Notices by Sal Rahman (manlycoffee@techhub.social)

@evan

California Roll

"Two Minnesota solar farms seeded native wildflowers under their panels, and 5 years of counting revealed native bees had multiplied twentyfold, then crossed the fence to pollinate the neighbour’s soybeans"

https://www.ecoportal.net/en/two-minnesota-solar-farms-native-wildflowers/29160/

@evan @realn2s

Speaking of hot sauce, I once got capsaicin poisoning.

Not fun.

Thankfully, the medical literature seems to point to it being generally a non-issue, other than extreme pain, enough for someone suffering from it to call an ambulance.

@evan

I want cannabis to be as legal as tobacco (with even fewer restrictions than tobacco), but I'm not convinced that this stuff is healthy for an adult that's otherwise in good health.

@evan

Instance: internal node

People (or actor): lead node

@dalias

The person's profile has "polymath" on it.

Reminds me of this post that I saw.

The Parliament of Estonia is orders of magnitude smarter than whoever is in the Parliament of Canada (including Mark Carney).

"Europe should regulate Big Tech instead of banning kids from social media, Estonia says"

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-should-stand-up-to-big-tech-instead-of-imposing-social-media-bans-estonia-says/

#CanPoli #CanadianPolitics #CanadaPolitics

The fediverse is full of real life superheros.

Let's shed some light on a few:

@dansup - Pixelfed & Loops

@quillmatiq & @snarfed.org - Building https://brid.gy + @anewsocial

@silverpill - Managing FEPs + @mitra

@julian - Building @nodebb

@jesseplusplus - Building @frequency

@jaz - Building @teamtoot + @iftas

@thisismissem - Building https://fires.fedimod.org

@benpate - Building https://emissary.dev

@koen - Building https://procolix.eu

Show em' some ❤️

(Yes, this is a copy+paste of @dansup's original post)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@torgo/115995086918168132

I may be wrong, but it feels like Europeans are a lot more active in the civic duty of providing alternatives to big tech.

Mad respect.

For reasons I would have used ChatGPT for, I use Claude Code entirely for that.

The advantage of Claude Code is that it is really good at identifying that a prompt contains one or more URLs, and if the system determined that it is compelling enough to visit it, then it will actually go visit it.

@freemo

I think I'm using the wrong term.

I'm referring to "argument extraction".

@freemo

They could be.

LLMs are used for so many NLP purposes, but sometimes, we really need to sharpen an LLM's saw to focus solely on "tool calling", and a lot of tool calling involves NER. Without the fine tuning, you get lots of "hallucinations" (bad results).

That said, a lot of off-the-shelf LLMs have already been trained to handle NER just fine, and fine-tuning is not really that necessary.

@freemo

I mean, calling it "special" gives the illusion to people that MCP is something only those seasoned in fine-tuning LLMs can deploy.

But other than that, sure, it is powerful, with lots of emergent properties.

I don't want to be expressing too much cynicism, but just a heads up: there is nothing special about MCP and Skills; those just work on top of whatever fine-tuning that a lot of off-the-shelf models are capable of.

Fedicon in Vancouver is going to be the best Fediverse-related event to have happened in a long time.

Definitely check it out!

I will most certainly be there!

https://fedicon.ca/

#Fediverse #Fedicon #Vancouver #VancouverBC #VancouverBCCanada #VancouverBritishColumbia #VancouverBritishColumbiaCanada #BC #BritishColumbia #BritishColumbiaCanada #BCCanada #GreaterVancouver #GreaterVancouverBC #GreaterVancouverBCCanada #VancouverCanada #GreaterVancouverCanada #MetroVancouver #MetroVancouverBCCanada #MetroVancouverCanada

Bear in mind, I know full well we elect MPs, but in common parlance, what do y'all say about how a Prime Minister gets to power?

Do say something along the line of being "elected by the people", or do you say something else?

@freemo I guess `main` being default is a macOS thing

I may be wrong.

I don't recall ever having changed that.

I've seen people actively go into their Git configs, to rename the default branch from `main` to `master`.

Makes sense if the source forge that you push to acts funny with anything other than `main`, but I've seen some people use nothing but GitHub, and GitHub doesn't care.

"Crustaceans are just bugs of the sea."

No! Bugs are crustaceans of the land.

"Why should I pay rent and cause someone else to gain equity? With a mortgage, at least I get to keep the home at the end!"

So you're willing to harm your own ability to gain wealth in the name of not making someone else rich?

For the record, it's not just mortgage that you're paying. If your downpayment is too low, you're paying into mortgage insurance. You have to pay the homebuyer's tax. There's legal fees for the purchases, the home inspection, etc. Don't forget moving fees (unless you're one of those cheap bastards that gets friends to help move).

And during ownership, you have insurance, maintenance, strata fees, then emergency expenses (such as a refrigerator breaking down).

Then moving out, you may have to pay agent fees, moving fees, and taxes again when buying your new place. Perhaps even fees for refinancing if you're in a pinch.

None of those expenses are things you'd have to worry about if you just rented.

Rent, save the rest. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-10/millionaire-renters-are-on-the-rise-in-high-cost-us-cities