Your friendly local programmer, uni student and *nix addict.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Chevy Suburban. I volunteered to drive for a university course field trip and it’s what I got stuck with.

    • Unresponsive fatass brick of a vehicle. I mean, come on, a minivan has more cargo space and the same passenger capacity without three light aircraft worth of inertia.
    • Dashboard sucked. It took me a solid three minutes to find the button shifts. (I know these can be done well - Honda does them right - but the PRNDL was fucking laid out in a thin row at the side of the dashboard. Huh?)
    • Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.


  • A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic.

    Tragically, this seems to be the minority viewpoint - at least among CS students. A lot of my peers seem to have convinced themselves that the hallucination machines are intelligent… even when it vomits unsound garbage into their lap.

    This is made worse by the fact that most of our work is simple and/or derivative enough for $MODEL to usually give the right answer, which reinforces the majority “thinking machine” viewpoint - while in reality, generating an implementation of & using only ~ and | is hardly an Earth-shattering accomplishment.

    And yes, it screws them academically. It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots when the professor who encourages Copilot use has a sub-50% test average.










  • Most of the more exotic colors (such as green) are caused by various optical tricks.

    Physically speaking, all true stars are roughly one of these colors:

    • Red
    • Orange
    • Yellow
    • White
    • Blue

    The exact color of a star depends on its size/temperature. Red stars are the coolest, while blue stars are the hottest.





  • It may nominally have more secure defaults than Firefox (although I doubt it’s better in the areas that matter.)

    The problem is that the creators have demonstrated (by secretly injecting referral/affiliate links into URLs, and also by being crypto shills) that they are entirely untrustworthy. In a piece of software as security and privacy critical as a browser, such behavior is unacceptable.