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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • What kind of world do we live in where folks are disappointed that their next kid will be female? It’s dumb society has been crafted this way, stupid af.

    I’m probably giving more credit than is due, but:

    I don’t think it’s inherently bad for a parent to have a preference for their kid’s sex. If a mother already has a son, I can understand her wanting her next child to be a daughter. Similarly, if a father already has a daughter, I can understand him wanting a son next. All parent/child relationships are special, but I understand parents who are particularly interested in cultivating a mother/daughter or father/son relationship.

    Obviously no parent should ever be disappointed in their child for simply being one sex or the other; that’s not okay. But I can understand a parent being disappointed that things didn’t turn out how they had hoped in that regard.

    Disclaimer: My father was very transparent that I was a last-ditch-effort for him to finally have a son after having 3 daughters. Thanks dad.



  • Space RF communication protocols and best-use technologies - I need to read about it more

    You can get a decent primer on this topic here and here. If you aren’t already a licensed ham, you can look into getting your Technician license (a lofty goal, given the exam comprises thirty whole multiple-choice questions, assuming you’re in the U.S.) and get familiar with transmitting/receiving across long distances.

    One fun experiment you can tackle early on before even getting licensed to transmit is to just receive signals from satellites that are already in orbit and can be reliably tracked. For example: you can easily track the International Space Station and know when it will be passing over your location and set up a receiver to listen on the right frequency. It’s not uncommon for them to be broadcasting some kind of signal on a regular basis. Sometimes they even broadcast SSTV signals that you can receive and decode. Once you’ve done this a couple of times, you oughta be pretty comfortable with at least receiving signals from satellites in orbit. Good preliminary proof of concept.

    A couple of handy web apps I’ve used to track satellites before:

    You used to be able to track the ISS through a NASA web app, but they recently retired it in favor of their first-party app 🙄. Admittedly, it’s a pretty great app in my experience. But I wish the old web app were still online. That said, the apps I linked above should also be able to track the ISS as well.


  • You could use PiVPN (you don’t need to install it specifically on a Raspberry Pi – this is just a handy all-in-one software solution). It supports both OpenVPN and Wireguard standards. Forward the relevant port in your router configuration, set up a single user for yourself in the VPN settings, and then connect via whichever client you prefer (OpenVPN if you use OVPN, or Wireguard if you use Wireguard).

    I’ve used it before to access locally-hosted services from outside my home network and it gets the job done with fairly minimal setup.




  • Professional boxing is corrupt in many, many ways. I never said otherwise.

    That said, boxing being corrupt isn’t the reason that Tyson lost to Paul. Tyson lost to Paul because Tyson was 58 years old. Again, not rocket science. This was an exhibition. The corruption you speak of is more prevalent in the actual professional circuit, not fights between youtubers and influencers.

    And perhaps take your own advice about not “contaminating other people’s thoughts” with your unsubstantiated nonsense. Tyson took the fight because the purse was enormous even if he lost, just like everyone who agrees to fight Paul. No one who actually watches boxing was surprised when Paul won.



  • Tyson barely threw a punch because he’s ancient and knew Paul could counterpunch much faster than Tyson could react. Tyson knew he was fighting an uphill battle and chose to be very conservative with his approach. Which was a smart idea. He didn’t want to get knocked out like Tyron Woodley did.

    Do you actually follow combat sports at all, or do you only show up when a YouTuber is on the fight card? If the latter, I could understand why you might think the way you do. If you actually follow combat sports or have any understanding of how they work, it’s obvious that the fight didn’t need to be fixed. There’s a reason 58-year-old boxers don’t fight 27-year-old boxers. It’s boring and one-sided.

    Again, “I do not like Jake Paul” is not actual evidence that the fight was fixed. Please feel free to provide any actual evidence you might have supporting your position, though.





  • trying to prove that he setup, paid and that the fights were mostly scripted

    There’s nothing scripted about the fights. He just only fights people he knows he can handily beat because of his size and youth. I don’t like Paul, but the whole “the fights are fixed” narrative is silly (and entirely devoid of evidence). He’s a hack who only fights people who are ancient, retired, or not even fighters to begin with like basketball player Nate Robinson. He doesn’t have to fix these fights; they’re just that overwhelmingly booked in his favor.

    Also, this entire topic gives him exactly what he wants: attention for his rage-baiting clout-chasing career.


  • It’s impressive, just not particularly useful,

    I will have to disagree with this. I have found LLMs to be remarkably useful in a variety of circumstances because they are pretty good at regurgitating API documentation and man pages in a relatively small context (effectively making them a very efficient google search).

    For example, last week I accidentally deleted a partition from a USB drive. I asked an LLM how I might recover my data using GNU/Linux tools and it pointed me in the direction of ddrescue (and subsequently, gddrescue) and showed me how I could use the recovered disk image to recover my lost files.

    I was already aware of ‘dd’ as a tool for disk management, but was wholly ignorant of ddrescue or gddrescue because I haven’t had a data recovery use case in over 15 years. It was a fairly simple affair, and it was much easier than asking StackOverflow.


  • I dunno if I’d say I’m “unimpressed” with AI. I certainly find the technology itself fascinating. I worked with machine learning for years before consumer generative AI became mainstream and it’s profoundly impressive what decades of research and development have yielded. I genuinely do admire the painstaking work that underappreciated computer scientists have put in to make such things possible.

    That said, “AI” is the new “blockchain” insofar as virtually every company on the S&P 500 has decided this is the new be-all-end-all feature that must be integrated into every aspect of every project. I don’t need AI to be part of my OS. I will open a new tab in my web browser if I decide I have a task for it. Granted, I am not a representative sample of a typical computer user (I use GNU/Linux btw).

    To say nothing of the unethical manner in which these models are trained, using works produced by actual writers, artists, programmers, etc. Obviously profiting from their works while offering zero compensation (and actively taking work away from them by offering AI as an alternative to their craft).


  • Nobody talks like that. Nobody

    How do you think LLMs learned to talk like that? Plenty of people talk (or rather, write) exactly like that. It’s just now heavily associated with AI because AI has been specifically tuned to output sentences structured that way.

    Yes, AI has a vibe to it that can be very predictable and easy to spot, but that doesn’t mean every single instance of someone knowing how to string a few paragraphs together with certain verbiage is a bot.

    Idk maybe I’m being paranoid

    Seems that way. Healthy skepticism is good and necessary. Paranoia not so much.

    This attitude is essentially discouraging certain syntactic styles in writing. I and many others now regularly have moments when writing posts where we go, “Hm, I maybe shouldn’t word it this way or people might say I’m a bot,” and it’s obnoxious that it’s come to that.