DefederateLemmyMl

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • So regardless of the fact that it’s about an optical connector here, and hence completely nonsensical, gold is actually a worse conductor of electricity than copper or silver. The point of gold plated connectors is not so much to improve the immediate audio quality, but to prevent oxidation of the connector over time, which can degrade quality and lead to bad contact. Gold is a noble metal, so doesn’t oxidize. I would think most audiophiles know this?

    I used to have to replace the cable of my electric guitar every few years because the sound would get crackly or drop out intermittently, I eventually got one with gold plated 6.35mm plug and I’m still using that same cable 15 years later.



  • To be fair half the world seems to forget Belgium is not all french sometimes

    It’s annoying as fuck.

    Microsoft/Xbox store used to be almost entirely French when visiting from a Belgian IP, even if you set your profile language to Dutch or English. Not sure how it is nowadays, I don’t come there anymore, but it was like that for at least a decade.

    Amazon Prime and Netflix still have many movies and series in dubbed French only for Belgian customers, and not the original version with Dutch or even just English subtitles.

    Many sites serve you a French language page by default if you visit from a Belgian IP, and then you have to hunt in the header or footer of the page for the language toggle. You usually can’t even read the cookie permission popup in a language you understand.


  • Why would I throw it away, when I can give it to someone who needs it more, or sell it?

    Because selling is always a hassle, dealing with choosing beggars and scammers, and it may not be worth much anymore for general use.

    For example, my old PC is a i7 4770k… it can’t run Windows 11 or play remotely recent games. I don’t know anyone who could use this thing, so to save a few watts I took out the GPU, put it in eco mode and have been using it as my Linux server.

    My NUC uses 6-7W idle.

    I have played around with some mini PC’s (minisforum and beelink brand), they’re neat but they turned out to be not very reliable, two have already died prematurely, and unfortunately they are not end-user serviceable. Lack of storage expansion options is an issue as well, if you don’t just want to stack a bunch of external USB drives on top of each other.



  • Doing your part in a relationship’s reproductive planning is good partner behavior. This shouldn’t be a game where just one person is on the hook and the other is just along for the ride. Male and Female birth control do not exist as a one or the other dichotomy.

    Except what the meme is saying is not that both partners should work together on birth control. It suggests that it should be on the man instead.

    Meme also suggests that no work is being done on a male contraception pill, when in reality this is being worked on and has been worked on for decades, but there are good biological reasons why this is anything but trivial and certainly much harder than a female contraception pill.


  • Counterpoint: a woman taking birthcontrol is empowered because she is taking charge of her own reproduction. She doesn’t have to rely on or trust the man to take his pill. After all, she would be the one bearing most of the burden in case of an unwanted pregnancy.

    Additionally, purely biologically it is much easier to reliably stop conception on the female side than on the male side. A woman only produces one egg cell per month, whereas a man produces millions of sperm cells per day.








  • I think the problem stems from how LLMs are marketed to, and perceived by the public. They are not marketed as: this is a specific application of this-or-that AI or ML technology. They are marketed as “WE HAVE AI NOW!”, and the general public who is not familiar with AI/ML technologies equates this to AGI, because that’s what they know from the movies. The promotional imagery that some of these companies put out, with humanoid robots that look like they came straight out of Ex Machina doesn’t help either.

    And sure enough, upon first contact, an LLM looks like a duck and quacks like a duck … so people assume it is a duck, but they don’t realize that it’s a cardboard model of a duck with a taperecorder inside that plays back quacking sounds.


  • LLMs are decent with coding tasks if you know what you’re doing

    Only if the thing you are trying to do is commonly used and well documented, but in that case you could just read the documentation instead and learn a thing yourself, right?

    The other day I tried to get some instructions on how to do something specific in a rather obscure and rather opaquely documented cli tool that I need for work. I couldn’t quite make sense of the documentation, and I found the program’s behavior a bit erratic, so that’s why I turned to AI. It cheerfully and confidently told me (I’m paraphrasing): oh to do “this specific thing” you have to use the --something-specific switch, and then it gave some command line examples using that switch that looked like they made complete sense.

    So I thought: oh, did I overlook that switch? Could it be that easy? So I looked in the documentation and sure enough… the AI had been bullshitting me and that switch didn’t exist.

    Then there was the time when I asked it to generate an ARM template (again, poorly documented bullshit) to create some service in Azure with some specific parameters. It gave me something that looked like an ARM template, but sure as hell wasn’t a valid one. This one wasn’t completely useless though, at least I was able to cross reference with an existing template and with some trial-and-error, I was able to copy over some of the elements that I needed.


  • every service will get your ID or photo

    To be fair, that’s not how it will work. The site and the identity verifier will be two different things, the verifier only attests that you are not underage and the site doesn’t get your identity.

    Still harmful though, because you can be sure that there will be scamsites redirecting people to fake but real looking verifiers for blackmail and identity theft purposes.

    I for one will never put my ID or photo into any age verifier ever.