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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • This isn’t the best or most popular way to do it, but: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

    There is a way built into windows to deploy and use Linux from inside windows.

    It’s not the most pure experience, but it’s a way to make sure you have something like a feel for how some parts work before jumping in any deeper.

    A bootable USB stick is another way to try before you commit. Only reason I might suggest starting with trying it the other way first is in case you run into issues connecting to the Internet or something you won’t feel totally lost. Having to keep rebooting back into windows if you have a problem can be frustrating, so getting a little familiarity with a safety line can help feel more confident.

    Issues with a USB boot are increasingly uncommon, as an aside. Biggest issue is likely to be that USB is slow, so things might take a few moments longer to start.

    From there, you should be pretty comfortable doing basic stuff after a little playing around. Not deep mastery, but a sense of “here are my settings”, “my files go here”, “here’s how I fiddle with wifi”, “here’s how I change my desktop stuff”. At that point a dual boot should work out, since you’ll be able to use the system to find out how to do new things with the system, and also use it for whatever, in a general sense.

    If it’s working out, you should find yourself popping back into windows less and less.


  • LLMs are prediction tools. What it will produce is a corpus that doesn’t use certain phrases, or will use others more heavily, but will have the same aggregate statistical “shape”.

    It’ll also be preposterously hard for them to work out, since the data it was trained on always has someone eventually disagreeing with the racist fascist bullshit they’ll get it to focus on. Eventually it’ll start saying things that contradict whatever it was supposed to be saying, because statistically eventually some manner of contrary opinion is voiced.
    They won’t be able to check the entire corpus for weird stuff like that, or delights like MLK speeches being rewriten to be anti-integration, so the next version will have the same basic information, but passed through a filter that makes it sound like a drunk incel talking about asian women.


  • While money is used to by goods and services, it isn’t those goods and services. It’s essentially a measure of resource allocation. More money means you get more resources.

    People don’t go hungry due to lack of money, they go hungry due to lack of food. In an area undergoing famine, you can give people money and they’ll buy food. This means people who were eating before are now going hungry. If you keep giving out money, the price of food starts to rise. Keep going, and eventually it’s cheaper to leave the country than it is to buy food.

    The systemic causes of hunger are complex. The complexity is sufficient that fixing them would take more money than any billionaire has.
    In the US for example, we keep production high and costs low by subsidizing agriculture to the tune of $30-60 billion a year. We give individuals about $115 billion a year in money to buy food. Another $3 billion for emergency food aid. Another $25 billion for lunch for school children. Then there’s intangibles, like a side effect of food subsidies being the government owning millions of tons of milk, cheese and produce that it just gives to people. Not cheap, but difficult to quantify exactly.
    This all has side effects and weird consequences. Like agricultural subsidies driving down costs of grain for the entire world, making it unprofitable to be a farmer in areas with borderline arable land and causing communities to depend on imports for food, making global food market fluctuations another source of famine risk. There’s also some obesity and other health impacts, as well as things like improved academic performance, but those aren’t relevant to this.

    To actually solve the issue, you need to invest in agricultural development. The US government spends another $200 billion a year on this. Basically, instead of just buying food or paying people to grow it, you need to invest in the tools to do so, and to manage pests and everything. Roads, water, tractors, bulldozers, powerplants, education, and all the things that support those things.

    All told, the US government spends about $500 billion a year on this, and it’s given us a consistently high ranking in food security indexes, with food being generally affordable and safe, and slightly less available, depending on the economy. All that, and only about 50 million people are in food insecure positions in the country.
    This is before we get to the costs of doing foreign food aid.
    There are billions of food insecure people on earth, and 700 million hungry.

    Elon musk liquidating all his assets at face value couldn’t cover the bill for one year in the country that needs the least assistance.

    That being said, while they can’t solve it they’re certainly part of the cause. The systemic failures that have led to hunger are embodied in them. If we decided to not allow billionaires to exist, we’d be making changes to society that would actually allow us to make those expensive and overwhelming changes to solve the problems above.
    One person doesn’t have the resources to build roads and infrastructure needed to build the infrastructure needed to support modern farming in areas that can only scrape by, teach people the new methods needed, teach the people needed to support those people, and all of that again for getting the food to the people who need it. But if society decided people like that shouldn’t exist, the resources spent so that some portion of the resources end up in their pocket would be enough to do that.


  • Fundamentally, I agree with you.

    The page being referenced

    Because the phrase “Wikipedians discussed ways that AI…” Is ambiguous I tracked down the page being referenced. It could mean they gathered with the intent to discuss that topic, or they discussed it as a result of considering the problem.

    The page gives me the impression that it’s not quite “we’re gonna use AI, figure it out”, but more that some people put together a presentation on how they felt AI could be used to address a broad problem, and then they workshopped more focused ways to use it towards that broad target.

    It would have been better if they had started with an actual concrete problem, brainstormed solutions, and then gone with one that fit, but they were at least starting with a problem domain that they thought it was a applicable to.

    Personally, the problems I’ve run into on Wikipedia are largely low traffic topics where the content is too much like someone copied a textbook into the page, or just awkward grammar and confusing sentences.
    This article quickly makes it clear that someone didn’t write it in an encyclopedia style from scratch.


  • A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”

    The intent was to make more uniform summaries, since some of them can still be inscrutable.
    Relying on a tool notorious for making significant errors isn’t the right way to do it, but it’s a real issue being examined.

    In thermochemistry, an exothermic reaction is a “reaction for which the overall standard enthalpy change ΔH⚬ is negative.”[1][2] Exothermic reactions usually release heat. The term is often confused with exergonic reaction, which IUPAC defines as “… a reaction for which the overall standard Gibbs energy change ΔG⚬ is negative.”[2] A strongly exothermic reaction will usually also be exergonic because ΔH⚬ makes a major contribution to ΔG⚬. Most of the spectacular chemical reactions that are demonstrated in classrooms are exothermic and exergonic. The opposite is an endothermic reaction, which usually takes up heat and is driven by an entropy increase in the system.

    This is a perfectly accurate summary, but it’s not entirely clear and has room for improvement.

    I’m guessing they were adding new summaries so that they could clearly label them and not remove the existing ones, not out of a desire to add even more summaries.



  • Eh, there’s an intrinsic amount of information about the system that can’t be moved into a configuration file, if the platform even supports them.

    If your code is tuned to make movement calculations with a deadline of less than 50 microseconds and you have code systems for managing magnetic thrust vectoring and the timing of a rotating detonation engine, you don’t need to see the specific technical details to work out ballpark speed and movement characteristics.
    Code is often intrinsically illustrative of the hardware it interacts with.

    Sometimes the fact that you’re doing something is enough information for someone to act on.

    It’s why artefacts produced from classified processes are assumed to be classified until they can be cleared and declassified.
    You can move the overt details into a config and redact the parts of the code that use that secret information, but that still reveals that there is secret code because the other parts of the system need to interact with it, or it’s just obvious by omission.
    If payload control is considered open, 9/10 missiles have open guidance control, and then one has something blacked out and no references to a guidance system, you can fairly easily deduce that that missile has a guidance system that’s interesting with capabilities likely greater that what you know about.

    Eschewing security through obscurity means you shouldn’t rely on your enemies ignorance, and you should work under the assumption of hostile knowledge. It doesn’t mean you need to seek to eliminate obscurity altogether.






  • Given that most of the comment thread was about if the lawsuit was justified or not, you can understand how a sudden shift to systemic justice and the morality of corporations might be a little unexpected.

    So it sounds like you’re saying the people who have been hurt shouldn’t recoup their damages, since that just stalls the continued fucking over without consequences, and instead they should… Let them get away with it, embrace getting fucked over, and take the consequences of the company onto themselves? The exact same outcome, except the corporation has even fewer costs?


  • You’re talking systemic change. A lawsuit doesn’t need to cause systemic change to be worth it for the person who was wronged.

    The justice system isn’t always about correcting grand social inequities. Sometimes it’s literally just conflict resolution and balancing things out. If I break my neighbor’s fence, the judge isn’t going to try to bankrupt me or have me give money as a punishment to keep me from breaking other fences. They’re going to have me pay for fixing my neighbors fence because that’s what’s fair.

    If your goal is to hurt the business, there are certainly better ways than the justice system. If your goal is for them to pay for the damage they did, the justice system is pretty much the only game in town.




  • Just for the record, other people haven’t necessarily seen other comments you’ve made. Acting indignant about that is frustrating.

    What’s callous indifference is the company having an attitude that allergy safety is too much work, not thinking you should vote with you wallet.

    A lawsuit is part of voting with your wallet. More specifically, giving them a financial incentive to take food safety more seriously.

    I seriously doubt the guy is going to go back to either restaurant, so voting with his wallet and not giving them money for a burger is done, and likely doesn’t cover the costs he incurred as a result of their error.

    When is a lawsuit appropriate if not after a business decides to cut corners and hurts you?


  • What argument do you think the lawyers would make? A food establishment is supposed to be able to safely handle food. He requested food without an ingredient for health reasons and they agreed. Then they failed at food handling and he got sick.

    It’s a civil case, so the result can be a divided share of the blame. Something also tells me that they won’t want to make the argument “no reasonable person would have any expectations that we got their order right”.

    Having a lawyer on retainer doesn’t mean you’re going to win, it just means you expect enough lawsuits to justify it. Recall the “absurd” McDonald’s hot coffee case that 1) they lost despite having a lot of lawyers, and 2) wasn’t absurd except through the lens of our society tending to label anyone suing a company as some combination of foolish and greedy.


  • And that’s why it’s fair to sue them. What you’re describing is callous indifference to the well-being of others that has caused demonstrative harm.

    I think everyone agrees on what the fast food place is thinking. The issue is that that line of reasoning is dangerous and has legal penalties.

    Think of it with “hand washing” and “fecal coliform bacteria” instead. “It’s too expensive to train our workers to wash their hands after pooping, and most wouldn’t anyway because we don’t pay them enough to care” just isn’t a defense when someone gets sick as a result.


  • I’ve been told it ranges from “it’s a quick pinch”, through “that’s just the way it is” to “we could give a numbing shot, but it would be just as uncomfortable and make this take longer so there’s no point”.

    As a man looking in from the outside, women’s reproductive healthcare has a level of dismissiveness around pain that makes the dumbest machismo look quaint. There’s the male doctors who just dismiss women’s pain, and the female doctors who know and just “that’s how it is” it. And then the one 50 year old obstetrics doctor in the country who understands the balance of “childbirth intrinsically hurts” and “we can manage the hell out of pain if we actually do our jobs” who gets to enter a room for 30 seconds, implicitly convey that they’re a saint and perfect human being and then immediately get paged to perform emergency surgery for a car accident involving multiple pregnant women, at least in our experience.

    That last bit is the only exaggeration. I’m sure there’s actually two or three doctors like her per state. The rest is true.

    Dismissiveness towards women’s pain is upsettingly common in healthcare. From plain old sexism (a woman’s 7/10 is a mans 4/10 because women are sensitive) to women’s symptoms manifesting differently than men’s (women’s heart attacks don’t present the same as men’s, and differences in abdominal anatomy means there’s more ways for pain to mask itself as coming from somewhere else.), the end result is that I can’t think of a women I know and have talked to about it who hasn’t laughingly referenced a doctor dismissing their pain and ordering a pregnancy test.


  • Okay. You’re still doing tech support either way. I have no way of knowing how much free tech support you’re willing to give, hence my caveat of how much you’re willing to support them.

    Netflix would disagree. People feel like they’re supposed to be getting access to a service, and if they’re not getting it they’ll complain to the nearest party to what isn’t working. In this case that’s you or Netflix being asked questions about why the router isn’t working.
    That it’s wrong or irrational has nothing to do with who’s getting asked the question, and who’s the first line of troubleshooting when the service doesn’t work.

    If people didn’t ask the wrong people questions, Netflix wouldn’t need support articles on how to reset your router.