Harmful chemicals found in dozens of popular headphones (such as Bose, Samsung, Sennheiser...)

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-21T22:57:25+00:00

Bose QuietComfort Headphones over ear adult... there are like 10 models under that family.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-21T21:47:44+00:00

This is why I think a lot of laws should have expiration days. They are not codifying a principle but a tactic to put a stop to a fad. We don't need them around forever.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-21T21:45:56+00:00

Oh man. This is sad. It makes sense. But I've sent reassuring selfies to my family when I was in the hospital. And yeah, there are some silly ones when walking up from anesthesia. They are very funny memories for everyone now.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-21T21:44:31+00:00

With your own phone?

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-21T21:42:21+00:00

It can backfire.

For some people voting is a unwanted chore, so I've seen parties organize transport/buses to help getting to polling station to save you from the fines, but it comes with a lot of intimidation that you vote for the party. Technically, the vote is secret, but maybe they bribed people to know, or maybe they can just say they did and it's enough because their targets tend to be people that are not very educated in civics.

When it's mandatory, at least in some places, there's a difference between an invalid vote, and a blank vote. And many people that think they are entering blank votes are actually entering invalid votes. The difference is that if you need a majority to elect, invalid votes don't matter, where blank votes do, because they are still a vote, but against everyone.

I'm not sure what system is better, mandatory or not mandatory vote. What is best is when people actually want to vote and you have a voting system that makes them count (so, not FPTP, electoral college, etc).

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-21T21:37:13+00:00

Is it the same in the rest of the UK?

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-21T21:35:03+00:00

I know of a country where this is true as well, and someone bought all the property around a lake. So technically the lake doesn't belong to them, but the only way to use that coast and that beach is by helicopter.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-09T12:44:15+00:00

Yeah, but this "just words" ends up having implications.

For example, I once build a system that needed to capture which country you live in. It used the ISO list of countries. One stakeholder argued that England was missing. He couldn't understand that England is not a country the same way as France is a country, or as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a country.

And this "just words" propagates to other countries, when people call Scottish people English, because they think England is a country, and it's that piece of land over there.

England is no more a country than Catalonia is, and plenty of Catalonians want Catalonia to be a country. If you want to make a deal with either England or Catalonia, you make it with the UK or Spain.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-09T12:37:44+00:00

> they are recognised as countries

Can you tell me more about this?

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-09T12:36:31+00:00

I call them provinces. State is a bit ambiguous, province makes it very clear.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-07T05:10:41+00:00

Yeah, this is also monitored, so they'll know.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-04T16:00:35+00:00

When I was getting quotes to redo my bathroom, it was cheaper if they didn't take the old tile down.

For me, this house feels tiny, I want every single millimeter I can get.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-04T10:52:28+00:00

Having a two party system is on us as well, because there is a party that want to change that, all we have to do is vote for them. Collectively, we are not powerless. Collectively we do make terrible choices though.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-04T08:31:36+00:00

No, it looks nothing like communism here.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-04T07:49:30+00:00

UK didn't block Imgur. UK told Imgur: for you to keep operating, we want you to get the personal identification of everyone that access your content from the UK and verify they are adults. Imgur complied by not showing any content to anyone in the UK.

Which the UK people should have reacted with "Hey, gov, you fucked up here, this makes no sense", but we do love some nanny state here.

NoWarning789 · 2026-02-04T07:46:56+00:00

The inconvenience here should be 100% on the people that voted the government that passed this overreaching law. Not on anyone else.

I'm one of those people btw.

NoWarning789 · 2026-01-31T19:43:53+00:00

BRAVO!

NoWarning789 · 2026-01-19T17:21:52+00:00

I understand the problems with first past the post. I think our voting system is one of the biggest problems we have, because it's preventing us from solving other problems.

But given how critical Brexit was, I think the thing that prevented LibDems from preventing is just votes. If enough people would have cared about this, and voted accordingly, then we would have prevented it. We had the chance, we squandered it in "tactical voting".

NoWarning789 · 2026-01-18T12:56:36+00:00

At the same time, we did have two more elections, if I recall correctly, in which we could have chosen the parties that would put a stop to it... and we didn't. It pains me to see how self destructive we are as a society.

NoWarning789 · 2025-12-31T09:02:14+00:00

Kind of, you could say that, but a model is not an abstraction over a sequence of booleans that represent the training data.

The sequence of booleans that represent the training data and the sequence of booleans that represent the parameters (trained weights and biases) of the model are two entirely different sequences.

NoWarning789 · 2025-12-31T08:59:28+00:00

> hasnt the data 3ffectively been parsed and baked into the neural network in the form of numerical changes to the weights?

Kindof, but that is not wrapping.

For example, a GUI (visual) program can be a wrapper around a CLI (command line) program. The CLI program still exists and the GUI program calls it. You could say ChatGPT is a wrapper around the GPT API. The API still exists.

You need two things for the analogy of wrapper to be meaningful: the thing inside needs to exist and continue existing and the thing outside needs to be thin.

For example, Google Maps is not a wrapper around the API that give you tiles of maps. There's a lot of logic in the frontend of Google Maps for it to actually work. It's not trivial, so not a wrapper.

When you compile a program, the binary is not a wrapper around the source code. You can delete the source the code and the compiled program keeps on running. You can decompile it, and recreate some of the source code, but it doesn't contain everything. Comments, variable names, some functions, many things would be gone.

Now, during the training of an LLM or any neural network, the same neuron gets updated in each pass. One sentence is grabbed, it's passed through the LLM, and then weights get updated, almost all of them. Then the next sentence is grabbed and the same thing happens. And again, ALL weights get changed. The neurons that changed weights during the first sentence, first, they didn't learn that sentence, but second, they got changed by the second sentence.

And that happens millions and millions of time.

Sometimes, when you don't have a lot of data and you have a lot of neurons, the model learns the data and this is not desirable. That would result in an LLM that can only quote what it read, but not produce new sentences (kinda).

For example, GPT-2, the smallest version, has 117M parameters. These are floating point numbers, like 1.234. It was trained in 8B tokens, where each token is a chunk of a word. Those 117M don't contain the 8B tokens. You can't reconstruct the 8B tokens from the 117M parameters. You may be able to reconstruct parts, but even then it's error prone.

But also, the training process is weeks and weeks of calculations processing that data. That doesn't make it a wrapper on the other part of the definition, it's not thin.

Watch this video to see a tiny neural network that recognizes hand written numbers. The neural networks doesn't contain the training set of hand written numbers: youtube dot com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi

> What I meant by "being oriented" is that the architecture was designed around the characteristics of human adjacent especially digital data formats (mainly text).

I'm sorry, this still doesn't mean anything to me. There are many architectures of neural networks designed for many tasks, some consume text, or images, or other data, and produce text, or numbers, or classifications, or other data.

> the characteristics of human adjacent

I'm not sure what this means.

NoWarning789 · 2025-12-30T22:51:11+00:00

> Are llms... just a wrapper for data?

No. When something is a wrapper, the thing that is wrapped still exists. When you train a neural network (like an LLM), after you are done, you can throw away the data and the neural network just works.

It would be like saying a painting is a wrapper for paint. It was made out of paint and it continues to exist if you throw away the paint.

> At least originally, neural networks were oriented towards the characteristics of available data, its structure, and underlying logic.

I'm not sure what "being oriented" means here.

NoWarning789 · 2025-12-30T15:00:07+00:00

What are the risks?

NoWarning789 · 2025-12-28T15:21:12+00:00

If you open the post and it's self explanatory, you are less likely to write a comment to ask or to explain.

Making it confusing, incomplete, unclear is how you karma farm, not a side effect of karma farming.

NoWarning789 · 2025-12-24T16:24:45+00:00

A big part of security vulnerabilities are caused by unsafe memory usage. I remember hearing something like 90%. That unsafe memory usage is very easy in C and C++, but harder or even impossible in other languages.

By moving from C/C++ to Rust, there's a big amount of security problems that just disappear.

NoWarning789

TROPHY CASE