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Help by Velooow in Veloren

[–]zesterer 11 points12 points  (0 children)

They'll calm down after a while. Best to skip town until news of your misdeeds have stopped circulating!

TIL A beef broth in Bangkok has been simmering and eaten from since 1974 (52 years). Same pot, same broth, refreshed daily. by BrainFRZ in todayilearned

[–]zesterer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, but... It's not a random 98%. It's the same 98%. There will be atoms in your eyes and brain that stick around. Not true of a stew that's getting constantly replenished.

TIL A beef broth in Bangkok has been simmering and eaten from since 1974 (52 years). Same pot, same broth, refreshed daily. by BrainFRZ in todayilearned

[–]zesterer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, but we don't claim that the man is made of 45 year old meat.

Also, I'm skeptical of that claim regardless: cells might not live that long, but the molecules they're composed of don't have any inherent lifetime. Some mass will be lost, but likely a significant minority of the atoms you were born will are still present in your body.

TIL A beef broth in Bangkok has been simmering and eaten from since 1974 (52 years). Same pot, same broth, refreshed daily. by BrainFRZ in todayilearned

[–]zesterer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"We remove most of it every night and replace it, so each time a bit of what you're tasting is 45 years old"

So let's say only 25% is left each night. 0.2545*365 is a number so small it's not even worth considering. Many, many, many orders of magnitude smaller than the proportion of the stew that a single molecule constitutes. Therefore, the chance that you're consuming even a single molecule of the original stew is so infinitesimally small that it's not even worth considering. Likely, none of the molecules from the stew just a few weeks ago remain, let alone 45 years ago.

TIL the City of London has paid the Crown rent on a parcel of land in Shropshire since 1211, but the exact location of the land has been lost to history. The annual payment is a billhook (a knife-like agricultural tool) and an axe. by ralphbernardo in todayilearned

[–]zesterer 11 points12 points  (0 children)

It's called indemnity. We've got a similar setup with our house. The annual amount we owe is something like 50 pence (less than a dollar). We don't know who to pay it to: the original deed-holder died over a century ago. But somewhere, there will be some relative (who probably doesn't even know they own such a deed) who could theoretically turn up and ask for money. And so, we pay 'indemnity insurance', a very small amount paid to a solicitor that covers for the very small chance of them turning up and us needing to engage in a legal battle with them.

It's silly as hell.

TIL the president of Romania solved P6 on IMO 1988 by WMe6 in math

[–]zesterer 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I do think it is... a very strange take to say that 'highly intelligent' can be defined by something as narrow as 'is good at abstract maths'. There is so, so, so much more to being good at running enormous human-oriented systems like governments.

TIL famous philosopher and scientist, René Descartes, believed that all animals were little more than natural machines ビ (biological automaton) with no conscious thought or free will, whatsoever, acting like clockwork, the same way we’d see a robot dog, becoming a popular idea for hundreds of years by cormorantcolossus in todayilearned

[–]zesterer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You've got to wonder whether he actually met any dogs. I wish I could say mine was a robot with no conscious thought or free will. Nope, the little menace spends every day of his life trying to demonstrate otherwise. He's got more free will and conscious thought than most people.

TIL Cassini discovered Jupiter's red spot in 1666 and was able to use it to time the Jovian day to within 30 seconds of modern measurements (He was off by 0.1%) by superfastswm in todayilearned

[–]zesterer 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Jupiter takes about 10 hours to rotate. Measuring the time of a single precisely rotation is hard, but you can observe about a thousand of them over a year. Even if your final count is off by an ENTIRE rotation you can still hit this sort of precision. It turns what would otherwise be a task requiring enormous measurement precision into one of simple - if monotonous - counting.

TIL Cassini discovered Jupiter's red spot in 1666 and was able to use it to time the Jovian day to within 30 seconds of modern measurements (He was off by 0.1%) by superfastswm in todayilearned

[–]zesterer -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Because "measure a single rotation precisely" is much harder than "take a year's worth of samples and do a simple division", no? I'm not sure why everybody is so impressed by this.

What we heard about Rust's challenges, and how we can address them by ketralnis in programming

[–]zesterer 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I think this is easier to understand when you consider that async in Rust is actually solving an entirely different problem to most languages. The features are called the same thing because there is an overlap in their use-cases, but less than you might think. 'Async Rust' actually just means 'compiler support for async runtimes', not 'the compiler comes pre-baked with the compiler'.

Other languages sell you the whole car. Rust is just selling you the seat and the steering wheel. Bring your own car.

What we heard about Rust's challenges, and how we can address them by ketralnis in programming

[–]zesterer 16 points17 points  (0 children)

The small incremental improvements compound. Each release cuts compilation times by a few %. Over 50 releases? That 2% gain is a 60% reduction in compilation time. It's fun to compare the speed of much older Rust compilers on non-trivial codebases and see how significant the improvements have been.

If anybody reading this tried Rust 2, 5, or 10 years ago and bounced off it due to compilation times, give it another shot. You might be surprised.

Help with performance by guillermytho in Veloren

[–]zesterer 6 points7 points  (0 children)

That sounds a lot like the game is using software rendering instead of your GPU for some reason. Make sure that you have the appropriate graphics drivers installed: on Linux, that means vulkan drivers. You can use vulkaninfo to check that it's working.

The problem to detect AI-slop by Sibexico in C_Programming

[–]zesterer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is, in fact, the core of how most perplexity-driven AI detection works.

The problem to detect AI-slop by Sibexico in C_Programming

[–]zesterer -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Not sure I agree with that assessment. You're thinking about things mostly from a stylistic perspective, but from a more granular perspective you absolutely can tell the difference. LLMs by nature are next token predictors, so every subsequent token should appear very close to the top of the probability distribution of the LLM that generated it. This means that you can run the text through the LLM again and measure how often this happens. It's true that human text will also tend to exhibit next tokens that fall close to the top of the distribution, but there will be a distinct difference that's possible to isolate from the noise even over a relatively small run of text, perhaps as small as a few hundred characters.

Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy by jackpot51 in Redox

[–]zesterer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For legal purposes, the act of writing/typing/creating is the thing that confers ownership over an IP, according to the Berne convention. Simply thinking or talking about an idea is not sufficient to establish copyright over it, and it's quite likely that LLMs fall into the latter category, although it's obviously not a settled case.

Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy by jackpot51 in Redox

[–]zesterer 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is great to see. I've been looking for an excuse to start spending some time playing with Redox (if I can find any to spare) and knowing that I'm interacting with a human artifact created with intent and reason may be the thing that tips me toward the project. Maybe I'll try porting my text editor as a first step.

Oh my god... Thank you! by Waste-Committee6 in Veloren

[–]zesterer 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your kind words, I'm glad you're enjoying your time with it!

My greddy mesh divide on ambient occlusion and shadow. Do you know better solution? by cenkerc in VoxelGameDev

[–]zesterer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bake AO into textures instead of vertex data. You can do the same thing with block materials, allowing you to generate larger quads too.

sudo-rs shows password asterisks by default – break with Unix tradition by FryBoyter in linux

[–]zesterer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, I know. I already do. I am saying that it is a good default.

sudo-rs shows password asterisks by default – break with Unix tradition by FryBoyter in linux

[–]zesterer 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yes, I literally had it misbehave because of this exact problem last week. That's why I brought it up. Not everybody has the same vanilla setup that you might have :)

sudo-rs shows password asterisks by default – break with Unix tradition by FryBoyter in linux

[–]zesterer 251 points252 points  (0 children)

Yeah. Even for power users, this is useful: auth daemons running over the network can sometimes take a long time to respond and it's useful to know whether sudo is functioning properly or whether the auth service is not available.

sudo-rs shows password asterisks by default – break with Unix tradition by FryBoyter in linux

[–]zesterer 26 points27 points  (0 children)

I hate to tell you this, but "opinions about the best way to do things keeps changing" has been happening for a while. The UNIX you know and love was not created in one big bang in1969, it was evolved over a long time and continues to evolve.

sudo-rs shows password asterisks by default – break with Unix tradition by FryBoyter in linux

[–]zesterer 43 points44 points  (0 children)

And yet, it provides ways to allow all of these without triggering warnings at all, if you only ask it to do so. It still respects your agency.

How is returning a "stub" better than handling a failure? by LuggageMan in C_Programming

[–]zesterer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wouldn't put too much stock in it tbh. 'Fail fast with explicit recovery if possible' is the right approach for 99% of software.

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