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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I once had the great idea of drinking a litre of beetroot juice, which I had read is amazing for sports recovery because of something something helping blood carrying more oxygen or something like that.

    Instant diarrhea, and on top of it, beetroot tinted it looked just like blood, so up until I realised what was going on and the fact that it actually wasn’t blood, that was a scary experience.

    I don’t know whether beetroot is known to cause diarrhea or it was just my body noping the juice out of it, but I have steered clear of beetroot juice ever since!



  • I don’t agree - to me, it feels the article is not about generations but about society. For example, take the fact that right now aesthetics are shaped by algorithms, and anyone from any generation needs to tailor their photography to what the algorithm likes. This is not a “gen z bad, millennial good” complaint - this is cross-generation and the complaint here is “we’re all letting corporations dictate our tastes like never before”.

    The other points such as FOMO, Monetization of human relationships (influencers), can be similarly linked to social interactions being primarily corporate controlled.

    I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss those issues as “things young people like”, nor to put the blame on them and say “these issues are caused by how young people interact socially”.

    FOMO is a genuine cause for anxiety and it’s a direct consequence of a modern society where social media exists - not something that Millenials, Gen Z or Gen Alpha like or are responsible for.


  • I’ve had success with just dish soap - it makes blockages “slide” more easily.

    In the last flatshare I lived, I had a particularly annoying combination of a slow toilet and a flatmate incapable of solving any blockages. Whenever I’d see that, I’d go “fuck this”, squirt a silly amount of Fairy in the bowl (I’m talking like 100 ml at least) and usually the blockage would resolve itself overnight.


  • This can be correct, if they’re talking about training smaller models.

    Imagine this case. You are an automotive manufacturer that uses ML to detect pedestrians, vehicles, etc with cameras. Like what Tesla does, for example. This needs to be done with a small, relatively low power footprint model that can run in a car, not a datacentre. To improve its performance you need to finetune it with labelled data of traffic situations with pedestrians, vehicles, etc. That labeling would be done manually…

    … except when we get to a point where the latest Gemini/LLAMA/GPT/Whatever, which is so beefy that could never be run in that low power application… is also beefy enough to accurately classify and label the things that the smaller model needs to get trained.

    It’s like an older sibling teaching a small kid how to do sums, not an actual maths teacher but does the job and a lot cheaper or semi-free.


  • I bought a Ricoh GR III (not a GR III digital, an actual GR III) off Facebook marketplace for £350 a few years ago (at this point, the GR IIIx hadn’t been released). It was cheaper than most because it was missing the front decorative ring. I added that back for £10-15, though.

    In the year or two that I had it, I realised it wasn’t right for me. It was a lovely camera, but I hated the focal length, the autofocus system always seemed to pick up some random object I didn’t care about, and manual focus with the buttons was between impractical and downright unfeasible. I put it on eBay with an auction start price of £150 or so… And it fetched £450.

    Another year or two later I was thinking of getting a GR IIIx as I’d probably enjoy the focal length more. I looked at eBay and damn, both the IIIx and normal III are selling for £800+, with only some poor-condition outliers below £700.

    Apparently ricoh’s manufacturing hasn’t kept up with demand and their used prices are absolutely bonkers. I don’t think this has happened to Sony (although I wish, as I need to sell my A7ii soon). I think its a bit of a case-by-case basis.





  • Also because, as a person who has studied multiple languages, German is hard and English is Easy with capital E.

    No genders for nouns (German has three), no declinations, no conjugations other than “add an s for third person singular”, somewhat permissive grammar…

    It has its quirks, and pronunciation is the biggest one, but nowhere near German (or Russian!) declinations, Japanese kanjis, etc.

    Out of the wannabe-esperanto languages, English is in my opinion the easiest one, so I’m thankful it’s become the technical Lingua Franca.





  • My take is that best case scenario you’d arrive roughly at the same time you left.

    If you have breakfast in London at 8am, then make it to the airport by 8:30, you’re at the gate at 9:30 after one hour of security and controls, and you’ve made it exactly at the time when boarding starts, which usually is 45 minutes before takeoff on most airlines. You take off at 10:15, arrive at 11:45 (which is 6:45 local time), then still have to go through half an hour of border control and getting out of the airport, and then another half an hour to get to the city centre and have a coffee.

    You’d still arrive at about 8:30, but I don’t see the whole ordeal taking any less than 5 hours.

    I routinely take a 1.5 h flight to visit my family and while I’m a fair bit away from the airport, I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get door-to-door in less than 8 hours. 6 if we are measuring departures lounge to arrivals.


  • To be honest I get your point. We use it at work for summaries of 70-page lists of software commits, and with adequate prompting to “understand” what’s what in our codebase it works remarkably well.

    Granted it doesn’t work near as well as a person who spends a month working on such a summary, but it does it in seconds. Then a person can work for a day on reviewing this and tidying up rather than wasting time trying to summarise 100k lines of code by hand.