of PRs are bots 6 days ago:
Yeah, agreed. I must have misunderstood your original comment.
- Comment on I prompt injected my CONTRIBUTING.md – 50% of PRs are bots 6 days ago:
I’m not sure I totally understand your comment, so bear with me if I’m agreeing with you and just not understanding that.
“let me prioritize PRs raised by humans” … but why? Why do that in the first place? If bots/LLMs/agents/GenAI genuinely worked they would not care if it was made or not by humans, it would just be quality submission to share.
Before LLMs, there was a kind of symmetry about pull requests. You could tell at a glance how much effort someone had put into creating the PR. High effort didn’t guarantee that the PR was high quality, but you could be sure you wouldn’t have to review a huge number of worthless PRs simply because the work required to make something that even looked plausibly decent was too much for it to be worth doing unless you were serious about the project.
Now, however, that’s changed. Anyone can create something that looks, at first glance, like it might be an actual bug fix, feature implementation, etc. just by having the LLM spit something out. It’s like the old adage about arguing online–the effort required to refute bullshit is exponentially higher than the effort required to generate it. So now you don’t need to be serious about advancing a project to create a plausible-looking PR. And that means that you can get PRs coming from people who are just trolls, people who have no interest in the project but just want to improve their ranking on github so they look better to potential employers, people who build competing closed-source projects and want to waste the time of the developers of open-source alternatives, people who want to sneak subtle backdoors into various projects (this was always a risk but used to require an unusual degree of resources, and now anyone can spam attempts to a bunch of projects), etc. And there’s no obvious way to tell all these things apart; you just have to do a code review, and that’s extremely labor-intensive.
So yeah, even if the LLMs were good enough to produce terrific code when well-guided, you wouldn’t be able to discern exactly what they’d been instructed to make the code do, and it could still be a big problem.
- Comment on Hisense TVs force owners to watch intrusive ads when switching inputs, visiting the home screen, or even changing channels — practice infuriates consumers, brand denies wrongdoing 2 weeks ago:
Yeah. I think none of us really understands how valuable all our data really is.
- Comment on Hisense TVs force owners to watch intrusive ads when switching inputs, visiting the home screen, or even changing channels — practice infuriates consumers, brand denies wrongdoing 2 weeks ago:
Most of the “commercial” TVs, the ones intended for businesses, don’t have this. They also don’t have streaming services and whatnot not built in. They’re just a display with a few inputs, and maybe a tuner.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 3 weeks ago:
Haha, that’s giving me way too much credit. I was a high school student and was still figuring out what the GUI bits did, like the ArcBall widget, so I practically couldn’t do anything useful on the GUI itself on days when I didn’t have a GUI machine. I could do some of the behind-the-scenes linear algebra stuff, though. Like, there was an array that held a 3d vector at every point in space that represented the flow field, and they wanted to be able to visualize cross-sections, so for that I needed to make a 2d grid of 2d vectors on a single plane. That sort of thing basically had to be done blind anyway.
- Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion. 3 weeks ago:
Oh man, I had to use the orange ones sometimes at my first programming job. They were VAX/VMS dumb terminals. It sucked getting stuck with one of those, because the job was making a visualization GUI for some data, and these ones literally couldn’t run the GUI; they were text-only. Eventually they started reserving one of the GUI-capable machines for me.
- Comment on big facts 3 weeks ago:
Through the modial interaction of magnetoreluctance and capacitive diractance… youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag
- Comment on big facts 4 weeks ago:
I mean, it’s talking about people thinking that “energy, frequency and vibration are just mystical nonsense.” People don’t think that if you talk about an FM station broadcasting on a particular frequency, or about the frequency of light absorbed by particular atomic orbitals. They think that if you’re explaining that you’ve slept much better since you placed jasper and amethyst on the ley lines near your bed to absorb the negative frequencies.
The implication in the meme that anyone who is using these terms cannot be indulging in mystical nonsense, because these terms can also apply to real things. In fact, though, mystic cranks have been coopting scientific terms for ages, and they show no signs of slowing down. It’s a real problem that people confuse crap with science.
- Comment on big facts 4 weeks ago:
This is what I don’t like about the top meme, though. Like, yes, energy, frequency, and vibration are all things. Obviously. But the top meme is implying that everyone should believe that those things work in the specific ways that the woo practitioners say they do, and that’s a very different demand. More, it’s implying that people who doubt those effects are ignoring obvious evidence, when in fact the people who doubt those effects do so because nobody has been able to demonstrate reliable evidence for them. It has a nasty gaslighting overtone to it.
- Comment on big facts 4 weeks ago:
I think you’re probably joking, but this actually is a thing. e.g. scitechdaily.com/engineers-harvest-energy-from-wi…
- Comment on Also, in my state, all the drivers are the worst 4 weeks ago:
I’ve heard “If you want snow, drive to it,” which is pretty related.
- Comment on Priorities 2 months ago:
I think “ct” on this receipt is short for “count” rather than “cent.”
- Comment on The dominoes are falling: motherboard sales down 50% as PC enthusiasts are put off by stinking memory prices 2 months ago:
Yeah. At least I managed to pick up a used 3070 a couple years ago. I’ll just jolly along my old i7-7700k system for a few more years…
- Comment on The dominoes are falling: motherboard sales down 50% as PC enthusiasts are put off by stinking memory prices 2 months ago:
GPUs at least are actually not that expensive right now. Aside from the 5090, they’re mostly close to MSRP, which is a pretty novel situation. I was waiting to upgrade my whole system for that, though, because my CPU would be a bottleneck at this point, and that’s not really an option now because of the crazy RAM prices. The past few years have been super frustrating for PC builders.
- Comment on The dominoes are falling: motherboard sales down 50% as PC enthusiasts are put off by stinking memory prices 2 months ago:
I mean, it is also that OpenAI cornered the RAM market, which is a typical price gouging scenario; it’s just weird that OpenAI wasn’t trying to make money directly through the maneuver. It does seem like they wanted prices to rise, though, to increase the barrier to competition.
- Comment on *confused flatfish noises* 3 months ago:
Also crabs. I mean, their eyes are often on stalks and more mobile than mammalian eyes, and they’re compound, so they have a very wide field of view, but they’re still often basically in front, and they do apparently provide depth cues for hunting thanks to this.
www.jneurosci.org/content/38/31/6933
It also occurred to me to look up about dragonflies, and it seems they mostly hunt dorsally (which is a pretty viable option if you’re flying). BUT I found this article about Damselflies, which notes that they rely on binocular overlap and line up their prey in front of them. Which is pretty cool.
- Comment on OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates 3 months ago:
Relative to a second currency, as a derivative on the foreign exchange market.
- Comment on Microsoft Open Sources Zork I, II And III 4 months ago:
Agreed.
- Comment on Microsoft Open Sources Zork I, II And III 4 months ago:
I mean, arguably this was done years ago with Return to Zork, Zork: Nemesis, and Zork: Grand Inquisitor. They shared a bit of the humor of the originals, but they were still pretty different.
- Comment on Microsoft Open Sources Zork I, II And III 4 months ago:
- Comment on Radon 4 months ago:
- Comment on THIS is real. There is an app that allows you to text with Jesus 4 months ago:
The image looks rather a lot like the “Buddy Christ” from Dogma. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Buddy_christ.jpg
- Comment on Over the past ~20 years, Google became the de facto entry point for learning new skills and information. Google also sucks now. This is a really big problem. 4 months ago:
I ran into this just yesterday. My dad’s Windows 10 computer was reporting our printer as offline, even though it wasn’t; it would queue print jobs, but never actually send them. It did this even though it had been printing normally less than half an hour beforehand. It’s connected over Wi-Fi.
And I remembered having solved this problem once before, ages ago (I think like twelve years ago?), by digging through the old Microsoft forums and Google search results, and I had a dim recollection of what sort of thing the solution had been, but not the details. So I figured that, most likely, the fix had gotten undone, probably when I switched him to IoT LTSC edition so he could keep getting security updates. (Both my parents were basically unwilling to switch to 11.)
But when I pulled up search on a browser to see if I could reconstruct the solution I’d found all those years ago, instead I got all this SEO and AI slop. Page after page that claimed to have relevant information, and didn’t. After about fifteen minutes I decided I was better off trying to dig through the settings myself and see if I could reconstruct it from my own memory, kind of like driving through an old neighborhood and seeing if I recognize any landmarks.
I did manage to fix it that way. There’s some kind of dumb aspect to the way Windows gauges whether a printer is online that doesn’t work if it’s connected over wifi. The workaround is to go into the properties for the printer, tell it to change the settings (which brings up a very similar-looking but not actually the same panel), go to the “ports” tab, scroll down to the TCP/IP port with the address of the printer, choose “configure port” which brings up yet another dialog, and at the bottom of that check the box marked “SNMP enabled.” SNMP is “Simple Network Management Protocol,” and lets Windows check the status of the printer in a more sane manner. After doing this the printer reports itself as online and prints normally.
But yeah, I had to rely on my rotting meat storage because our global worldwide network of supercomputers now only serves up blather designed to look like it might hold solutions but not actually contain any of them, because it’s more profitable to delude you into reading endless ad-filled pages of slop than to solve your problem and let you leave.
- Comment on I'm blue ba da ba da dee da ba dieee 5 months ago:
Honestly the idea that parasites all share a single, simple method of reproduction is the silliest thing in this comic. There’s a cordyceps fungus that not only has a stage in an ant, it then swells and reddens the abdomen of the ant, takes over the behavior of the ant and forces it to climb to the top of a stalk of grass, and has it wave in the air until a bird mistakes it for a berry and swoops down and eats it. At this point it has a whole other phase of its life cycle inside the bird until it finally releases its spores in the bird’s droppings.
(I probably have a few of the details here not quite right, as it’s not my field of expertise, but it’s along these lines, including the behavior modification and the two separate host species.)
There are so many kinds of parasites, and they do so many crazy things.
- Comment on Commercials seem to be normalizing an unhealthy work-balance more. 5 months ago:
As an American, I can confirm, it’s fucking grim here right now.
- Comment on Microsoft is plugging more holes that let you use Windows 11 without an online account 5 months ago:
🎶 The dream of the 90’s is alive in Linux🎶
- Comment on Fuck you in particular 6 months ago:
Don’t forget that he paid for and directed a music video specifically to make fun of Kapoor. It’s called “Bean Boy.”
- Comment on 6 months ago:
It’s because, for the most part, it doesn’t actually have access to the text itself. Before the data gets to the “thinking” part of the network, the words and letters have been stripped out and replaced with vectors. The vectors capture a lot of aspects of the meaning of words, but not much of their actual text structure.
- Comment on Inside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars 7 months ago:
Yeah, I definitely read that as an effort to preempt the folks who were going to yell about how clearly this means the Flipper Zero should be illegal. Hacking has been so poorly represented in TV and films that there are a distressing number of people who don’t realize the term can even have a positive connotation.
