this is how I ended up finding out there are now much better rips available for many of the shows I burned to DVD in the mid 2000s

that’s quite possible, yes

I don’t think he was talking about spending 5 minutes on a message, just that it’s not actually going to take you much longer to send what you want to say in a single message rather than 3 separate messages with one of them being a correction. So it wouldn’t make much of a difference to the sender, but it’s much nicer for the receiver.

this is awesome news, I hope that this also ends up reviving the ut:xmp mod. as much as I played ut2004 back in the day (I loved the various RPG mods), I played u2:xmp more and miss it a lot. the ut2004 is not exactly the same, but would be great to see.

2.3 percentage points of growth is not all that small when talking about steam’s user base I think. and his point about acceleration is interesting, we might still be in the early phases of an s-curve.

personally though, as a 20-year Linux user I’m already gobsmacked by the number of new users and mainstream discussion around linux. if we never crack 5% that will already be more users than I ever thought Linux would get

my only complaint with it is the same complaint I have with all kpop: it’s autotuned to hell and back. I suppose many people like how it sounds, but it’s not for me

on the contrary, why do so many old apps waste all the space in the title bar just for the title and 3 buttons? it makes no sense.

I mean, refried comes from spanish refrito which just means ‘fried well’. a dish that is called refrito doesn’t necessarily involve cooking ingredients twice. although in this case you do boil the beans first and then fry them, the name doesn’t actually mean you fry the beans twice as it sounds like it does

3 students share an apartment and 2 of them study a lot but the third spends most his nights partying. The 2 studious housemates decide to pull a prank on him, and one night when he comes home they are waiting for him next to the bedroom door wearing white sheets. One of the friends says ‘welcome friend, I am Peter!’. The other says ‘welcome friend, I am Paul’. The drunk house mate looks at them and says ‘Colleagues! would you mind stepping aside? I am Lazarus!’

yeah, that doesn’t translate… in Dutch, the names refer to St peter and St Paul and both end in -us as well: Petrus and Paulus. Also, ‘being Lazarus’ means being very drunk.

I’m not arguing that AI won’t get better, I’m arguing that the exponential improvements in AI that op was expecting are mostly wishful thinking.

they could stick to old data only, but then how do you keep growing the dataset by the amounts that have been done recently? that is where a lot of the (diminishing) improvements the last years have come from.

and it is not at all clear how to apply reinforcement learning for more generic tasks like chatbots, without a clear scoring system like both chess and StarCraft have.

the problem is that ai’s are trained on programs that humans have written. At best the llm architectures it creates will be similar to the state of the art that humans have created at that point.

however, even more important than the architecture of an ai model is the training data that it is trained on. If we start including ai-generated programs in this data, we will quickly observe model collapse: performance of models tend to get worse as more ai-generated data is included in the training data.

rather than AIs generating ever smarter new AIs, the more likely result is that we can’t scrape new quality datasets as they’ve all been contaminated with llm-generated data that will only reduce model performance

why is it very likely to do that? we have no evidence to believe this is true at all and several decades of slow, plodding ai research that suggests real improvement comes incrementally like in other research areas.

to me, your suggestion sounds like the result of the logical leaps made by yudkovsky and the people on his forums

kiwis? what do New Zealanders have to do with it? I feel like something is flying very far over my head

as long as people are logging pertinent information sure. but I’ve had the misfortune of working with plenty of programs that return just an error code that means ‘something went wrong initialising subsystem X’ and left it all to the user to figure out what exactly went wrong, with files and where in those files etc. etc.

using nushell is my little rebellion against POSIX tyranny

i find that I have significantly less problems with heartburn when I remember to eat enough fiber. eating more veggies, pulses, wholegrain bread and fruit helps me a lot

if I don’t use android or iOS, I can’t use my banking apps, pay with my phone, access government services as they require an app to sign in, etc. it’s just not doable anymore for me

didn’t apple just get forced to enable side loading in the EU due to the DMA?

using irc is near outcast level? well damn…

I’ve been dual booting for ages without any windows-caused issues. is it windows 11 specifically that messes with dual booting or did I accidentally work around it by installing Linux to a separate ssd