stochastictrebuchet

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve really been enjoying Vivaldi. It’s also Chromium-based. It’s easy to customize and it has really good tab management. You can group tabs into workspaces, open split panes, and – this one I really appreciate – you can stack tabs by domain. Added bonus is that the company behind it, Vivaldi Technologies, is Norwegian, which ticks the ‘shop European’ box for me.

    As for ad blocking, the shittiness of manifest v3 made me look at options outside the browser rather than rely on extensions. These days I pass all my traffic through adguard, which filters out ads from the request responses. All in all this has been a positive step, because now I can play around with any browser without ever seeing ads.




  • Well-deserved win! Watched this in the cinema a few weeks back. What immediately struck me about the beautiful art style is that it felt more like what you’d expect from a labor-of-love indie game than from a dreamworks/pixar studio – and it was incredibly refreshing! Also, for a movie where water plays a big role, the fluid rendering was absolutely breathtaking. I could almost smell the warm plastic air of a GPU giving its all.



  • https://minilanguage.com/ is an interesting one to look at. There are exactly 1000 words in the total vocabulary. That’s Mini Mundo though. A second, smaller variant also exists: Mini Kore, with 100 words.

    I started learning it too soon after learning Toki Pona and lost steam. But I agree with the design principles. They stem from the observation that Toki Pona, as fun as it is, is just too damn ambiguous for anything non-superficial. All too often speakers need to clarify what they said by switching to a natural language. Even my own Toki notes become indecipherable after a few days.

    Toki Pona: fun, therapeutic mental exercise, made even better with sitelen pona. Feels like writing poetry. Never meant to be a useful language. Easy to learn, hard to use.

    Mini: useful as a language for general purpose communication. Small, primarily latinate vocabulary. Harder to learn, easier to use.



  • Final graphic shows why the far-right hates education. I’m probably jumping to conclusions, but I wonder if their relatively low popularity among higher-educated voters is due to:

    1. Voters being more aware of their history (a “… doomed to repeat it” sort of thing)
    2. Better at spotting populist lies (I don’t know enough about German politics to know how populist the Left Party is)
    3. Leading more comfortable lives, thus less inclined to reach for extremes.

    It’s an undemocratic thought, but sometimes I wish there were some sort of aptitude test right before casting a vote. Or at the very least, a quick quiz to confirm you’re aware of the party’s key program points. Obviously, both options are ripe for abuse.


  • So long as we’re not just singling out Meta. They’ve all done it.

    At least Meta, with its Llama model family, has enabled the open source LLM space to flourish (along with Mistral, AI2, Alibaba, Eleuther, and many others).

    What-aboutism. I know. I’m okay with what’s happening here in the sense that in return we’ve gotten magical (compared to the SoTA five years ago) models with seemingly emergent reasoning capabilities and expertise in basically every domain. That’s huge, even if it’s started to feel normal.

    The issue, of course, is creatives whose content was stolen now losing out on opportunities or revenue that they relied on, meaning fewer creatives in the future and more AI slop.

    Not seeding is hilariously on-brand for Meta though. Maybe it’s the ‘possession < distribution’ defence?


  • To the extent that the billboard never existed while the image implies it did – sure.

    I love the term ‘slop’. It’s one of my favorite new words along with ‘nontent’.

    But this, to me, isn’t that. I think of slop as ‘unrequested, unconvincing, lazy, and lifeless’. In short, ineffective and unwelcome.

    I feel like this meme gets the message across. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. The AI tells are subtle enough: the multi lane pileup in the background and some poor small size text rendering.

    Not sure why I felt the need to write this. Guess I’m of the opinion that just because something is AI-generated doesn’t mean it should be discounted immediately, unless it really feels like zero effort went into it. Have a nice day!