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Nothing quite illustrates the desperate need for proper civics education than a man with a policy platform of “stopping imaginary transgender immigrants eating your cats” being neck and neck to be US president.

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NEW! Force femmed immigrants in YOUR neighbourhood eating YOUR cat!

Trump watches some very weird porn.

in reply to Sarah Brown

I only saw bits of it on the news this morning and switched off immediately. I really feel sorry and scared for my US friends.


Apple: “And our new iPhone 16 has hardware ray tracing for unparalleled mobile gaming performance”

Mobile gaming:

in reply to Sarah Brown

but also mobile gaming:
youtu.be/Rf5pB31k3dw?si=dRuPVG…
in reply to Alan Braggins

@Alan Braggins bet I know which ones get played and played and played.

Never seen anyone on a train or plane or bus playing a 3D FPS thing on their phone.

But word searches and distant descendentes of Tetris? All the time.


in reply to Sarah Brown

how many hours/days would you give your current location of living, until looting and riots would start, if the power was completely down?
in reply to mxk

@mxk I have experienced a 5 day power cut before. None of that happened. People pulled together.
@mxk


Now smartphones are mature products we’re into the annual “this is an incremental upgrade over last year. I’m so mad replacing my 2 thousand quid perfectly functional phone with one that’s almost the same for another 2 thousand quid” cycle.

My brother in Christ; have you considered just … not?

I’m upgrading this year. My phone is 3 years old and the camera stuff is worth it for me. My step daughter is getting my old one, which she is thrilled with.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

yes, which I have done a few times, however, and this might be due to my obtaining cheap highstreet repairs, they never seemed to last long.


Yesterday I saw a discussion about whether you can smell in a dream.

As fate would have it, I had a lucid dream last night (I have a cold. That’s probably why), so I decided to test it.

Yes, you can smell in dreams.



Spoilers for Netflix's Kaos
Loved Kaos, but it tickled me to realise that it is basically the same plot as Jupiter Ascending, only in this case Jupiter is the baddie.

Sarah Brown reshared this.


"Why don't women use artificial intelligence?" asks The Economist.

"Maybe it's because we don't need a computer to automate mansplaining when there's already an excess supply produced by men" answers one woman


in reply to Dgar

depends if you want the correct answer. Of course it's entry, but I was being silly.

There is a really good stackoverflow that gives information about CI (cancel input) as well as CA and CK too
superuser.com/questions/449637…

It's the only answer I could see.

in reply to Lewis Cowles

mnemonics and initialisms and acronyms, are always very difficult to get right. And more often than not, an icon would likely do a better job if we have to learn one anyway.
in reply to xs4me2

@xs4me2
vintagecalculators.com/ or stackoverflow? or is there another?

Sarah Brown reshared this.


The simplest, most direct way to disabuse someone of the notion that LLMs have any kind of model of reality, even an implied emergent one, is to play a game of 20 Questions, with the LLM asking the questions.

In the real life game, the player guessing has ‧nothing‧ to go on other than their world model and logic, and it becomes obvious very, very quickly that an LLM simply stringing "typical" questions together has neither, and has no framework for extracting any kind of information from your yes/no answers.

To me, this seems much cleaner than to "trick" them with riddles or logic puzzles or ambiguous language etc., and is also not merely harder, but fundamentally impossible to patch.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

@goatsarah I tried a trickier one where I used the standard hack of thinking of an abstract concept (love, in my case), and it absolutely nailed it.
in reply to Amanda

@Amanda @Bilal Barakat 🍉 Ok, so I'm concluding that we need a better way to show that these things are bullshitters, because this one is too easy for them.
in reply to Sarah Brown

@goatsarah @amanda
Might still work. It's easy to overestimate how unusual your targets of a 20 questions game is. There are 7+ billion people, easily a few million people thought of anything you think of and there's probably text on the internet with yes/no questions about it.

Love is a far too easy abstract noun. Arbitrage or Musica Ficta would be trickier. Bornite or dysprosium would have fewer trained paths than emerald.

in reply to Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫

@petealexharris @goatsarah @amanda We might be talking at cross purposes. It's not even about whether it ends up guessing your word. You might as well not have a word and just answer randomly. The question is whether its question sequences (off the beaten track) are logical and coherent in light of your answers.
in reply to Bilal Barakat 🍉

@goatsarah @amanda

Yes, an LLM purely operating as an LLM without a 20-questions guessing module added will do lots of obviously stupid things. But it might accidentally look enough like it's reasoning from a model to not make the point as clearly, if it has a lot of pre-existing 20Q games converging on common targets and you pick one of them.



It would be justifiable homicide to off the eejit who decided to put capacitive controls on hobs, right?
in reply to Sarah Brown

Yes. There is absolutely nothing wrong with rotary knobs and other physical controls.
in reply to Ozzy

@Ozzy Can even make them waterproof by using Hall effect sensors.
@Ozzy

Sarah Brown reshared this.


Breaking: Researchers declare that the most effective birth control measure is owning a Cybertruck.

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in reply to Missing The Point

*looks at my 5 kids*

is it too late?

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Missing The Point

It both prevents the user from getting children AND their neighbours from continuing to have children! Dual purpose!


Long form - ADHD and suchlike
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Long form - ADHD and suchlike

Sensitive content

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to 1ngi

Long form - ADHD and suchlike
@1ngi Feeling is mutual, my lovely x
@1ngi

Unknown parent

Erik Uden ⁂🥥🌴🍑
@aspensmonster oh no, someone figured out where I've been stealing my quotes from!
Unknown parent

Preston Maness ☭
*Parenti intensifies*

Friendica Support reshared this.


!Friendica Support Seeing this in my log. Any idea how to get to the bottom of it?
in reply to Sarah Brown Friendica Support reshared this.

OK, more digging. It's failing in line 231 of /var/www/html/src/Object/Image.php.

Which is this:

} catch (\Throwable $error) {
			/** @see https://github.com/php/doc-en/commit/d09a881a8e9059d11e756ee59d75bf404d6941ed */
			if (strstr($error->getMessage(), "gd-webp cannot allocate temporary buffer")) {
				DI::logger()->notice('Image is probably animated and therefore unsupported', ['message' => $error->getMessage(), 'code' => $error->getCode(), 'trace' => $error->getTraceAsString(), 'file' => $this->filename]);
			} else {
				DI::logger()->warning('Unexpected throwable.', ['message' => $error->getMessage(), 'code' => $error->getCode(), 'trace' => $error->getTraceAsString(), 'file' => $this->filename]);
			}

So my suspicion was right: it's animated GIF avatars which are causing this. However, rather than fail gracefully, I'm left with a zombie worker job which seems to persist forever.



I'm going to just leave this here for no particular reason. inhousepharmacy.vu/p-1120-prog…

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Have taken the plunge and changed the physical SIM on my iPhone 13
To an eSIM. I was previously dual SIMming with one physical and one eSIM, but now I’m dual eSIM and the SIM tray is empty.

Sarah Brown reshared this.


Read this out loud.
If you know the original source of this, please let me know so I can give credit!
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

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Dear menopausal cis women:

The trans women in your life evangelising HRT are subject matter experts. They are on your side. They are trying to help you.

Stop fighting them, FFS.



Behold my awesome goblet. I got it at the Silves medieval fair. It appears to be 3D printed.
in reply to So‑Called Vaughn

@So‑Called Vaughn Oh, that’s a hydrocolloid bandage. There was an unfortunate percussive issue and I lost some skin. There may have been screaming.
in reply to Sarah Brown

There may have been some wincing here as I rendered a mental picture of the percussive issue and bloodcurdling SFX

Friendica Support reshared this.


!Friendica Support Hey all. Just upgraded to 2024.08 and the list of forums/groups from the column in the left has disappeared. Is there an easy way to get this back?


Just travelled with “Transavia”, which I found out afterwards is basically KLM/Air France (which is an airline I try to avoid) trying to do a Ryanair impression, and getting pretty much nothing right.

Clara Listensprechen reshared this.

in reply to Sarah Brown

ah, they're keeping the shit bits and making the rest worse? Impressive.


Welcome to this French marina. Thank you for paying us silly money to let your boat stay here for a bit while doing your hobby that will get terminally online people calling you a plutocrat who deserves to be killed by a giant murder dolphin over. Here’s what your money gets you.

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The press seems to have switched from “Trump’s brand of irreverent fascism is so sexy, we love it” to “Trump is a pathetic loser, and we can smell his fear”.

And honestly, I’m ok with that.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

I think this may end up being considered one of the most important political news articles ever published. It represents the moment the press realised that Kamala Harris can supply eight years of headlines more compelling than anything Donald Trump can dream up. Race riots, carnage in the streets, sinister dictators, foreign rapists. Yawn. Been done. But consider: a woman is wearing clothes, and the clothes have colours.


When I am empress of the universe, one of my first decrees shall be to make the past tense of “quit”, “quat”.

Because the lulz.

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Unknown parent

Bork!
Duly noted your regency.
in reply to Sarah Brown

So would the pluperfect be ‘quot’?

Yikes! I haven’t used the term ‘pluperfect’ since I was fourteen.



Tired: Americano. Who the hell even knows what that is?

Wired: Espresso squash. Does exactly what it says on the tin!

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Apropos of a conversation on Reddit, the British etiquette of offering tea/coffee three times, and refusing on the first two, thus:

Can I get you a tea or coffee?

Oh, no thank you.

You sure?

Yes, I'm good.

I'm making one anyway.

Oh go on then.

Now here's the thing: most of my social circle are geeks with some type of neurodiversity going on, and one thing we value is a straight bloody answer.

So it will go something like this:

Can I get you a tea or coffee?

Oh, no thank you.

OK.

I wonder how many thirsty tradespeople I've annoyed in my life?

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in reply to Sarah Brown

@Tathar when presented with the "must offer something 3 times to make sure" thing I occasionally after the third time just say "etiquette handshake protocol complete." Much to some annoyance 😁


Free hint: if you want to tell trans women that we have male privilege and therefore don’t understand sexism, maybe just fuck off instead?
in reply to Noctifer Shade

@godzero especially cis women who are delighted to finally have someone they can pay forward the misogyny they experience
@gz
in reply to Noctifer Shade

@godzero then they say “i’m not transphobic” and all the other cis people around them just somehow believe them
@gz
in reply to Noctifer Shade

I guess I move in the wrong circles because I don't hear people say that. It's awful.
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in reply to gz

@gz someone just did on another thread. I didn’t take it well.
@gz
in reply to Sarah Brown

cis women don’t act like you perfectly understand the trans femme experience challenge: impossible


Dear heterosexual men: you’re finding bras hard to take off because they’re designed for us to remove with our right hand.

But you’re facing the other way.

Try with the left.

You’re welcome.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

I've never had that problem because fairly ambidextrous lol
What about left-handed women?
in reply to gz

@gz Left handed people get a bad deal in so many ways.
@gz
in reply to gz

I should have said "left-handed people who wear bras".


Menopausal cis women be like: “I know I could feel like I’m 30 again, but I think I’m gonna try feeling shit for a few years” 🤔

Trans women: “Why are you doing this to yourselves? Behold our lord and saviour, HRT!”

Unknown parent

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@ajlanes but then without prescription is illegal too? I personally was raised paranoid of Getting Caught or Getting In Trouble.
in reply to Heather 👻

@Heather As I understand it, without a prescription it’s legal to buy them from abroad but not from the UK. It’s legal to possess them and illegal to supply them.

There are uk sites where you can have an “online consultation” with a doctor who will rubber stamp your purchase.

Finally some HRT is now available over the counter without a prescription at Boots

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@ajlanes Boots and superdrug have age restrictions.... Not really great if you're just perimenopausal.
in reply to Heather 👻

@Heather @Alexandra Lanes It’s absolutely legal to possess oestrogen for personal use without a prescription.

Trans women do it … a lot, because doctors are arseholes to us.



Nine hours ago, due to a series of events I don’t wish to recount, I ate an entire Carolina reaper.

I now know that nine hours is how long it takes to transit my digestive tract.

I desire euthanasia.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

I've been torturing myself for decades. But a big glass of milk isn't a great deterrent to heat overload. Something with milk fat coupled with citric acid helps the most. Like plain whole yogurt with lime or lemon juice squeezed into it. Citric acid breaks up the capsaicin oils bonded to your mouth and throat, milk fat coats and sooths a bit. But just pounding milk puts a big strain on your digestive system, which makes Act 2 & 3 a lot worse than they have to be.


Found this absolutely fascinating youtube.com/watch?v=UCXav-ptPe…
in reply to Sion [main]

@Sion [main] There’s a delay attribution code EXT ANIMAL for attributing a delay to “animals not under the control of Network Rail”. This begs a question, obviously.


So I have a little holiday rental business.

One of my guests just complained that there was sand on the beach.

Give me strength.

in reply to Sarah Brown

Regrettably, there are people out there who seem to find a complaint in every activity. It is not that the glass is half-empty, it is that the glass it the wrong temperature, wrong colour, badly designed, and probably made in a country that they disapprove of.
So grit the teeth and don't get wound up when these people come into your life (just hope they move on soon).


I understand that apartheid nepo space Karen told the EU commission to “fuck your own face”.

It’s a … bold … move. Let’s see how that works out for him, shall we?

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Are you replying to a Tropic Thunder quote with a Dodgeball quote?


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Unknown parent

Bag Of Mostly Sentient Water

@Captain_Jack_Sparrow @partnumber2 This is what you responded to. Where I'm very clearly not making a generalisation. You replied to this. This is what you've been basing your whole tirade on.

'People don't realise how corrupt the UK is because the British (let's be honest mainly English) know how to spin, minimise, evade & manipulate like no others. Even the British public has zero clue just how corrupt it is."

You engaged with me. You started insulting me. You wouldn't drop it. But please tell everyone how I'm the bully.

Unknown parent

@dibi58

When I eventually got the joke, I belly laughed...

I feel that I'll never see an ellipsis the same way...



Remember when we thought that the internet was going to be a wonderful thing for the advancement of human knowledge instead of the Library of Babel, with Hitler as the librarian?

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in reply to Sarah Brown

I was working as a programmer on the Internet in the 1980s (before the WWW and social media). Had I known, I'd have given up and joined a monastery.
in reply to Andrew Ginty

@Andrew Ginty Also date from before the eternal September. I worked for ARM in the 90s as well. It’s my fault too.
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in reply to Sarah Brown

@Lizette603_23 Again, I blame capitalism. It always finds its level at the lowest point.
@Liz




Long form, on fascism on western democracies

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Long form, on fascism on western democracies

Sensitive content



British middle class: These far right riots were disgusting! Where were the police while all this was going on?

Rage Against The Machine: Was there some lack of clarity on our part?

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