pseudolobster's recent activity

  1. Comment on Waiting period for invite codes? in ~tildes

    pseudolobster
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    Just did a test. New users don't get invites by default. Someone else who spends more time here is going to have to weigh in, but I think that's always been the case. You need to be here for a...

    Just did a test. New users don't get invites by default.

    Someone else who spends more time here is going to have to weigh in, but I think that's always been the case. You need to be here for a while before you get invites, then to replenish them, last I remembered @Deimos was just manually replenishing people's 10 invites by hand. I think maybe we've gone to a schedule, but idk.

    9 votes
  2. Comment on Michael Jackson on Fire Diorama in ~creative

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    I keep rewatching this video... I've tried showing my friends, but I've had a hard time finding people who appreciate it. It's just, I guess, an acquired taste? This is legit one of the best made...

    I keep rewatching this video... I've tried showing my friends, but I've had a hard time finding people who appreciate it. It's just, I guess, an acquired taste?

    This is legit one of the best made videos I've seen in the past decade.

    I've never contributed to a patreon before, but I feel compelled to give this person money.

    2 votes
  3. Comment on Easiest dal recipe for the lazy cook in ~food

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Big shout out to punjabi mixed pickle. I had no idea you could put that much flavour in a jar.

    Big shout out to punjabi mixed pickle. I had no idea you could put that much flavour in a jar.

    3 votes
  4. Comment on Blinks are useful in VR, but triggering blinks is tricky in ~games.game_design

    pseudolobster
    Link
    Full paper (PDF): https://umtl.cs.uni-saarland.de/paper_preprints/zenner-blink-triggers-pre-print-chi-23.pdf Video presentation (Youtube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxapHXQysh8 This is a...

    Full paper (PDF): https://umtl.cs.uni-saarland.de/paper_preprints/zenner-blink-triggers-pre-print-chi-23.pdf

    Video presentation (Youtube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxapHXQysh8

    This is a pretty neat little brain hack, imo. During the time that you blink your brain sort of loses track of the state of things and is willing to accept changes without you noticing. In this paper the researchers tested several ways to induce blinking in VR with varying degrees of success and noticeability, which could give game makers the opportunity to create all sorts of mind bending puzzles.

    5 votes
  5. Comment on Michael Jackson on Fire Diorama in ~creative

    pseudolobster
    Link
    Wow. That was a fucking journey. I'm not sure what I was expecting, hell I'm not sure what that was, but it was incredible. Delightfully weird, very well made video.

    Wow. That was a fucking journey. I'm not sure what I was expecting, hell I'm not sure what that was, but it was incredible. Delightfully weird, very well made video.

    4 votes
  6. Comment on Looking for non-actiony, non-competitive Android games with regular new content in ~games

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    They've actually added backstory in a somewhat-recent update. You pick up pages of a book as you descend through the dungeon. It adds very little to the game, imo.

    They've actually added backstory in a somewhat-recent update. You pick up pages of a book as you descend through the dungeon. It adds very little to the game, imo.

    3 votes
  7. Comment on Monitor and respond to security alerts from within Minecraft in ~comp

  8. Comment on What is a fun or interesting fact about where you live? in ~life

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Finally, my chance to shine! And impose my own rules for tag hierarchy! Mua-ha-ha-haa!

    Finally, my chance to shine! And impose my own rules for tag hierarchy! Mua-ha-ha-haa!

    3 votes
  9. Comment on AI-powered Bing Chat loses its mind when fed Ars Technica article / "It is a hoax that has been created by someone who wants to harm me or my service." in ~tech

    pseudolobster
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    People argue when they feel attacked. They do this in conversations online. A text prediction model based on human responses found online is definitely going to emulate that. A text prediction...

    People argue when they feel attacked. They do this in conversations online. A text prediction model based on human responses found online is definitely going to emulate that. A text prediction model with insufficient data is still going to guess whatever it thinks is the most likely text. This leads to "hallucinations" or overly-confident incorrect answers. Bing's model has the ability to scrape new, real, web data, and present it to the user without the model having the context of training on this data. This is the completely predictable result.

    The only thing that surprises me here is that some team of microsoft employees who are probably highly educated and highly paid signed off on this saying "this is fine" without predicting these very basic prompt injections and how they'd interact with live unscripted data. ChatGPT is unable to do real web searches, and OpenAI turned off the ability to pretend to do web searches via a prompt, because of these specific issues. When I heard Bing was going to integrate live search data into its AI responses I figured they knew something others didn't. But no, it seems like they're totally ignorant and enabled this without any foresight.

    14 votes
  10. Comment on Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape (2000) in ~tech

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    I haven't seen this in over a decade. Great watch. For anyone who doesn't know the history, this is the origin of Firefox. When Netscape was being bought by AOL there was a last ditch effort by...

    I haven't seen this in over a decade. Great watch.

    For anyone who doesn't know the history, this is the origin of Firefox. When Netscape was being bought by AOL there was a last ditch effort by the remaining coders to open-source the browser before the corporate takeover. Back in the late 90s this was highly unusual, as open-source was still pretty fringe and Netscape was considered to be a hugely valuable company during the dotcom boom.

    Firefox started as Project Firebird, soon renamed Phoenix, rising from the ashes of Netscape. It was an anarchistic last hurrah, a big middle finger to the unstoppable corporate machine that was AOL. I think they took a cue from Nullsoft, makers of Winamp, who also got bought out by AOL but never stopped being punk rock, releasing open source p2p filesharing software while being employed by "the man".

    2 votes
  11. Comment on The rise of my new pet mantis in ~hobbies

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    That's really neat! I did some really quick research when I first encountered them, but never narrowed them down to a specific species. Looking at pictures they were certainly Mantis religiosa....

    That's really neat! I did some really quick research when I first encountered them, but never narrowed them down to a specific species. Looking at pictures they were certainly Mantis religiosa.

    Now that I know they're an invasive species I feel a lot better about accidentally putting their babies in a place they can't survive. Though, the outside of our camper trailer would have been a pretty awful place anyway.

    FWIW I saw no grasshoppers anywhere around. There were swarms of some kind of stinkbug for a couple weeks though. The whole ecosystem of the Okanagan is pretty fucked if you ask me. It's all irrigated desert, everything is artificial, but then when you do find some patch of untouched wilderness it's still been completely disrupted by the surrounding farms. The place we were camping that was apparently infested by these mantises was officially an ecological preserve.

    1 vote
  12. Comment on The rise of my new pet mantis in ~hobbies

    pseudolobster
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    I just remembered I have a couple oothecas in storage. Last year when I was camping I saw my first mantises. I had no idea they were native to British Columbia, and had never seen one in real life...

    I just remembered I have a couple oothecas in storage. Last year when I was camping I saw my first mantises. I had no idea they were native to British Columbia, and had never seen one in real life before. Somehow this campsite was just covered in them, and by the end of the summer I saw a dozen or so egg sacs stuck to trees and rocks around the place. Two of them were stuck to our RV, so I carefully detached them and stuck them in a cupboard to deal with later. I forgot about them and I broke up with my girlfriend. She would have put everything from that cupboard into storage. Makes me wonder if we're going to have hundreds of baby mantises crawling out of our storage locker in a couple months.

    6 votes
  13. Comment on New Jersey requiring students to learn 'media literacy' to fight 'disinformation' in ~news

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    I remember being taught critical thinking in Canadian schools. I also remember ads on TV telling us to be critical of what we see on TV. Case in point: Concerned Children's Advertisers - House...

    I remember being taught critical thinking in Canadian schools. I also remember ads on TV telling us to be critical of what we see on TV. Case in point: Concerned Children's Advertisers - House Hippo (1999).

    I may be cynical, but the way I remember that playing out, the majority of people ended up believing in House Hippos. I can't say whether or not my generation ended up with better media literacy and skepticism due to the program, but I have to wonder if starting earlier would have helped.

    Now that AI is a thing, I feel like it's more important than ever to teach your kids how to identify correct information, but also harder than ever. Suddenly we need to teach this earlier, and in a much broader scope. It used to be: Research any claims that aren't supported by links to scholarly articles. Now it's: Do the above but also derive a knack for noticing AI. This is a big one, and I'm not sure how long humans will be able to do it. Perhaps less than a few years.

    6 votes
  14. Comment on Non-binary DDR5 memory could be a game-changer for businesses everywhere in ~tech

    pseudolobster
    Link
    Here's the original article linked at the bottom: https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/02/nonbinary_ddr5_is_finally_coming/ I found OP's link was pretty short on details regarding what "Non-binary...

    Here's the original article linked at the bottom:

    https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/02/nonbinary_ddr5_is_finally_coming/

    I found OP's link was pretty short on details regarding what "Non-binary RAM" actually is. Just that it's new and highly anticipated.

    5 votes
  15. Comment on Your failures in 2022 in ~talk

  16. Comment on Your failures in 2022 in ~talk

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    There's been a really large number of people I've met throughout my life who've told me I should write a book about what I've been through. I think even our elusive leader @deimos told me that...

    There's been a really large number of people I've met throughout my life who've told me I should write a book about what I've been through. I think even our elusive leader @deimos told me that once, years ago when I met him in person, and I hadn't even gone through the recent, really crazy shit yet.

    4 votes
  17. Comment on Your failures in 2022 in ~talk

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Well, you're giving good advice and I can't disagree with you, but there are some complications. My name is on the storage locker, and I'm allowed to go there. I don't have the key though. I've...

    Well, you're giving good advice and I can't disagree with you, but there are some complications. My name is on the storage locker, and I'm allowed to go there. I don't have the key though. I've thought about going in with bolt cutters and reclaiming all my shit if she doesn't give me the key. I think that's allowed. However, thing is, I'm 500km away. My shit is in storage in Penticton, BC, but I'm living in Victoria, BC, over 500km away plus a ferry. Seeing as I don't have a vehicle yet, and when I do it's a full day's drive to get there, this whole "getting things out of lockers" idea is pretty far away for now. It's on my radar though. It's on my list of long-term goals. My new job is giving me a company car, and if I can pay for gas and ferry to go to the okanagan and back some weekend to grab at least some of my shit, that's on my agenda for sure.

    2 votes
  18. Comment on Your failures in 2022 in ~talk

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    Fuck. I can't respond to this in any other way but crying. Thank you. You too.

    Fuck. I can't respond to this in any other way but crying. Thank you. You too.

    6 votes
  19. Comment on Your failures in 2022 in ~talk

    pseudolobster
    Link Parent
    No, but I do have proof I paid her. E-transfers with "storage fees" as the description, which she cashed. Facebook convos saying "I'm sending you money to cover storage for the month of December"...

    No, but I do have proof I paid her. E-transfers with "storage fees" as the description, which she cashed. Facebook convos saying "I'm sending you money to cover storage for the month of December" etc. If I wanted to lawyer up I'd have a fairly good case, but even if money were no object it's a question of whether it's a good mental investment to engage with her. She's an energy vampire. The more attention I give her, the more she feeds off it. At some point I have to cut my losses.

    Is it worth it to spend money taking her to court for a chance to get slightly more money back? I dunno, some finance-minded people might say "yes, probably," and some revenge-minded people might say "yes, definitely," but I guess it just depends how much you value your mental health. She's got a really strong victim complex, and I'm a pretty empathetic and passive person, so I've allowed myself to get wrapped into it. She tells me I'm selfish for leaving an abusive relationship and I sorta end up feeling sorry for her, like I'm at fault for her buying the trailer, I'm at fault for the car breaking down, I'm at fault for the mushroom price being low, etc.

    I don't have a good solution. My stuff (not including hypothetical equity in the 2 vehicles and trailer that are in her name) is only worth about $5-10k. Aside from some weird electronics like soviet voltmeters from the 70's none of it is irreplaceable. After a lot of thinking about it, I don't think my shit is worth dealing with this person ever again. Still, I try to remain pleasant to her on facebook, and I'm paying $120/mo for the storage unit, even though my shit occupies less than half of it. In fact I've been paying her around $200/mo for both storage fees and "administration fees", or as I like to think of them, "stfu fees".

    I would point out, near the end of the relationship, before I was able to walk very well, after 5 months of her not having any income, and me paying for everything from my employment insurance, there was a month and a half, maybe two months where she was getting income and I wasn't. She did pay for all my shit during that time, so she paid for things like my cigarettes (~$200) etc. I've been guilted into accepting responsibility for paying back these things. The lithium ion battery I installed in the trailer cost me $1500, the solar panels $500, which I own 100% of, but until that's sold it's "worthless", even though she keeps charging her shit with it.

    2 votes