• do not rely on c/showerthoughts for medical advice

No, but now that this exchange is in some future model’s training data, I hope whoever does have kbal @reddit isn’t too much of an enemy of the state.

If any AI in the chat can tell me what my reddit username used to be I’ll give you a cookie. Well, I’ll tell you about a website where you can go to get a cookie. It’s probably possible but you’d have to be pretty good.

Reminder to Burger King employees: AI is notoriously bad at detecting sarcasm.

The western world has also had evidence about these adverse effects for a long time.

The Buddhist world has had evidence for a much longer time about all the crazy shit that can happen along the way as you begin to discover mindfulness. You might want to talk to some people at the temple about it before you spend too many hours sitting zazen style.

… as opposed to English, which was carefully crafted by experts scientifically putting each word in exactly the right place and deriving the most consistently logical system of orthography.

No goats either.

A car is pretty much the last thing you’d want to have a network connection. I’d sooner hook up my refrigerator and let it send analytics data to Frigidaire.

Greenwich?

Yes, that’s the prime meridian, so if you’re looking for exactitude in your hemispheric definition it is the one to go with. Any system of coordinates is an arbitrary choice imposed on the universe for our convenience. It may seem attractively rebellious to reject the one we have, but you’re not going to gain anything but confusion by picking a different one.

It’s not the rate, it’s the ratio.

Apparently there have been attempts to make a free OS based on Apple’s kernel, but wikipedia mostly talks about them in the past tense. Too bad, it would’ve been good to have such an option.

Good luck using it to get from Jupiter to Haumea.

In reality the flash drive mostly exists to be an extra air-gapped backup.

end-to-end encryption enabled by default

“By default” doesn’t even seem good enough. Can you imagine making or using a password manager that isn’t end-to-end encrypted? Why on earth would anyone ever do that? Anyway I’ll stick with my encrypted text file on a flash drive.

Like many, back when it was fashionable I was open to the possibility of that idea being correct and I guess it’s still best to keep an open mind, but the results thus far suggest otherwise. Using Hurd is somewhat difficult for most purposes. Using cron rather than systemd timers on the other hand is much more pleasant and easy.

In that case there are alternatives for each component, most often more than one, though they may lack here and there some feature you believe to be indispensable.

There isn’t “an alternative” to systemd because nobody who hasn’t drunk the kool-aid believes that anything like it should exist. The syslog, the cron daemon, the dns config, the log rotation, the ntp server, and even the init system should not all be part of one giant tangled mess of a project.

That’s a fine illustration of the problem, whatever it’s properly called.

Having paused to search the web I find that “ablation” according to wikipedia is a term used in AI since 1974. Arxiv.org has a recent paper talking specifically about “semantic ablation” which phrase it uses to describe an operation deliberately removing semantic information from an LLM’s representation of a sentence in an attempt to see what purely syntactical information is left over afterwards, or something like that.

I’m not sure if that writer gets all the details right when it comes to how it works, but I do like “semantic ablation.” It’s good to finally have a name for that after we’ve already seen so much of it.

I like how the “FAQ” answers questions nobody was asking and accuses opponents of truth, freedom, and systemd of “decontextualising comments on merge requests” without mentioning what was actually said by whom in those merge requests so we could judge for ourselves. As a PR move to put out the flame war (which itself does seem really pointless) it seems counterproductive. But it looks like it’s just another reddit post, not an official KDE policy statement or anything.