Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • I’m Canadian. I would say that I don’t think much about it in terms of current events, I haven’t heard much in the news about it in recent years. And my assumption from that is that’s probably a good sign. There used to be a steady stream of bad news, and “no news” lies along the path in between “bad news” and “good news.”

    I did see a video recently about Iraq’s plans for a giant new port facility on that little tidbit of Persian Gulf shoreline it has and road/rail link from it up through to Turkey, and thence onward into Europe. It sounded like a very optimistic development if it can be seen through to fruition, opening an alternative trade corridor to the Suez Canal. Anything that diversifies a country’s economy is a good thing, and anything that removes single points of failure in global shipping networks is also a good thing. I can’t imagine the Houthi obstruction of the Red Sea would still be a problem by the time that route opens up but at least it’ll be an option if something like it happens again.


  • I’m Canadian so I’m not a voter in the contest you’re presenting, but if I were I would vote Democrat. And of the trio you present for the Democrats, I would say that the position I’d compromise on would be gun control. Not because American gun culture isn’t bananas and it’s not a serious problem, but because I can’t see any plausible way to fix it in the short term. So might as well let it go for now and deal with the more important stuff that affects more people.

    I think a more reasonable compromise would be to give Republicans most of what they want on immigration reform. That seems to be something they consider to be of critical importance, but that I think can be allowed without it causing significant harm. If the American economy starts to suffer as a result of not having illegal immigrant workers then that will be motivation for further reforms. I think it’s important to have the laws try to reflect the realities, though, and having the economy literally depend on large-scale lack of adherence to the law of the land is a bad place to be. Just make sure not to be monstrous about it - don’t do the concentration-camps-for-children thing, try to maintain basic asylum access for those who truly need it, and so forth.





  • It’s actually a lot worse than just thrusters not working any more. At least according to the unofficial “word on the street” about what’s going on, the details haven’t been officially released yet.

    It appears that the cause of the failures was because the thrusters are housed inside compartments that are containing their waste heat. The thrusters were tested individually, but apparently were never tested once installed inside the capsule. The heat is causing teflon valves to fail, which clogs the thruster plumbing and disables them. But the scary thing is that the heat necessary to do that to teflon would also potentially be enough to boil the hypergolic fuel itself inside the fuel lines.

    When you heat hypergolic fuel up enough it will spontaneously ignite. It’s got its own oxidizer in it, essentially. Which means those thrusters could well be bombs that could go off if they’re fired too long.

    The way they’re talking about moving the unmanned capsule away from ISS, slowly and gently, it sounds like they’re concerned Starliner could literally explode next to the station. That would be, to put it mildly, very very bad.

    If any of this is true then this is going to be a colossal scandal. This is Starliner’s third test flight, it’s absolutely incredible that Boeing wouldn’t have figured this out by now and that NASA let them get away with such a shoddy program.


  • If you simply don’t want to engage in a discussion with him, then that’s fine, you should let him know that you’re not interested in talking about it. You don’t have to justify your choices to him, if you want to use a particular browser then that’s fine and if he spontaneously decides he needs to “talk you out of it” then that’s a dick move. Tell him that you don’t want to debate the subject and it’s no skin off of his nose so he shouldn’t try to engage you in one.

    But if you’re asking “how can I convince him that he’s wrong”, well that is engaging in the debate. And if you’re going to engage in a debate you should try to be as open about it as you’d like your debate opponent to be in turn. Have you considered that perhaps he has some valid points and is not taking that position just to be contrarian?

    Personally, I find that it’s pretty much impossible to talk someone with a strongly-held position out of that position. The value of Internet debates with people like that is that lots of spectators who don’t have such strongly-held positions may be watching, but when it’s a one-on-one situation it’s likely to be a futile and frustrating effort with no benefit. So I would advise going with the “don’t bother engaging” route. But of course, if you feel strongly that you want to engage, I can’t change your mind on that and won’t try. It’s your time to spend.








  • Not to mention that technology is continuing to advance in new and unexpected ways.

    We’re getting close to artificial womb technology, for example. There are already artificial wombs that are being experimented with as a way to save extremely premature babies that wouldn’t survive in a conventional incubator, for example.

    Commodity humanoid robots are also in development, and AI has taken surprisingly rapid leaps in development over the past two years.

    I could see a possibility where in a couple of decades a human baby could be born from an artificial womb and raised to adulthood entirely by machines, if we really really needed to for some reason. Embryo space colonization is the usual example given, but it could also potentially work as a way to counter population decline due to people simply not wanting to do their own birthing and child-rearing.


  • The main problem with adding your own page is ensuring that the “no original research” rule is followed. In principle, everything on Wikipedia should be verifiable by third parties so they can check it. So if you write an article about yourself and say “Their dog’s name is Chesterfield” there needs to be some kind of external source that other editors can use to check whether that’s true. People writing about themselves often overlook that sort of thing. A classic example is a problem Philip Roth had trying to correct a Wikipedia article about a book he’d written, Wikipedia can’t simply “take his word for it.”

    The other major problem is the “neutral point of view” rule. It’s very difficult to write about yourself in a neutral manner so it’s a safe assumption to scrutinize the neutrality of one’s own edits about oneself very closely.

    Probably the best way to go if you’re notable is to ensure that you’ve got a detailed biography of yourself published somewhere and then point Wikipedia editors at it. And don’t get possessive about your Wikipedia article, it’s likely going to end up saying something you didn’t want it to say and there’s not a lot you can do about that if it’s within their rules.






  • Though bear in mind that parameter count alone is not the only measure of a model’s quality. There’s been a lot of work done over the past year or two on getting better results from the same or smaller parameter counts, lots of discoveries have been made on how to train better and run inferencing better. The old ChatGPT3 from back at the dawn of all this was really big and was trained on a huge number of tokens but nowadays the small downloadable models fine-tuned by hobbyists would compete with it handily.