• 15 Posts
  • 694 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • As the other person said, the bit about Arch is just the preamble.
    But you can use Nix Home-Manager on Arch (or other distros), if you’re so inclined, which will give you that reproducibility for the stuff in your home-directory.

    In some ways, this is like backing up and restoring your dotfiles, but it allows you to template those dotfiles and depending on the program, it offers simple ways to populate the dotfile templates. For example, KDE applications don’t generally offer very legible dotfiles and so configuring e.g. a panel via dotfiles is kind of a pain. To help with this, there’s Nix Plasma-Manager.


  • Oh man, a few years ago, we had a military dude as conductor in our wind band. And I was always one of his favorites, I’m guessing because I have broad shoulders and a deep voice – prime military recruit material.

    …except that I’m vegan. So, one day he sits next to me during lunch and asks me why I’m vegan. I do the usual dance of avoiding the topic, but he does not want to let it go. So, I tell him that I think killing animals is wrong. He walked out of that conversation like a hurt gazelle.

    Like, fuck me, dude, if you’re gonna do the whole military tough guy spiel, but cannot take a kid disagreeing with you, then maybe you’re not as tough after all.


  • That argument annoys me so much. Each vegetable does cover all amino acids, they just don’t have them in the exact relations that our body needs. But if a vegetable has only 50% of one amino acid compared to the distribution that our body needs, then you can abso-fucking-lutely just eat double of that vegetable. Or as you say mix-and-match.

    A typical Western diet includes far more protein than the body needs for maintaining itself either way.


  • Ah yeah, there’s various technologies that I don’t mention too loudly. For example, all things considered, I’m probably an above-average Python dev, but I never enjoyed writing it, so when I get asked about it, I always answer that I’m not too confident with it.

    Which, in my defense, isn’t even really a lie. My specialty is large-scale projects, which is something where Python with its loose typing just does not give you confidence…




  • The thing I never understood about PowerShell is that it’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages in existence. It just feels like you might as well go for a full-fledged programming language at that point.

    The appeal of Bash et al is that the scripting is almost the same as the interactive usage, which you already know. But because PowerShell is so verbose, I’m really not sure people do use it interactively.

    I guess, that code snippet in the article makes somewhat of a difference, in that PowerShell offers better features for interop between processes. But man, that still feels like it could’ve been a library instead…


  • I have been expecting that to happen in gaming in general. I feel like the reason we aren’t seeing it right now, is because it would feel quite pointless to integrate it into a game, if it isn’t actually properly integrated.

    For example, if you tell an NPC to jump off a cliff and the LLM responds with “Excellent idea!”, then well, you expect the NPC to do that thing.
    Or if a dragon crashlands next to an NPC, you expect it to notice and not tell you calmly about the weather.
    You need code for these things. Tons of code.

    To some degree, Bethesda will have the money to do that sort of thing, especially since they’re now owned by Microsoft, which’s investors are extra horny for AI.
    And they already have a reputation of jank and Todd Howard lying, so there’s perhaps less of an expectation for an NPC actually reacting to a crashlanded dragon.

    But even then, this whole thing might just end up being a very expensive gimmick.
    In particular, you can’t expect console players to have a keyboard for chatting. You can try to do voice control instead, but you also cannot expect players to have a (decent) microphone, or for them to be talking to their console when they want to play late in the evening.

    So, you can’t really make this LLM thing part of the core gameplay. Everything will still need to be solvable without it. Which gives it very high potential to become a gimmick.
    Maybe you could have pre-canned questions like we currently do and then an LLM responds, kind of keeping the context of your conversation in mind? That might still be annoying, though, when as a player, you can never be too sure, if it gave you all the relevant info, or you have to repeat the question another time.





  • I’m saying spray-mop the floor once a week and you’ll take most of the dust out of that room before it settles on harder-to-clean surfaces, which reduces how often you need to clean shelves, plants etc…

    Most dust in a typical household is from shed skin cells, from either humans or pets. And I do imagine that most shed skin cells just fall onto the floor at first and can be collected there.