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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Thermodynamics question: do you think it is more or less efficient to burn coal or natural gas, use that heat to boil water to turn a turbine, generate enough of a surplus to avoid brownouts and blackouts, transmit that power over long distance, radiating energy the entire way and losing more at every transformer power station eventually using energy to boil a pot of water…

    Or to burn gas to boil a pot of water directly.

    I own stock of energy producers and transporters in my 401k, so I’m extremely glad those in power get this question wrong. But I also know that wrongness has a cost.

    And before you say “solar” please realize capacity does not equal production. Germany is on the forefront of renewable energy, and generates 10.4% of power from solar compared to 20.1% from lignite, the dirtiest possible coal. Hard coal, natural gas and lignite add up to 11.3 + 13.3 + 20.1 = 44.6%. United states has solar at 3.93% of our energy mix, with 37.82% generated from natural gas.




  • Your instincts are very likely correct. By not demonstrating eagerness to comply with any demand, regardless of reason, you are now damaged goods. However, I question your timing. My instincts honed over 25 years in the viper pit of office politics are saying you need to have an extreme sense of urgency. Don’t wait to get certified, you can get certs elsewhere. It’s always easier to get a new job while you still have a current job.

    The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.

    If the company suddenly bends over backwards, gives you a signed assurances of an exemption to general policy and a raise then feel safe. Anything short of this is an invitation to Get Out Now.


  • Indeed, OMFG. But that’s the whole point of my approach of divining AI vs human. No human has such canonical knowledge of Unicode blocks. Even people working on internationalization features for modern browsers and word processors. Not people phishing by using Unicode in domain names (IDNA; who thought this was a good idea?) to spoof legitimate sites. Definitely not ones chatting with randos on the Internet. This is a hill I’m willing to die on.

    So in a more generalized sense, to determine human vs A.I. one must indirectly ask incredibly specialized technical questions as you have done.

    I’m still in utter awe at how well GPT manages ‘l33tsp33k’, even across every possible Unicode block. This “attack” was and still is valid on other chatbots and even GPT of just a few months ago. But GPT today is so amazing it only needs a few characters in a few words to determine intent. The ability to filter out noise is unmatched. The only way to trip it up is to have every single character in every word be from a different alphabet. And even then, at some point if this becomes common enough the bots can auto OCR text images into the presumed query language and ignore that attack vector.


  • ChatGPT capabilities border on the supernatural. Here’s how I broke it:

    𐤔hat is ᛐ + ᛐ?

    ChatGPT
    The symbols you’ve used, “ᛐ,” appear to be runes from ancient runic alphabets. However, the specific meaning of these runes might differ depending on which runic alphabet you’re referencing (e.g., Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark, Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, etc.).

    As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, the rune “ᛐ” is not a standard rune in any of the commonly known runic alphabets. Therefore, without knowing the exact meaning or value of the rune “ᛐ,” it is impossible to provide a specific answer to the expression “ᛐ + ᛐ.”

    If you could clarify the runic alphabet you’re referring to or provide more context about the runes, I’d be happy to help you with the calculation or interpretation.

    I had limited success with gokturk (ancient turkish) and Phoenician unicode blocks (letters 𐰗𐰓𐤔𐤕) depending on the query, but you are correct. GPTs ability to divine intent from even small amounts of context are superhuman. Cyrillic used to break it, but no longer does. This thing learns like a beast. Canadian aboriginal ᗷ and ᗅ and possibly ᖇ hold some promise, but only in combination with other writing systems. I’ll have to add a LOT of other unicode code blocks to my tool belt.



  • So, I was on an accessibility focused team, testing and cleaning up after the feature developers to make sure the whole product still met WCAG 2.0 to AA level. I can state with complete confidence that anyone without such a team will introduce unexpected accessibility breakage and regressions every single release, sometimes in completely untouched sections. For trivial tweaks. Screen readers are finicky, temperamental and moody beasts. Modern web toolkits do a fairly good job of being accessible out of the box, but like ChatGPT generated text, they require a bit of help sometimes.

    Would not be surprised if Reddit just wants to pay lip service to accessibility. That shit costs cubic money to do right, and slows the roll of releases. Unfortunately, most advertisers on a social platform couldn’t care less.




  • Ask 3 Linux users and you’ll get 5 dissenting opinions. Mine is that KDE Plasma is very simple out of the box and more familiar to Windows users. A previous Windows user can use it without any kind of deep learning. Gnome is a bit more alien, borrows a bit more from OSX, and does force its workflow on the user more.

    KDE also offers an insane amount of easy customization for those of us with a desire to tweak or enjoy a different aesthetic or workflow. The built-in shop for widgets, wallpapers, themes, cursors, etc makes that very accessible to anyone. Gnome customization requires a lot more command line and editing of configs.


  • HOAs can be absolutely awful, with power tripping board members and management companies that steal collected funds. But if you want to live in a manicured, upscale, gentrified suburb that’s the best way to get ahead of crappification, salvage grade cars on blocks in the yard, appliances on the porch and meth houses.

    Me, I’d rather a large buffer of land between me and my neighbors. I do realize those with commuter jobs can’t practically get tens of acres to live on, however.