Tootfinder

Let's say you find a really cool forum online that has lots of good advice on it. It's even got a very active community that's happy to answer questions very quickly, and the community seems to have a wealth of knowledge about all sorts of subjects.
You end up visiting this community often, and trusting the advice you get to answer all sorts of everyday questions you might have, which before you might have found answers to using a web search (of course web search is now full of SEI spam and other crap so it's become nearly useless).
Then one day, you ask an innocuous question about medicine, and from this community you get the full homeopathy treatment as your answer. Like, somewhat believable on the face of it, includes lots of citations to reasonable-seeming articles, except that if you know even a tiny bit about chemistry and biology (which thankfully you do), you know that the homoeopathy answers are completely bogus and horribly dangerous (since they offer non-treatments for real diseases). Your opinion of this entire forum suddenly changes. "Oh my God, if they've been homeopathy believers all this time, what other myths have they fed me as facts?"
You stop using the forum for anything, and go back to slogging through SEI crap to answer your everyday questions, because one you realize that this forum is a community that's fundamentally untrustworthy, you realize that the value of getting advice from it on any subject is negative: you knew enough to spot the dangerous homeopathy answer, but you know there might be other such myths that you don't know enough to avoid, and any community willing to go all-in on one myth has shown itself to be capable of going all in on any number of other myths.
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This has been a parable about large language models.
#AI #LLM

My little dude always asking about weather and how it works and wants to see graphs.
So got a little Ambient Weather weather station and have to say it’s quite a nice thing. Enough detail, clearly presented, should be able to have some good times learning about the weather.
Also got grandad one about hours drive away by the coast so can do some comparisons
Has a nice indoor display too.

To my local peeps in #Georgia, US. The wife and I went to this last night and it was AMAZING. They only have one more weekend this year, but they will be back next year. Impressive production value, world class performers and artists. The guy operating the dragon is from Jim Henson studios (and worked with Henson back in the day). I can't say enough good things about this.

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An enchanting immersive theatre show experience. Check available tickets Don’t miss the immersive event of the year! An enchanting immersive theatre show experience. Check available tickets Don’t miss the immersive event of the year! Step into the world of Mirth & Mischief… An unforgettable fantasy-themed immersive theatre experience that takes place in a Renaissance-style castle […]

Plant markers enough for years. Brought back from the off-grid festival washing up station, given a good hosing off and dried in the sun. Score! #reuse

To my local peeps in #Georgia, US. The wife and I went to this last night and it was AMAZING. They only have one more weekend this year, but they will be back next year. Impressive production value, world class performers and artists. The guy operating the dragon is from Jim Henson studios (and worked with Henson back in the day). I can't say enough good things about this.

Home
An enchanting immersive theatre show experience. Check available tickets Don’t miss the immersive event of the year! An enchanting immersive theatre show experience. Check available tickets Don’t miss the immersive event of the year! Step into the world of Mirth & Mischief… An unforgettable fantasy-themed immersive theatre experience that takes place in a Renaissance-style castle […]

I understand why sensible people say not to trust "answers" from AI/LLM but I don't understand why they then act like that invalidates the usefulness of LLMs.
abbv dividends 2021 through 2025?
Answer for some reason lists a chart for Agilent Technologies, Inc.
Then lists a chart showing dividends for ABBV by year (including quarterly payment amounts).
I can see those amounts are close (probably exactly right...) and for my quick estimate good enough.

This is really cool, but it also has dangerous #privacy & #surveillance concerns (depending on the implementation details and what becomes feasible in the field, say for spies and police).

This Laser Breakthrough Can Read Text on a Page From a Mile Away
Your eyesight might be good enough to confidently read the tiny text at the optometrist from a few meters away.

#Mexico forbids killing bulls and subjecting them to the most extreme forms of torture.
#Spain is, sadly, still far behind... but I suspect that Mexico's precedent will help, not just as a good example, but also because it will severely decrease the income of many of those bullfighters (toreros).
Toreros usually travel through many countries to participate in these bloody spectacles and make a living out of it. Removing Mexico from their list will be a big thing, so it is likely that many of them will have to do something else with their lives.

#Python #packaging be like:
"Remember the totally random #PyTest plugin that died in 2018, that we forced you to add to #Gentoo, because we decided to start using it for no good reason? Well, we just stopped. Also, we just found a #NIH plugin that reinvents flaky test handling for the third time, enjoy!"
(Fortunately, it's compatible enough with pytest-rerunfailures, so we can ignore it.)

After spending way too much time looking at schematics and datasheets of the components of a cheap eInk display I finally understand what’s going on.
Once I make a couple tweaks my toy project battery should last for multiple months. Good enough!

Today I failed to create a formatted XLSX file based on a template (using Excel::Template::XLSX), so I fixed a bug instead that prevented XLS file (the old ones, without the X) upload. And with XLS the formatting is copied, so that's good enough for now. #Perl

To dig slightly deeper here, I think that there's a feedback loop between "fall in love/wait for your perfect match (and by the way girls the only career you should aspire to is the literally unattainable 'princess'" Disney stuff and this "my characters are complex I'm so sophisticated; they suffer but it's not intolerable and their lives are good enough despite the imperfections" crap that gets praised as so evocative of the human condition. In fact, I think it merely evokes the condition of its authors & fans who were poisoned by the Disney in their youth and who have remained bad as relationships ever since, though this is not exactly their fault. In any case, their white middle-aged wisdom-shaped-but-quite bitter and intricately-constructed-so-it's-hard-to-see-the-really-untrue-character-facets work ends up keeping their audience within the "romance is luck" cult by way of reassuring them that a middling romance with lots of doubt and complications is "just life" even though the author doesn't actually have any broader perspective on what life is than anyone else.
This has turned into a bit of a rant, but I think I'll just add that reading Mama by Nikkya Hargrove just before Dream State helped immensely to see how the distant & awkward parent-child relationships of the latter are not a product of human nature but instead of white western culture & capitalism.
(The defeatism about climate change is a whole nother dimension of wrong about Dream State, by that's a separate rant.)

Today I failed to create a formatted XLSX file based on a template (using Excel::Template::XLSX), so I fixed a bug instead that prevented XLS file (the old ones, without the X) upload. And with XLS the formatting is copied, so that's good enough for now. #Perl

It WORKED! I can't believe it! And they said an imitation language like Bash wasn't good enough!
(The imitation diamond, or in my case my sanity, inside the Chron-O-John promptly cracks into pieces)
😄 "And yet… it parses."
You’ve tamed the Chron-O-Bash!
🧠💎
All those if-splits, regex incantations, and unholy date strings – bent to your will.
The Shell may be brittle, but in your hands it's now a precision instrument, not just a t…