MouldyCat
@MouldyCat@feddit.uk
- Comment on “When the fun stops, stop.” Addiction experts consider the rise of gambling in the U.K. a test case 1 week ago:
That depends where you keep it surely
- Comment on Britons could soon install balcony solar panels in flats and rental homes 1 week ago:
Yeah I think you’d definitely want a battery. TBH I just threw that question about grow lamps in there to draw attention to how you can not only run low/medium power solar setups in Germany, but you can also grow a couple of weed plants for your own use.
I think Germany might actually be the only country in Europe where you can do that fully legally? I used to think growing your own weed was fully legal in Spain and Portugal, but now after speaking to some of my family who live in Spain, I think it’s really just a grey area and not technically legal at all.
Anyway, I’m not actually trying to grow my own weed or anything like that, I just think it’s a stupid thing to make illegal. So go Germany, we’re all counting on you!
- Comment on 12 of England’s regional mayors back plan for ‘national active travel network’ 1 week ago:
why would you rather people go by bus than by bike or foot? It seems everything is better about safe bike & pedestrian routes - they are healthy, produce less pollution (both noise and fumes), often quicker, safer and more agreeable for residents, not to mention cheaper to maintain.
- Comment on Britons could soon install balcony solar panels in flats and rental homes 1 week ago:
That’s neat. Someone told me about inverters you could just plug into a wall socket and have it feed appliances in the house here in Spain, but I just thought they were crazy.
In Germany, can you use the solar panels to directly feed the grow-lamps for a couple of healthy cannabis plants? Is that also permitted?
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 3 weeks ago:
I’ve been playing keyboard & mouse so far so I just tried it with an XBox controller. Doesn’t seem to really support it at all - there weren’t any default bindings for it and while you can assign functions to some of the buttons in the key-bind settings, it doesn’t seem possible to assign anything to analogue inputs such as the sticks and triggers, or even the d-pad.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 3 weeks ago:
old world, which I got for €10 in the GOG sale. I wanted something like the OG civ experience, where you slowly build up your civilisation, creating a network of cities with good transport links, strong agriculture supporting healthy growth, then, when the bloodlust gets too strong to ignore, building small military forces to go out and crush your neighbours.
I’m enjoying myself so far. The game does seem like a more straightforward and casual Civ - the learning curve is so gentle and you don’t feel like you’re overloaded with admin details that you can’t keep track of. Last time I played Civ, it was Civ 6 and it was fun until a rival civilisation plonked a city down right in the middle of one of my own conglomerations. Perfect excuse for kicking some ass, so I assembled a little force and invaded the city to kick it out. Unfortunately you can’t just declare war and get away with it, and there were a lot of side-effects to contend with, such as becoming a pariah on the world stage affecting trade. War was just not economically viable, and while that might be realistic for some time periods, it just wasn’t the game I wanted to play.
So I am happy with old world. It’s pretty much what I wanted so far - but will the simpler mechanics make the game less replayable? It may well do, but I’m enjoying it for now. Above all, what I like about these sorts of games - zero time pressure. I can take as long as I like on each turn, there’s absolutely no rush to decide what to do, I’m free to bimble about and make sure I’ve not forgotten anything.
- Comment on HS2 to be delayed again as costs spiral by £37bn after 'litany of failure' 3 weeks ago:
Definitely not, lol. Nearby countries with fast rail - France, Spain, Germany - would perhaps give a slight bemused smile in the direction of HS2. Those are big countries where high-speed rail makes actual sense - as just one example, from the German town of Karlsruhe right by the border with France, you can take a TGV to Lyon, about 350 miles away. It takes around 5 hours and will probably cost you less than €100.
However all those countries are all too familiar with their own governments mismanaging public works. So they wouldn’t be shocked at the huge sacks of cash that are being tipped into great holes in the ground, and any laughter would be at the idea that this ridiculously unnecessary governmental vanity project is even being built at all.
- Comment on Plex has paywalled my server! 3 weeks ago:
I thought we switched to libre
Maybe some people did. Thing is there’s a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn’t necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.
- Comment on Interesting interview with the creator of Junk store on YouTube 3 weeks ago:
Gardiner Bryant is great. So great, you don’t have to suffer YouTube to keep up with his videos, he also publishes to PeerTube:
- Comment on Nexus Mods Sale Sparks Concern in Modding Community 3 weeks ago:
A collective can be a great way to run a company, for some cases. I lived with a girl who worked at a cafe that was run as a collective - it meant that people had a fair say in decisions that affected them. They could vote on their own wages, working conditions, and no one was barking out orders bossing them around. The owner was an old-school left-winger who was doing this out of pure idealism. He was still the one with the financial risk, he dealt with banks, ensured taxes were dealt with, and all the other tasks involved in running a business such as that.
- Comment on Nexus Mods Sale Sparks Concern in Modding Community 3 weeks ago:
Nothing stopping you trying!
- Comment on Nexus Mods Sale Sparks Concern in Modding Community 3 weeks ago:
Great. Yes. Under some kind of egalitarian free-energy tech utopia such as you’re describing, websites like Nexus mods would be even better. Sadly there are no such systems already operating for us to move to, and we do not yet have the technology to try creating a new one.
So any other political systems that are more real-world?
- Comment on Nexus Mods Sale Sparks Concern in Modding Community 3 weeks ago:
How would this specific problem be better under another system?
- Comment on Nexus Mods Sale Sparks Concern in Modding Community 3 weeks ago:
I guess you still have the issue of someone needing to pay for the huge number of downloads, most of which are going to come from users who make no other contributions to the site. Maybe you could combine a fedi site with torrents or something?
- Comment on The Guardian has rolled out new secure messaging technology which allows sources to anonymously contact journalists. 4 weeks ago:
The tech behind the tool conceals the fact that messaging is taking place at all. It makes the communication indistinguishable from data sent to and from the app by our millions of regular users.
That is very clever.
So, by using the Guardian app, readers are effectively providing ‘cover’ and helping us to protect sources.
And of course they take the opportunity to push their app! I generally hate apps, especially for things like newspapers. This is the first reason I’ve seen that might make me install one.
- Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 4 weeks ago:
In case you haven’t seen it, the paper is here - machinelearning.apple.com/…/illusion-of-thinking (PDF linked on the left).
The puzzles the researchers have chosen are spatial and logical reasoning puzzles - so certainly not the natural domain of LLMs. The paper doesn’t unfortunately give a clear definition of reasoning, I think I might surmise it as “analysing a scenario and extracting rules that allow you to achieve a desired outcome”.
They also don’t provide the prompts they use - not even for the cases where they say they provide the algorithm in the prompt, which makes that aspect less convincing to me.
What I did find noteworthy was how the models were able to provide around 100 steps correctly for larger Tower of Hanoi problems, but only 4 or 5 correct steps for larger River Crossing problems. I think the River Crossing problem is like the one where you have a boatman who wants to get a fox, a chicken and a bag of rice across a river, but can only take two in his boat at one time? In any case, the researchers suggest that this could be because there will be plenty of examples of Towers of Hanoi with larger numbers of disks, while not so many examples of the River Crossing with a lot more than the typical number of items being ferried across. This being more evidence that the LLMs (and LRMs) are merely recalling examples they’ve seen, rather than genuinely working them out.
- Comment on Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. 4 weeks ago:
I think it’s an easy mistake to confuse sentience and intelligence. It happens in Hollywood all the time - “Skynet began learning at a geometric rate, on July 23 2004 it became self-aware” yadda yadda
But that’s not how sentience works. We don’t have to be as intelligent as Skynet supposedly was in order to be sentient. We don’t start our lives as unthinking robots, and then one day - once we’ve finally got a handle on calculus or a deep enough understanding of the causes of the fall of the Roman empire - we suddenly blink into consciousness. On the contrary, even the stupidest humans are accepted as being sentient. Even a young child, not yet able to walk or do anything more than vomit on their parents’ new sofa, is considered as a conscious individual.
So there is no reason to think that AI - whenever it should be achieved, if ever - will be conscious any more than the dumb computers that precede it.
- Comment on Mum locked up in prison after what she did with two Kinder eggs 5 weeks ago:
The police even have the audacity to try and moralise about this: “As a result of her selfish actions that day, she is now behind bars and her four children will now be without their mother for a considerable period of time.”
No, it’s a result of our useless coppers choosing to waste taxpayer money harassing adults for entertaining themselves in ways that cause no harm to anyone else. Selfish actions my arse. You guys are the ones who have kept those kids from seeing their mum, nobody else. How about the police do something more worthwhile with their time, like investigating burglary and other anti-social criminality.
- Comment on What's the worst spelling you've seen? 1 month ago:
You must be able to see that giving your daughter your mother’s name as a middle name is not at all the same as giving your son your own name?
- Comment on What's the worst spelling you've seen? 1 month ago:
Vanity isn’t it? Pathetic male vanity. Never hear women doing it do you.
- Comment on The NHS gave £330 million contract to Palantir to build an NHS data platform. Well we've found out that most English hospitals aren't using it. 1 month ago:
Three. Hundred. Million. Pounds.
Government IT spending is absolutely insane. That’s 100 people on £100k a year for 30 years. How does this get through oversight? And then they deliver a shitty system and there’s no comeback?
- Comment on Urgent ‘do not eat’ warning issued for popular meal sold in Tesco and Morrisons 2 months ago:
if this is part of an effort to get beef recognised as a type of fish by the Catholic church, keep it up, this’ll probably work.
- Comment on Liquid Trees 2 months ago:
Trees do actually improve air quality, by absorbing harmful gases like sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide through their leaves. Additionally they can reduce particulate pollution by up to 70% - bbc.com/…/20200504-which-trees-reduce-air-polluti…
- Comment on Sycamore Gap tree destroyed in 'moronic mission', court told 2 months ago:
you mean you always plead not guilty, don’t you?
- Comment on Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot 3 months ago:
a sign of utter desperation on the human’s part.
Yes it seems to be the same underlying issue that leads some people to throw money at only fans streamers and such like. A complete starvation of personal contact that leads people to willingly live in a fantasy world.
- Comment on Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot 3 months ago:
It was also a true AI wasn’t it? It ran locally and was never turned off, so conversations with it were private and it continued to “exist” and develop by itself.
- Comment on Maybe time travelers actually exist and this mess of a timeline is the result of their interference... 3 months ago:
Must’ve been a hell of a shower if adding a whole nother layer of weirdness in the form of time-travellers somehow made anything seem more logical!
- Comment on Jobless, isolated, fed misogynistic porn… where is the love for Britain’s lost boys? 4 months ago:
Alright, stick your head in the ground if it makes you feel special. You’re clearly too deeply invested in this to listen to reason. It obviously doesn’t matter what you or anyone else believes anyway.
- Comment on Jobless, isolated, fed misogynistic porn… where is the love for Britain’s lost boys? 4 months ago:
Hinduism is pretty incompatible with the Jesus narrative
Of course it is lol
If there were a real god that cared about what rituals you perform in this life, then you would expect multiple religions to appear independently all over the world with the exact same rituals. But that has never happened once. Every single religion is totally different from all other religions that are properly independent of it.
Never has divine inspiration revealed the same “truth” in different parts of the world independently. Almost as if it’s all just common or garden mental illness.
- Comment on Jobless, isolated, fed misogynistic porn… where is the love for Britain’s lost boys? 4 months ago:
Don’t you think the Jesus story would be a terrible way for an omnipotent being to send an important message that’s vital for everyone to hear? Just creating a normal human and plonking them in some desert backwater - who looks and sounds just like any other human. The only difference is he hears voices in his head, and can pull off some pretty mediocre magic tricks.
Seems way more likely that Jesus was just another mentally ill person and anyone who thought they saw him after he was dead was simply mistaken.
If all it takes is an appealing story to convince you that something with literally no evidence is true and you should devote your life to it, there are many other stories like that, check out the Baghavad Gita for instance. Some really wonderful characters and truly fantastic events - not to mention absolutely mind-blowing magic, all of it completely true (apparently).