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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Github copilot can do some impressive things, but it also ignores my instructions to not try to run anything and leave testing to me that I’ve stopped bothering saying it and just block the attempt when it asks permission. Just yesterday, it confidently said it had figured out an issue I was debugging with it and made a bunch of code changes that literally only affected comments. If I leave it in agent mode (which allows it to edit code) when asking a question to clarify something and not intending any code changes but wanting to think about the answer (and telling it that), sometimes it still runs ahead and tries to make changes anyways.

    When it does well, it’s uncanny how effective it can be these days, but it’s not reliable enough to be trusted to be in control of the whole system. Plus I don’t trust Microsoft enough to put my data on onedrive, and believe that access to data is the real reason behind their AI push, no matter how much usefulness and reliability improves.




  • As I understand, chess AIs are more like brute force models that take the current board and generate a tree with all possible moves from that position, then iterating on those new positions up to a certain depth (which is what the depth of the engine refers to). And while I think some might use other algorithms to “score” each position and try to keep the search to the interesting branches, that could introduce bias that would make it miss some moves that look bad but actually set up a better position, though ultimately, they do need some way to compare between different ending positions if the depth doesn’t bring them to checkmate in all paths.

    So it chooses the most intelligent move it can find, but does it by essentially playing out every possible game, kinda like Dr Strange in Infinity War, except chess has a more finite set of states to search through.


  • I had an A5 a while back and samsung didn’t make me hate them so the next phone I got was an s10. On that phone, they decided that they needed to dedicate a physical button to their fucking virtual assistant bixby. It was pretty obvious to me that these virtual assistants were mostly actually data vacuums, wanting to integrate into every aspect of your life so they can access better data on all those aspects.

    Every single time it opened that fucking thing, it was unintentional. It wasn’t as annoying as your TV, since I bet the phone was way faster and had enough memory to not have to discard whatever else you were doing just to open its app, but it exemplifies how I see samsung today. Hardware had great specs but the software made it annoying by trying to lock everything in to their ecosystem without a hard lock like apple. Even MS had ways of disabling the windows button (which used to have a high chance of crashing a game if you accidentally hit it).





  • I remember being annoyed that I had to install yet another launcher and make yet another account when I was installing portal. But I didn’t know at the time that this was the launcher to end most other launchers and accounts, or at the very least made most of that transparent other then adding an extra click to launch some games.

    Iirc, Blizzard had just replaced the wow in-game patcher with a launcher (though I don’t recall if they had a unified launcher for each game, if they all had their own at that point, or if it was just wow), Oblivion had a game launcher, and I think there were a few others. Some of them even needed to be installed separately iirc.

    Steam is nice because, being the launcher for most of my games, it’s just always open and helps organize my games. And it doesn’t feel like its main purpose is to make money, with everything else just being about opening pathways to that money. And even though it is meant to make Valve money, it’s the lack of blatant dark patterns and constant upsell attempts that makes it feel better than most of the rest of the commercial world.


  • Except that wouldn’t make a difference as far as the children data protection bit is concerned. It goes WAY beyond porn and governs the handling of any data that can be tied back to a child, including IP address, online aliases, and email addresses.

    And it’s not even just about selling it, but processing it and storing it at all. There’s technical necessity exemptions, like routers aren’t subject due to handling the IP address for routing, but stuff like logging the submitting IP address with an image to be able to handle abusive submitters would count. While it is a legitimate use, part of the UK law is requiring consent for doing anything with the data of someone under 13, and the current legal situation is “well, most sites probably break the law but you can trust us that we won’t go after you if you give it your best shot”.

    I’m surprised more sites aren’t pulling out of the UK with a law that seems designed for selective enforcement to get rid of sites the government deems “bad” while letting the ones it deems “good” or “harmless” serve as examples that they are trying to be reasonable with the law that basically makes websites illegal because 12 year olds can use browsers and might go there without parental consent.

    Also handing the ones that do check age even more information, but it’s OK because once you become an adult to do whatever with that information.


  • I’d put it like this:

    Your mom and dad give you a credit card plus $600 in allowance each month and expect you to cover all expenses, including groceries, maintenance, plus the cost of hiring a cleaning service using those, which totals $800 per month. Oh, also a bunch of guns, so it’s more like $1100 per month.

    Anyways, every now and then, your credit card hits its limit and mom and dad need to agree to raise the credit limit. And if they don’t, then you refuse to pay for anything. Except the guns, but they are only like $300, so the $600 a month will cover them easily.

    Oh but the cleaning staff should still come, they just won’t get paid until the credit limit is raised.



  • If it makes you feel any better, you would have turned 30 today regardless of what you have done in the past (unless you don’t make it to 30 (unless quantum immortality is real)).

    Happy birthday! And if you aren’t happy with your efforts so far in life, better to tackle that looking forward than regret it looking back, though be kind to the yourself of today so you don’t regret spending your life preparing for the future instead of enjoying the moment.






  • I used to do “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, etc”

    But then found it was better to so l switch it to “one-thousand one, one-thousand two, etc” because then the count matches the time closer. In the first, when you say the count, you are actually one second earlier. Eg, “two” marks the end of the first second and the start of the second one. But saying the number after (one-thousand, steamboat, mississippi, or whatever) means you can just say the number you last said for an accurate second count.



  • Plumbing issues? When I had one of those at my last place, it just had an attachment for the tap to get the water and another hose that drained into the sink. My current under the counter dishwasher is the exact same setup, it just taps into the inlet and drain under the sink instead of over it. The only physical change to the pluming was replacing the tap nozzle, which I put back without issue when I moved out (might have even given them a new screen when I did so).