Spyke

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[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?

Because as much as trains and buses are great for everyday commuter movement (and having amenities within walking distance is key as well), there's two issues:

  • Changing the infrastructure and zoning of an existing city is much easier said than done. Ripping up concrete, tearing down existing business and homes to increase densification, that's a huge undertaking.
  • Trains never replaced the horse drawn carriage. You can never fully eliminate the need for cars because sometimes you need to move something big like a couch. Even if there's less cars on the road, it'll never be 0, as this also includes things like ambulances, and fire trucks that can't rely on schedules.

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OpenAI just admitted it can't identify AI-generated text. That's bad for the internet and it could be really bad for AI models.

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For laymen who might not know how GANs work:

Two AI are developed at the same time. One that generates and one that discriminates. The generator creates a dataset, it gets mixed in with some real data, then that all of that gets fed into the discriminator whose job is to say "fake or not".

Both AI get better at what they do over time. This arms race creates more convincing generated data over time. You know your generator has reached peak performance when its twin discriminator has a 50/50 success rate. It's just guessing at that point.

There literally cannot be a better AI than the twin discriminator at detecting that generator's work. So anyone trying to make tools to detect chatGPT's writing is going to have a very hard time of it.

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White chocolate is better than dark chocolate and i'm tired of pretending it's not

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Depends! If you consider chocolate to be food derived from the cocoa bean, then white chocolate is chocolate because it's made of cocoa butter without the solids!

The powdery stuff you call cocoa is what's left over once you get rid of the cocoa butter. So if you feel that cocoa solids are required for something to be classified as chocolate... Then no, it's not chocolate.

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[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?

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The image in the post is of a yogi of some sort stating that electric cars are here to save the car industry first, and my impression of it is that it's suggesting that exploring the idea of electric cars is unwise.

And hell yeah, efficient transit and walkable cities are the goal. But while we're working on that goal, we should also focus on electrifying cars! Tackle the crisis in multiple ways. Because there's no way we're gonna stop using cars overnight, and if we can make cars more environmentally friendly while we taper off of them, that's a win.

adhd

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A deal with the devil

I like having an off day once a week from my Vyvanse, personally. On a day off where I've got nothing important to do.

Like, I let myself have an ADHD day, where I'd normally be beating myself up over my self perception of being lazy with deadlines hanging over my head, but now it's fine because I actually got things done the other 6 days of the week.

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[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?

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Some cities, yes. LA is an example, right? And how they wrecked the street cars.

But not my city. Calgary was built as a stop on the Trans Canadian Railway, and that still exists, and there's an (okayish) light rail train system here that's slowly been built over the years and not torn down. Fully wind powered, too! Edit: our public transit kinda sucks though, I'm not saying we're great. My commute to the office would be over an hour by transit and twenty minutes by car, I'm lucky I work remote.

A majority of North American cities that have grown within the last hundred years (coinciding with cars) were built from the ground up with cars in mind as the primary form of commute.

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College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT

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I think you're conflating "intelligence" with "being smart".

Intelligence is more about taking in information and being able to make a decision based on that information. So yeah, automatic traffic lights are "intelligent" because they use a sensor to check for the presence of cars and "decide" when to switch the light.

Acting like some GPT is on the same level as a traffic light is silly though. On a base level, yes, it "reads" a text prompt (along with any messaging history) and decides what to write next. But that decision it's making is much more complex than "stop or go".

I don't know if this is an ADHD thing, but when I'm talking to people, sometimes I finish their sentences in my head as they're talking. Sometimes I nail it, sometimes I don't. That's essentially what chatGPT is, a sentence finisher that happened to read a huge amount of text content on the web, so it's got context for a bunch of things. It doesn't care if it's right and it doesn't look things up before it says something.

But to have a computer be able to do that at all?? That's incredible, and it took over 50 years of AI research to hit that point (yes, it's been a field in universities for a very long time, with most that time people saying it's impossible), and we only hit it because our computers got powerful enough to do it at scale.

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We Know “NoFap” Is Misleading Men About Masturbation. It Might Be More Dangerous Than That.

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I think it's a lot like weed or video game addiction.

Is it going to send you to the hospital? Probably not. But if you let it take over your life to the extent that it's detrimental, then using strategies that help people kick physical addictions can be effective.

These religious groups seem to hate a lot of things that appeal to basic pleasures, want to make you feel bad for wanting to feel good.

adhd

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Finishing programming projects

Reduce scope. Look at what you're doing and cut out all the "nice to haves" until you have just the "need to haves".

For a behindthevoiceactors clone, the bare minimum would be a simple web page with a search bar for actor names. You could use a query string in the URL that gets passed to an IMDb API call that then renders a simple page that just has the actor's name as the header and a plain table listing shows/movies/games and their role(s) and years.

Everything on top of that, pretty CSS, pictures, hyperlinks to other places, that's all fluff that you can add on after you're already "done" having created a minimum viable product. And at the nice to have stage, you can put it down at any point without feeling like it's unfinished.

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Yeah, which is a generational issue at worst. One guy in my family keeps forgetting his bags and buying new ones, but he also has a mindset where he resists change. The rest of us have gotten into the habit of remembering them, leaving a few in the car, etc.

Kids growing up after the ban are just gonna see it as normal. You go buy groceries? You bring your bags, just like you need to remember to bring your wallet.

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Can anyone recommend me a setup to virtualize Linux under Windows that runs smoothly?

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That's odd! I had no issues with the stock Ubuntu install. Installing CUDA on a Windows machine requires WSL2 now, but I didn't really use it for anything more than that, so I could've just not used it enough to find problems. As soon as I finished the semester that required proprietary software, I got rid of Windows entirely though.

IMO, as long as you get comfortable with the basics like navigating directories and moving files, installing and updating software (first through something like apt, compiling stuff manually isn't necessary at first), and managing some basic bash settings like aliases, you're pretty much set. At least, from a programmer's standpoint.

I dunno how well versed OP is in computers overall is the thing. The above is a good baseline, but you need a general understanding of how operating systems work in general to be really comfortable with something like Arch. Like you gotta know what a driver is before you can troubleshoot issues with your hardware, or if you're managing disks it's good to have an idea of how filesystems work. But that all comes with experience.

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I imagine this commercial/personal art dichotomy has existed ever since the first time someone paid for art. Like how there's always been folk music played around campfires in contrast to the operas and orchestras where the local lord's funding goes.

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How do you walk the line between not wanting to impose on the host and understanding they want the space to show their hospitality?

Ask yourself if it's ego stopping you from accepting generosity. Here's an extreme example:

I visited my dad in another province (parents separated). We went to a department store, and he forgot his wallet in his car. I offered to help, and he got extremely upset, lectured me in the middle of the store, and left me standing there waiting for him to fetch his money. He wouldn't even take a "you can pay back me back after we're out of here."

It was honestly insulting to me, being shut down like that. I think I hurt his pride? But it soured my opinion of him.

If you've got good will and trust, take help gracefully, then offer it back when the time and means are right. People will remember how you react to these things, and if you consistently reject them, they will eventually stop offering, even when the time comes that you really need it.

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I think the thing about the word "retard" is that it's not so much about something being aggravating as it is about something being absolutely stupid. It has these hard consonants that make it sound powerful when it's said. It's effective, and it's really uncomfortable to hear. It's the fuck of the moron/idiot family of words.

And we've got this reality where there's variability in how smart people are. And then people with developmental delays get tossed into the extreme end of the scale with medical terminology, and so that gives people an easy word to use when someone is acting on the extreme end of "not smart". And then the word becomes a slur, and then a new word gets coined that's medical and not a slur, and then it gets co-opted as a slur, and so on.

And it's not gonna stop, because sometimes you do gotta call out someone for making stupid decisions, especially when their idiocy is causing harm. It's just we've also got assholes around, but those people will insult more than just someone's brain, they'll go for anything that hurts.