Biggles @Biggles@qoto.org

Are you all so unsure of your sexual preference that you make a whole community over the believe someone could be 𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒆𝒅 gay?

@mayaisloading haha and as some Redditor pointed out, there are a whole bunch of children who never turned into a hungry caterpillar

I have so many questions about what just happened with Voyager 2. But let's review:

On August 20, 1977, Voyager 2 was launched from Earth.

In December 1977, it entered the asteroid belt.

In June 1978, its main radio receiver failed. Since then it's been using the backup receiver!

On July 9, 1979, it flew past many of Jupiter's moons and made its closest approach to Jupiter.

On August 26, 1981 it shot past Saturn.

On August 25, 1989 it shot past Uranus.

On November 5, 2018 it crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space, 120 times farther from the Sun than we are.

On July 18, 2023, it overtook Pioneer 10 and became the second farthest man-made object from the Sun.

3 days later, some idiot sent a command that pointed its high gain antenna 2 degrees away from Earth. HOW EXACTLY DID THIS HAPPEN?

On August 4, 2023, NASA used its most high-powered transmitter to successfully command Voyager 2 to reorient towards Earth, resuming communications. HOW WAS THAT POSSIBLE?

How can you "shout" across 120 AU? It takes light about 16 hours to travel that far.

I found this on an old, salvaged drive I was organizing and immediately crumbled into ancient dust.

@baldur exactly this:

(Quote from the article):
“This isn’t fixable,” said Emily Bender, a linguistics professor and director of the University of Washington’s Computational Linguistics Laboratory. “It’s inherent in the mismatch between the technology and the proposed use cases.”

It’s like trying to solve the problem that cars don’t provide any nutritional value. The idea of using LLMs to provide detailed factual information is just not tenable. That’s not what they are.

SunOS 4.1.4 says it can't possibly be the year 2023: "WARNING: preposterous time in filesystem -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!"

sorry SunOS, there's nothing i can do to fix 2023.

One of the most spectacular coronal mass ejections from the Sun ever captured by NASA's SDO spacecraft.

Credit: NASA​/​SDO

With 45’s checkered past, is Smith playing brilliant, strategic chess? Trump looks to assert “advice of counsel” as a defense. But that could prove very damaging to his case and still fail outright when the jury deliberates. I explain why in today’s piece. https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/jack-smith-has-set-a-trap-for-trump?sd=pf

I keep flashing back to eliezer being smug on Twitter about how good ChatGPT is at chess, and it turns out once you get past book openings and extremely well-documented games, it completely shits the bed and stops acting like it knows the rules of chess or even basic chess notation. and this is a very obvious outcome if you know how LLMs work, but most promptfans don’t

The Infinite Mac CD-ROM library is now officially launched! I wrote up a post with some details of how it's implemented and other recent improvements: https://blog.persistent.info/2023/08/infinite-mac-cd-roms.html

Infinite Macs website just got WAY, WAY, WAYYYY better. Read the blog: blog.persistent.info/2023/0...
mounted CD libraries from URL (streamed fast instead of all loaded at once), drop-down menu selectable OS, and more.

being mutuals with me means I will helpfully explain what an upper decker is if you ask

(as a public service: it's when you shit in the cistern of an enemy's toilet, thus releasing an infusion of poo stew with every flush)

Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition gets a free starter edition https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/08/age-of-empires-iii-definitive-edition-gets-a-free-starter-edition/ #RTS #Linux #SteamDeck #PCGaming

One of the creepier tech-related incidents I remember was many years ago when I wanted the Sam's Photofacts (a third-party creator of device specs and schematics, etc.) for a very old portable TV. Way out of date, but I was trying to help someone with it.

I mentioned to a friend that I was looking for old Photofacts, but I did not say anything about the TV. He scribbled an address on a scrap of paper, an address locally here in L.A. "Try him," he muttered.

I drive over. It's a small unmarked storefront. I go in, the bell on the door rings. Sitting inside, like the caterpillar in "Alice in Wonderland", is this little guy perched on a stool, with immense stacks of paper surrounding him everywhere. Total mayhem.

I walk up to him -- knowing that this was a waste of time and really wanting to get out of there -- and asked if he had the Sam's Photofacts for that specific very old TV model.

Without saying a word, he reached over to the pile of papers right next to him, took the TOP item off the pile, and silently handed it to me. It was the ancient one I needed. Stunned, I paid him the amount marked on the item, and left with it, not completely sure what had just happened.

When I drove by there a month later that storefront was something else entirely. He was gone.

I am not a licensed electrician

I'm taking some time today to test a few new libraries/tools.
These CLI tools for working with llms by @simon work like a charm! And they support unix pipes. <3

More info here: https://llm.datasette.io/en/latest/index.html

#llms #gpt #languagemodels #cli #terminal #commandline

Homeworld Remastered Collection and Severed Steel are free on Epic Games https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/07/homeworld-remastered-collection-and-severed-steel-are-free-on-epic-games/ #FreeGames #Gaming #Linux #SteamDeck

Alright story time, Rubylith: How I Cured My Insomnia With Masking Material

I was an insomniac as long as I've remembered. Had it real bad, medicated and everything. Slept through fire alarms. Lost jobs to lateness. After hours of tossing and turning and fretting over how little sleep I was gonna get and how tired I'd be the next day I'd give up and grab a book in hopes that it'd help me sleep; it'd quiet my mind down, but turning on a light would make my body all excited, because I'm part moth I guess.

Round about when people started taking smartphones to bed with them, all the "I've spent years researching the effects of artificial light on circadian rhythms" people started shouting OH MY GOD DON'T TAKE YOUR PHONE TO BED WITH YOU, and we all shouted back LOL I'M TAKING MY PHONE TO BED WITH ME WHO ARE YOU THE BED COPS and took our phones to bed with us, and that's when the midden REALLY hit the windmill.

"Blue light keeps you awake!" they shouted.
"Lol" we replied.
"No we mean it, it's REALLY bad!" they wheedled.
"Lmao" we explained.
"Look, even a SINGLE blue photon hitting your retina can WRECK your night's sleep! One photon! Just one!" they cajoled.
"Sorry, what was that," we guffawed, "I was busy buying an alarm clock with big blue LED numbers on it. And an iPod dock, because that is the style at this time."

Anyway I was already an insomniac so no difference I guess, I'll read me ebooks on me phone, fine. Does seem a bit bright though even on min brightness, tell you what, I'll set the text to like a dark grey on a black background. Cor this is a good book, I'm gonna read this until 4am or whenever my eyes start hurting.

YEARS pass without incident or difference until my mate takes me to a star party. A very dark place, lots of quietly-excitable blokes with glasses and laptops and they're all very eager to let you look through their telescopes and tell you stuff, a Generally Mild Fun Chill Time - but a very dark time, the sort of darkness where everybody's eyes are used to it, the sort of dark where if someone lights up a smoke everyone blinks and scowls and goes "ah" just at that tiny lighter flame. I peek over the shoulder of one of these star dudes and see an entirely-red Windows XP and say "Oh cool, you've cut the green and blue all together huh?"

He's like well, red light doesn't destroy your night vision, you can look right at a red light and still see in the dark afterwards.

I say, huh. And I remember that big old metal torch my dad got from the army/navy shop, the one where you could swap out the lens for a red one. And I notice he's got electrical tape over his hard drive and power lights too.

And I say so what'd you do, cut into the video cable and short some stuff to ground, he says nah and he peels back the corner of his screen and blinds me with Horrible Blue Light and as I'm blinking it away he says this is just a sheet of Rubylith, and if this were a film I'd have that moment in slow motion, "Rrrooooooo

beeeeeeeeeee

lllliitthhhhhhh"

~~~RUBYLITH~~~

A clingfilm-thin plastic sheet originally used in lithography and screen printing because it cuts so clean and nice, Rubylith is called Rubylith because it's Really Really Incredibly Red. Its Incredible Redness means that you can put a layer on top of a monitor and it'd turn your whites to an arterial pink and your brightest blue to the deepest inky indigo; another layer and the blue is black, it's gone, your whites are now deep blood reds. Your #ffffff is a #ff0000, there's Nothing But Red.

I must clarify, I'm not talking about sunset mode here, I'm not talking about tinting your screen amber - I'm talking MUCH further than that. Imagine a red heart shape made to look shiny with a white highlight; you wouldn't be able to see the highlight, it'd render the same colour as the rest of the heart. Hell, if the heart were against a white background you might not see the heart at all, because it takes red, green and blue to make white, and there's no green or blue. There's no pink in Rubylith land, there's no amber, there's no orange, red is red and white is red and pink is slightly dimmer red. Clouds are blood red against a black sky. This isn't your phone's eye-relief night mode, this is the complete eradication of two thirds of colour data and damn being able to determine what you're looking at.

Anyway, there was a bloke selling big sheets of Rubylith on eBay for a tenner.

(it's gone way up, he's asking $20 now)

Anyway I saw this astronomer and his Rubylith and I set my phone's ebook reader app (moon+ Reader if you're interested, I've tried literally dozens and it's still the best) to red text on a black background, and aye it looks like a goth's MySpace but it works, I'm getting sleepy as I read - until I get a notification or there's a picture mid-text and I get the DANGEROUS BLUE PHOTONS and I'm awake again.

Cut out a wee bit of this lovely red wonder material and slip it into my phone case at night, though, and we're sorted. I'm not worrying about how late I'm gonna be up, I'm just reading my Terry Pratchett or Spider Robinson or Michael Marshall Smith or whoever, and half an hour later I'm getting sleepy, I'm having problems focusing, my mind's off in that pre-dream playground and I put my phone down and I'm off, I'm in the land of nod, I'm sleeping like a Functional Normal Person and it's absolute magic.

I'm constantly amazed at how well this works, and how I spent most of my life being perpetually late for things because No Sleep, before I put two and two together.

Now these days I use rooted phones where you can cut the green and blue with a one-tap widget on the home screen, but if you can't root your phone or you need to red-only an iPhone or a laptop or smth then RUBYLITH IS WELL WORTH YOUR CONSIDERATION MY FRIEND

If you're a Homebrew user this might now be one of the quickest and easiest ways to start running a LLM locally on your own machine - it's just three steps:

brew install llm
llm install llm-gpt4all llm -m 'ggml-vicuna-7b-1' \
'ten fun names for a pet pelican'