Human beings are not proscriptive. A “gay” “man” is a human being with biological characteristics typical of human males, who acts in a manner society describes as masculine, and who feels attraction towards similar sexes and genders of people.

If that person is forced into sex with a person they don’t feel desire for, I dunno, that’s some kind of thought-experiment rape. If a “gay” “man” has sex with a “lesbian” “woman” and it’s consensual for both of them then they are both, by a descriptive measure of what acts have occurred, bisexual people, who have just engaged in heterosexual coitus.

That’s assuming that both of them have engaged in homosexual acts before of course. By the nature of this thought experiment, they both could be people who self-describe as such without actually having done it.

They are free to consider themselves whatever they want, because self-descriptions of people are always based more on aspirations and desires than facts. Lots of billionaires consider themselves good humanitarians, and lots of straight people have suppressed homosexual desires. People are complex, contradictory, and our language falls behind in accurately describing reality.

Objects don’t “have” colors either, if we’re being pedantic. They reflect/absorb/transmit/emit different combinations of wavelengths. So “pink” objects just reflect some wavelengths that we classify as in the range of “red” and “blue”. Color is an interaction between emission, detection, and the brain’s interpretation.

Its not even a unique trick. The ears combine various wavelengths of air vibrations to create sound, with combinations of pure waves merging into distinct timbres (sometimes called “tonal color”).

Further, “Whether another user actually downloaded the content that Meta made available” through torrenting “is irrelevant,” the authors alleged. “Meta ‘reproduced’ the works as soon as it made them available to other peers.”

A “peer” in bittorrent is someone else who is downloading the same file as you. This is opposed to a “seeder” which is also a peer but is only sending data, no longer receiving.

You don’t have to finish the file to share it though, that’s a major part of bittorrent. Each peer shares parts of the files that they’ve partially downloaded already. So Meta didn’t need to finish and share the whole file to have technically shared some parts of copyrighted works. Unless they just had uploading completely disabled, but they still “reproduced” those works by vectorizing them into an LLM. If Gemini can reproduce a copyrighted work “from memory” then that still counts.

Now, to be clear, fuck Meta but also fuck this argument. By the same logic, almost any computer on the internet is guilty of copyright infringement. Proxy servers, VPNs, basically any compute that routed those packets temporarily had (or still has for caches, logs, etc) copies of that protected data.

I don’t think copyrights and open global networks are compatible concepts in the long run. I wonder which the ruling class will destroy first? (Spoilers, how “open” is the internet anymore?)

The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.

Spiritual practices are experiential; you aren’t meant to just hear them, you are meant to practice them and be enlightened through lived understanding.

Physically Based Rendering (the freely available book) won its authors a special Academy award in 2014. That book is still the teaching standard for ray tracing so far as I know. In the intro, they discuss Pixar adding ray tracing (based on pbrt) to their RenderMan software in the early 2000s.

A Bugs Life and TS2 could have benefit from some of that, but I’d guess Monsters Inc was the first full outing for it, and certainly by Nemo they must have been doing mostly ray tracing.

🐍: Anything you share with me is strictly confidential! (Doctor-patient privilege)

I used to work in a computer lab, open plan, where we all had CRTs. I sat across from the main DB admin, who had TWO monitors for all the work he was doing (wild stuff to have dual CRTs back in those days.) Due to the layout, my monitor sat in-between his, facing the opposite way of course. I loved degaussing my monitor because:

1. It would degauss both of his and
2. The EM fields were so strong between them that my monitor’s image would flip entirely upside down before snapping back into frame while making just the craziest electronic noises, colors dancing all over the screen. Gorgeous stuff! I wonder if anyone has tried to recreate a degaussing effect using shaders to simulate the process?

Well, I guess they aren’t a sea krait anymore, blabber mouth!

Yeah, basically this. 9/11 fundamentally changed the American psyche and ushered in a massive ramp-up of the neoliberal system. Covid didn’t really change a whole lot of anything (the biggest problem with it in many ways) but did utterly and fully convince me that we’re doomed as a species.

Nothing has ever illuminated for me so clearly that an unmanageable number of people are too stupid, hateful, or whatever else to work together to overcome an existential crisis. A significant amount of people would rather feel correct and kill all of us than work out their issues. So if humanity is like 30-40% evil, and about 40-50% “neutral” (aka myopically self-interested but not actively violent or hateful), that leaves only 10% “goodness” at most. And I’m sorry but a group that’s only 10% good doesn’t deserve to go on running things.

No worries! You’re probably right that it’s better not to assume, and it’s good of you to provide some different options.

If by more learning you mean learning

ollama run deepseek-r1:7b

Then yeah, it’s a pretty steep curve!

If you’re a developer then you can also search “$MyFavDevEnv use local ai ollama” to find guides on setting up. I’m using Continue extension for VS Codium (or Code) but there’s easy to use modules for Vim and Emacs and probably everything else as well.

The main problem is leveling your expectations. The full Deepseek is a 671b (that’s billions of parameters) and the model weights (the thing you download when you pull an AI) are 404GB in size. You need so much RAM available to run one of those.

They make distilled models though, which are much smaller but still useful. The 14b is 9GB and runs fine with only 16GB of ram. They obviously aren’t as impressive as the cloud hosted big versions though.

I missed the origin of this meme, what a vid though! I really need to attend more city council meetings, and I definitely need to open any addresses to them with “'sup bootlickers?”

It used to get recommended all over Stack Overflow, but I did really love reading Göedel Escher Bach. That book taught me to see math as a game or, equivalently, as purely exercises in shuffling symbols around, with intent.

That shift in outlook really unlocked the fun in math for me. I learned about category theory through Haskell shortly after, and got into number systems and the surreal numbers and quaternions after that. There’s so much neat math out there that the wall of calculus and linear alg really imposes right before all the good stuff.

Casualy sliding this out of my pocket like, no way bro, i always keep that thang on me!

Props for #2 being a #2, but of these I usually go for 6. My personal favorite though is Pentel twist erase.

Though all the kuru toga enthusiasts here have convinced me to give them a try.

I also buy 5s in bulk, those shitty bic pencils are the “little brother” option when my D&D players forget their own writing instruments.

Folks seem awfully confident in their ability to encode other things with only a single letter, but who said you get spaces or other seperators?

I’ll take A, so I can express how i feel everyday now:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

YOU’LL HAVE TO SPEAK UP ME HEARTY! THE MATES AND I ARE RAIDING 7\11 AT DAWN FOR CANDY AND SODA! ARRRRRRRRRRRR(oooooooooo)!

One of my favorite books! Great world building and quite thought provoking!

I’ve been hoping to save this one next time I saw it. So… thanks!