Notices by lfa :emacs: :tux: :freebsd: (lfa@hostux.social), page 3

"All of the gear you don't need on your urban commuter #bike " Currently this is the most useful and insightful resource I found during my buy a #bicycle research.

https://youtu.be/S3lXVwb2W04

@trainguyrom I think that was wise. Well done!

@trainguyrom I just started looking today. I think we need an expert on the subject to help us identifying such a resource. Maybe a mechanical engineer 😅

@Lstn2urmama Sure thing

@ruettet My first idea was buying something second hand and I thought: ok, for sure some things have changed, let's take a quick look online to get some updated insights on the subject... I'm so naive, It's easier to buy a car (or maybe nowadays it's not too).

I think I'm going to do exactly as you did.

The curse of today is that everything is a whole world. For things that used to be very simple and straightforward, now you almost need a college degree. I was thinking about buying a #bicycle for using the car less, avoiding car parking problems, doing some cardio and maybe for some recreational use too.

When I was a kid there where two types of #bikes your grandpa's one and the BMXs, now there are lots of different types and 1000 things to take into account. I feel already overwhelmed.

@evgandr the third one is great, and you know it 😉

@danielittlewood I think we've had too many decades of: "You have to be more productive", "You have to do more with less", "You have to improve this", "You have to, you have to, you have to..." ... or you'll loose your job.

Holy crap! This brainwashing and continuous fear burns out and kill every single regular person, it's just a matter of time. All the improve productivity crap has created a sick, unhappy and poor society, except the few SoB who make insane benefits by squeezing us out.

@bitsplusatoms When a large amount of something appear suddenly, I always think CrapGPT is behind the scenes, especially if the content is of questionable quality.

@thelastpsion If you're willing to buy a Framework maybe you can consider the #mnt reform too ( @mntmn ).

https://shop.mntre.com/

They will release a new model this year: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/mnt-reform-next

Idiocy
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Spending money in services that blocks legit users who use TOR because of: "Our system thinks you might be a robot!" while letting real "AI" bots to access the info because they disguise themselves as regular sheep user's browsers.

#tor #torbrowser #privacy #ai #rant #privacymatters #business

@psychotimmy
3/3

During 2024 I've seen people who keep using palm devices. Maybe I'll get my Handspring out of the box and do something with it.

In the gaming department, I love to keep enjoying the games I used to play and I prefer to play many of those games, especially on the Amiga system, than modern games. The most modern gaming platform I use is a PS3 with physical games on disc. IMHO nowadays games are no longer games because you have to get a PhD in order to play many of them.

@psychotimmy
2/3

Currently I don't program for any retro platform but I started my journey on electronics and probably that will end up making me working with retro systems and retro-like systems, and inevitably, that will end up making me program something. Also my interest in programming something retro has been awakened the past year by projects and people like you with your emulator and @evgandr with his palm-sync-daemon project.

@psychotimmy
1/3

For me those systems are the perfect mix of simplicity (understand or having the possibility to understand how things work or could work) and complexity (do amazing things with it). I must confess I believe that our society would have been better off if we had stopped at 32bits. I love that nowadays I'm able to interact with systems I wasn't aware of and systems I couldn't afford to have at the time thanks to emulators.

Finally I entered in programming mood and kept refactoring the code. I'm satisfied with the results and now I'm going to take other people's advice and play a bit of Oblivion 😉

Sorry for the ones who want that I get my ass off the house. I'm tired tonight (maybe I'm getting too old? 😅 )

Have a nice #Friday #Night ppl

Today is the day I started to learn #electronics I'm not concerned about doing it fast, I want to do it "right". Be ready for noob questions and mistakes 😅 😎

@psychotimmy IMHO you did it great in advent of code

@psychotimmy I see you ended your Xmas break and got back to work. Niceeee 😉

@thelastpsion @galaxis I had the two phenomena here on Mastodon. New accounts that follow at least 1k accounts asking to follow me and also the ones with almost no followers, no posts and no avatar asking to follow me. Usually they come from mastodon social

A lot of the current hype around LLMs revolves around one core idea, which I blame on Star Trek:

Wouldn't it be cool if we could use natural language to control things?

The problem is that this is, at the fundamental level, a terrible idea.

There's a reason that mathematics doesn't use English. There's a reason that every professional field comes with its own flavour of jargon. There's a reason that contracts are written in legalese, not plain natural language. Natural language is really bad at being unambiguous.

When I was a small child, I thought that a mature civilisation would evolve two languages. A language of poetry, that was rich in metaphor and delighted in ambiguity, and a language of science that required more detail and actively avoided ambiguity. The latter would have no homophones, no homonyms, unambiguous grammar, and so on.

Programming languages, including the ad-hoc programming languages that we refer to as 'user interfaces' are all attempts to build languages like the latter. They allow the user to unambiguously express intent so that it can be carried out. Natural languages are not designed and end up being examples of the former.

When I interact with a tool, I want it to do what I tell it. If I am willing to restrict my use of natural language to a clear and unambiguous subset, I have defined a language that is easy for deterministic parsers to understand with a fraction of the energy requirement of a language model. If I am not, then I am expressing myself ambiguously and no amount of processing can possibly remove the ambiguity that is intrinsic in the source, except a complete, fully synchronised, model of my own mind that knows what I meant (and not what some other person saying the same thing at the same time might have meant).

The hard part of programming is not writing things in some language's syntax, it's expressing the problem in a way that lacks ambiguity. LLMs don't help here, they pick an arbitrary, nondeterministic, option for the ambiguous cases. In C, compilers do this for undefined behaviour and it is widely regarded as a disaster. LLMs are built entirely out of undefined behaviour.

There are use cases where getting it wrong is fine. Choosing a radio station or album to listen to while driving, for example. It is far better to sometimes listen to the wrong thing than to take your attention away from the road and interact with a richer UI for ten seconds. In situations where your hands are unavailable (for example, controlling non-critical equipment while performing surgery, or cooking), a natural-language interface is better than no interface. It's rarely, if ever, the best.