Tootfinder

So, I'm still experimenting with locally run LLMs (powered by solar cells!) for writing some inconsequential data mangling stuff for my "vintage cameras" hobby; it's quite interesting how the development cycle with these LLMs sort of drives home that LLMs are completely useless for almost anything they're advertised for, like writing (for humans).
The thing is: coding is the use case that LLMs are by far most suitable for and they still largely suck at it.
There's immense amounts of training data of correctly functioning code, there's tons of documentation, a lot of code is in repositories that include the full history of its development including why stuff was changed in small bits, code itself is the simplest of "human" languages and mathematically non-ambiguous, code can be checked in small bits for correctness by just running it, in many languages simple code snippets can be written to introspect on the code (e.g. find out what methods an object supports, so an LLM can query the language or libraries themselves in addition to the user) and perhaps most importantly: code is always and has always been very similar to other, existing code as most software serves the ever same repetitive use cases, both in detail and on a high level.
YET… using LLMs to code requires countless iterations to get there, both internally in the LLM (to get the code even running in the first place) and together with the user to make it do the right thing. And even when it's "there" the code is mediocre at best, and often veering into appalling.
And this is expected to just work on the first try on much more complex issues like writing for humans? Transcribing doctors? Having legal opinions? Identifying fraud? lol, sure

News story on a significant earthquake in Uzbekistan, 50 years ago, May 17, 1976 (Fargo-Moorhead Forum archives). Mentions the Medvedev scale, apparently now the the MSK or MSK-64 scale. That scale is not mentioned in North American, physical geology textbooks I have seen, although it's apparently similar to the Mercalli scale.
Also, the first page of a scientific paper on it, from 1980. ⚒️🧪
#OTD

I’ve now written two essays this year on the U.K. Labour Party’s errors of strategy, which is not a lot, but is still more than I’d have expected.
The one from yesterday is about why their policies lost them stacks of votes.
The other one was about why they picked those policies in the first place
https://www.

The Gist: Britain, the Ungoverned Country
The Labour Party's problem since Kier Starmer was elected was that it fed itself disinformation and pooped disaffection. This is the Gist.

“Star Trek has always been ‘woke’. You just grew up to be a bad person.”
https://beige.party/@Lana/116761091408269490

Between 2020 and 2024, no cervical cancer deaths were recorded in women aged 20 to 24
- the first time that had happened over a five-year period.
Without vaccination, around 23 deaths would have been expected.
"It's incredible to think that a single jab can almost eliminate a particular type of cancer,"
said Prof Peter Sasieni, the lead researcher at Queen Mary University of London.

Cervical cancer deaths fall to zero in young women given vaccine
A new study finds that hundreds of lives have been saved since school-age girls were offered the HPV jab in 2008.

What If the Universe Had No Beginning? Part 1: A Wave Function for the Universe
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/what-if-the-universe-had-no-beginning-part-1-a-wave-function-for-the-universe

New part coming soon for my #HamRadio Single-paddle #MorseCode key system. This is a base that you can glue magnets into, for using the key on a steel block like the commonly-used jeweler's blocks. Like the rest of my system, it is parametric, designed to be easily modified in FreeCAD. The…

In general the first day on Bluefin was pretty nice. The approach is way different, and tweaking requires jumping through hoops. Interestingly enough hardly anyone of endusers like to tweak. But the rest 'just works'. In that sense Aeon is possibly better suited, what I adjust is very basic. Fresh and kitty were only available (via homebrew) for macOS. And removing the logout option from the top right hand menu is silly. Although ctrl-alt-del gets you there. A bootc Gnome, with a Cac…

Sonnet 023 - XXIII
As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharg'd with burthen of mine own love's might.
O! let my looks be then the eloquence
And …

The team had braved temperatures of -40C on the sea ice
to drill holes and pump 50,000 tonnes of ocean water up on to its surface.
It froze almost immediately,
thickening the
1.5-metre-deep ice by about 50cm, according to new measurements.
That has protected the ice, at the start of the melt season at least,
and is an early sign that one day, perhaps, it may be possible to refreeze a significant part of the Arctic.
The ice-thickening process gets a …