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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Maybe it’s not about humans and never has been. Maybe by the time the gods realized how much of an issue humans were, we were already too widespread for them to destroy us without either running out of mana or ruining earth for everything.

    Maybe the cancer is a god’s plan, but it’s not working well enough.













  • Personally, instead of smart bulbs, I’d use smart switches for automating lighting. There’s no need for every bulb to be individually controlled and carry all of the overhead involved in that. On that note, I’d also love to see DC circuits that can take LED bulbs without needing a transformer for each bulb (which tends to be what causes it to fail IIRC).

    Just tried looking at the state of the smart switch market and fuck Samsung for naming their app for transferring files from phone to PC “smart switch”. Especially because there’s plenty of ways to do that already that don’t require a shitty Samsung app.

    Excluding Samsung from the search, I’d suggest not looking for products directly but finding enthusiast communities that are building their own smart homes. There is more to it than just getting devices that don’t rely on some specific company’s web services. You’ll need to also setup a controller/server, connect all of the devices to that, and then figure out how you want to interact with it (eg via phone, scheduling, voice commands, etc). I haven’t done this myself, but I’m guessing all of these are solved problems, but doubt that anyone would call setting it all up easy.



  • The term “public relations” is literally propaganda to make propaganda look better. It was just called propaganda before WWII but then there was a propaganda campaign to increase local resistance to propaganda from the Nazis and then the Communists. And it worked, so they needed more propaganda to get the local propaganda to work again.


  • This raises the question of how many kg of human mass is required to start fusion and create a human star? How does fusion even work if you have a mix of different elements? Would the human star pulse in a cycle of collapsing until hydrogen fusion starts, exploding out until it stops and then collapsing again? Or would any fusion ignite enough to stop it from collapsing into a neutron star or black hole?

    And if I’ve asked this question, does it mean xkcd has already attempted an answer? Or at least a comic that mentions it?


  • It all depends on how and what you ask it, plus an element of randomness. Remember that it’s essentially a massive text predictor. The same question asked in different ways can lead it into predicting text based on different conversations it trained on. There’s a ton of people talking about python, some know it well, others not as well. And the LLM can end up giving some kind of hybrid of multiple other answers.

    It doesn’t understand anything, it’s just built a massive network of correlations such that if you type “Python”, it will “want” to “talk” about scripting or snakes (just tried it, it preferred the scripting language, even when I said “snake”, it asked me if I wanted help implementing the snake game in Python 😂).

    So it is very possible for it to give accurate responses sometimes and wildly different responses in other times. Like with the African countries that start with “K” question, I’ve seen reasonable responses and meme ones. It’s even said there are none while also acknowledging Kenya in the same response.