The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • For real. Companies being extra pushy with their product always makes me picture their decision makers saying:

    “What do you mean, «we’re being too pushy»? Those are customers! They are not human beings, nor deserve to be treated as such! This filth is stupid and un-human-like, it can’t even follow simple orders like «consume our product»! Here we don’t appeal to its reason, we smear advertisement on its snout until it needs to open the mouth to breath, and then we shove the product down its throat!”

    Is this accurate? Probably not. But it does feel like this, specially when they’re trying to force a product with limited use cases into everyone’s throats, even after plenty potential customers said “eeew no”. Such as machine text and image generation.




  • I have a way to make it work.

    Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won’t be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare’s complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.

    Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare’s works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.

    And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.

    Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let’s increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to… let’s say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it’ll take around 30min to type the right character.

    …not really. Shakespeare’s complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 5*10⁶ * 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.

    But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare’s complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren’t talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it’ll take at most a few days.


    Why am I sharing this? I’m not invalidating the paper, mind you, it’s cool maths.

    I’ve found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can’t appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can’t type the full works of Shakespeare.

    Complex life is not the result of a single “big” mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.

    And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.

    Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen…) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.




  • Pets and language learning are some amazing combo. They don’t judge your pronunciation, they’re happy to stare at you while you speak with them no matter language, and you can still train language usage.

    Probably because yelling at pets is my favorite use of it, it makes the neighbors nervous

    My neighbours, in the meantime, gave up pronouncing her name. She’s locally known as “a alemãozinha” (the little German).




  • Reworded rules for clarity:

    1. Min required length must be 8 chars (obligatory), but it should be 15 chars (recommended).
    2. Max length should allow at least 64 chars.
    3. You should accept all ASCII plus space.
    4. You should accept Unicode; if doing so, you must count each code as one char.
    5. Don’t demand composition rules (e.g. “u’re password requires a comma! lol lmao haha” tier idiocy)
    6. Don’t bug users to change passwords periodically. Only do it if there’s evidence of compromise.
    7. Don’t store password hints that others can guess.
    8. Don’t prompt the user to use knowledge-based authentication.
    9. Don’t truncate passwords for verification.

    I was expecting idiotic rules screaming “bureaucratic muppets don’t know what they’re legislating on”, but instead what I’m seeing is surprisingly sane and sensible.


  • Lemmy is too small and this snafoo is so pointless that I think a community apology would be hilarious.

    It doesn’t need to be something fancy. Just an “EDIT: I apologise to the community for sounding abrasive. I’m a mod here so my behaviour should be better than that, my bad.” I think that it’s important because users take moderators of their respective communities as role models on how they’re allowed/disallowed to behave, so if the mod doesn’t at least mention that they fucked it up, other users might see it and think “OK, that’s valid behaviour here, even the mod does it. Time to go rogue.”

    I think the punishment should fit the crime. Having some weirdo follow your posts around calling you manipulative and toxic for months is just… its too much.

    Yup, full agree with that. And based on interactions with the user in this thread, they’re being clearly disingenuous, mincing words to play the victim. The mod was in the wrong but that’s, as you said, too much.



  • Yes, their comment was extremely annoying, both in tone (whining) and content (TL;DR: “pls spoonfeed me basic reading comprehension”). If the mod simply removed the comment, or issued an official warning, it would be 100% warranted.

    However, what the non-mod user is saying ITT about moderator abuse is still spot on. The mod in question answered to the whining in tone, tried to cover their own arse with content removal, and then went to whine in Mastodon about the events, or the fact that there’s transparency functionality in Lemmy (the mod log) against the exact same behaviour that they showed there.

    So it’s a case where both sides were wrong but given their relative positions the mod being wrong is a bigger deal.