Spyke

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science

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I got COVID after taking all precautions because my father didn't wear a mask and took it home. I was sick for a month. I only left my bed to use the bathroom or eat. I literally slept the rest of the time. I probably should have gone to the hospital because I could hardly stay awake even just to eat. I remember waking up one day, and just knowing that I was recovering.

Recovery was hell. I couldn't taste, or smell anything. I had awful flu like symptoms. I was lethargic and I could hardly walk. It took two weeks to feel functional, and for three months my sense of taste was completely fucked.

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Have you ever had an illness that most people don't understand?

Asthma. People expect you to have dramatic TV style throat closing episodes where you turn blue grabing your throat as you gasp and gag. For me, an episode is just sudden onset hypoxia. I'll feel my lungs get tight, but because I'm still getting some air it can be hard to tell I'm suffocating, especially if I'm distracted. When it happens, I have about 3 - 5 minutes to catch it. If I fail to catch it, I'll quickly lose balance, struggle to speak, I'll be unable to think, and finally my vision darkens to a dot, and then I black out. I can appear fine, and then out faster than anyone expects.

Once I get a puff, I'm fine in 10 seconds (minus some shaking from the medication.)

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18+ What's the most disturbing thing you have seen in the Internet?

Cartel torture and execution video. I tried typing up what I remembered of it, but even omitting half the details left me with a very gruesome and disturbing story. I'll just say that the casual nature of the men doing the torture was the most disturbing part. They laughed and took turns as they drank beer. They made other victims watch while having demented smiles across their faces. They delighted in the screams. I suppose not understanding Spanish was a blessing for a curious child.

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If GPTs only predict the next word how do they decide between "a" and "an". Wouldn't this have massive effect on their abilities?

To be overly simple about it, the LLM uses statistics and a bit of controlled RNG to pick its words. Words in the LLM have links to each other with statistical probabilities attached. If you take the sentence "I fed a peanut to an elephant" and "I fed a peanut to a elephant" and then asked 100 people which is more correct, there will be a percentage which favors one over the other. Now with LLMs its not choosing using weighted coin flips, but rather picking the most likely next word (most of the time). So if the 100 people choose "an elephant" over "a elephant" 65% of the time in its training data, then the LLM will be inclined to use "an elephant." However, Its important to know that the words around "an elephant" will also bias its choice to use the word 'an' for the word 'elephant'.

Really, its largely based on the training data and the contexts to which 'a' and 'an' are used. Or in other words, the LLM knows because people figured it out for the LLM. People did all the thinking, LLM's just use statistics on our bottled phrases to know when to use which. Of course, because it got its data from people - it will sometimes get it wrong which is based on how often people got it wrong.

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Steam Deck OS 3.4.9 released with GPU fix for Starfield

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I haven't been able to play it yet, but I did see some reviews, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt.

If you're familiar with Bethesda games then starfield will feel familiar in some ways. The gunplay is close to fallout 4's, where some enemies health scales with difficulty. There are a lot of guns you can hoard. However there have been major improvements which seem to address shortcomings of other Bethesda games.

In the cities, they've managed to cram more NPCs in to give life to hub areas. The lockpicking minigames and hacking have been replaced with digipicking, which is an actual puzzle and requires some thinking to solve. You can fast travel from anywhere, you no longer have to be outside. Render distance is impressive in some areas. There's a new persuasion system. NPCs have (somewhat stiff) facial animations. You can highlight loot with a scanner, and the same scanner can act as a guide to the objective.

The real strength of the game is just how much effort has been put into it. You really can find how parts of this game look like a real labor of love. Some voice actors are big names. There's a lot of content to constantly side track you. There are 4 factions that I know of, and each has their perks once you work with them enough. Finally, there is a ton of customization. Weapons, suits, your ship, and late game outposts you can make. The game is very pretty.

Are there bugs? Yes. They aren't as bad as previous titles however. I haven't heard of the game crashing. Performance seems to be pretty alright as well.

trees

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Personally, a diet change helped me more than pot did, but there were days it eased my symptoms where nothing else would. If you try it, do not become a heavy user as it can fuck up your digestive system.

pnw

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The wheels on the bus are battery powered as e-bus use surges ahead

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Electric cars being charged by fossil fuels still have major advantages. Those who make generators are incentivized to get as many joules of energy per gallon of fuel. Diesel generators can have some efficiency adaptations that vehicle engines wont often have, such as being designed to run at a fixed speed. Your average car owner wont care about efficiency as much as getting from point A to point B, so the already low efficiency of combustion engines is probably lower on average than what could be theoretically achievable just due to people not maintaining their vehicles. Electric vehicles do not idle, and starting an electric vehicle does not cost extra power. Additionally, stop and go traffic leads to far less loss of energy in cities for anyone driving an electric vehicle.

While I would prefer renewable power for electric vehicles, electric cars can still use fossil fuel power more efficiently than internal combustion engines can.

I'd still prefer electric trains however.

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Hey what's your longest playthrough or the most dramatic thing that happened to you in said playthrough

1 year in I'm at 7k kills. I'm loaded with loot and boredom set in. I load up my scout vehicle and head down the road. I decided to go to the country club for furnishings. I light a campfire to warm up as the heater is bust. I clear flamables nearby and toss them into the fire so its there when I go back. I go in stealth, I'm slaying countless zombies. I didn't expect so many zombies. I take a wrong turn. I try to hop the fence but my pack is too heavy. The attempt puts me at the first moodle. Shit. I turn back and run to the forest. There's so much more here than I expected. No rest means that I start dropping a trail of items. I head to my car. Second exhaustion moodle and tiredness moodle. I see fire. Fire everywhere. Wtf? Burning zombies shuffle towards me. I try the fence after dropping everything. I go back to my camp and there's black squares running off from my campfire. I'm barely shuffling and meekly shoving zombies when I get to my car. I can't get in with them on me. I just barely juke them to the other side. I'm heading to the door and a zombie crawls out from under the car and lacerates my foot. I get in and speed off.

After tending my wounds and resting at my base I get the queasy moodle.

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[Feature Request] Convert WEBP to JPEG when sharing?

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In the telegram app, webp is counted as a 'sticker', which will cause it to be rendered at a fixed scale, and you will be unable to zoom in on it. Stickers in telegram are used as reaction images that can be put into their own folders.

So if I share a webp image in telegram, you pretty much wont be able to read or see what's going on due to the fixed scale.

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Israel's Gaza attack 'beyond proportionality', Norway says

I'm an American, so pardon me butting in here in this community. I feel like this counter attack was the plan all along. At first it seemed they ignored intelligence from multiple countries seemingly out of incompetence, but I believe they used it as a way to justify the counter attack. This has been something they've wanted to do for a long time. This was planned in advance and they waited for an opportunity.

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Online movie reviews [Beetlemoses]

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I'm a FNAF fan, and as a movie its quality is that of a straight to DVD movie. It has major flaws that I could go into incredible length about, but the more I think about it, the more I like it as is. The lore of the games is campy, and all over the place, as well as cliché in many places. The series never took itself too seriously while managing to make goofy characters feel mildly threatening. The FNAF movie captures this campy B movie plot excellently.

Really, the major draw for me was that I had invested my emotions into a community that formed as a result of the creator embracing his fans and doing his best to give them what they wanted, even if he wasn't the best at it. The community never really cared that the lore was imperfect, they cared because they felt like they could invest themselves in the story because there was another game of uncovering the hidden story after they finished playing each game. It brought people together because everyone had their own takes on the story. It was super exciting to have each game show up because then you'd have more people with their own takes on the story and big personalities making videos having fun with a goofy game series.

Seeing the movie felt like a huge love letter to the whole experience. I wanted to see these goofy and campy machines on the big screen because they already occupied a space in my imagination. As a fan, I went in with the perfect level of expectation, I expected a campy B movie that would be fun to watch and not take too seriously, and its exactly what I got. In fact, there was a level of fan service in the film which made me absolutely delighted to watch it.