Actually, having like a 10ml can of iranian crude oil as a conversation piece would be fun.especially if it comes in a mini barrell that just says ‘Iranian Oil’ on it, maybe with an added ‘Warning: May cause sanctions if used incorrectly’ label

sort of. Having a system that allows multiple parties, like in many European countries, certainly helps with representation and discourse. But looking at Europe, it certainly doesn’t prevent a right-wing drift towards authoritarianism. There’s sooo many other things needed for a healthy democracy, like education/literacy, strong independent institutions, unions etc.

You can just end up with two right wing parties, an extreme and a moderate one, but the moderate one catering to the extreme positions of the extreme party (and being mostly moderate in name only), and both of them forming a majority government and drifting to authoritarianism, even if there are many parties.

After ther recent acqusition and firing of a lot of staff, it might not be the best alternative

Edit: article with more details can’t find a non paywalled version and not really any other pages that discuss the firing, just the acquisition

A proper (CNC) milling machine and lathe, like ones you can work hardened steel with. Lots of better things you could buy for that money, but with a mill and lathe i could make those things for even more money!

Edit: oh and a proper garage/hobby room to put them in

Actually, as to your edit, the it sounds like you’re fine-tuning the model for your data, not training it from scratch. So the llm has seen english and chinese before during the initial training. Also, they represent words as vectors and what usually happens is that similiar words’ vectors are close together. So subtituting e.g. Dad for Papa looks almost the same to an llm. Same across languages. But that’s not understanding, that’s behavior that way simpler models also have.

Though half the time it’s

deleted

thanks that really solved my problem, you’re amazing!

I still have mixed feelings about deleting one’s whole comment history, though i also did that when I left reddit. it’s the right thing to do, but the amount of information lost because of greedy leadership is super sad.

waits to order stuff until there’s a few things needed

free shipping not available anyways unless you hit minimum order of 50.-

proceed to order 10 things at once

each thing gets shipped in a separate package, on separate dates…

even the 20x 1cm M3 screws that you originally needed come in a cardboard parcel, by themselves

packages keep arriving randomly at your place for the next 5-10 days, leaving you with a pile of cardboard

I mean, yes, i takes some practice. I was more commenting in terms of time+effort, which imo is not that much actual time spent doing stuff compared to e.g. just making regular sourdough bread. which also takes practice if you want nice big bubbles. In my experience, getting a pretty sourdough bread with high hydradation dough actually took more practice (in terms of handling the sticky dough) than getting good croissants.

And even the first couple of croissants turned out pretty good when i started. Not on par with bakery ones but still tasty. So it’s not like practice results need to go in the bin

You fold and flatten it like 3-4 times, each takes like 5 minutes and then it goes back in the fridge for 45 minutes.so while it takes like 4-6 hours of time to make croissants from scratch (including proofing the dough etc.), it’s more like 1 hour of work. Really not as bad as people make it out to be.

effort wise I find it on par to making sourdough bread, what with all the stretching and folding of the dough dgring proofing.

and you can prepare them the day before and proof in the fridge, then bake the next morning. Actual fresh baked croissants in the morning are fucking amazing and well worth the work

Yes that’s what I mean. But with crypto, not being able to reverse a transaction is one of the main features and makes this kind of thing immensely easier.

being the reserve currency isn’t that nice for citizens, though. Other countries and companies need your money, because all the big deals are made in it and you really want some on hand to protect against currency fluctuations (don’t want your 50m € deal suddenly costing 100m€ because it’s denominated in dollars and the exchange rate rose).

but if everyone wants your currency, in large amounts, your government at some point can’t keep up with printing, otherwise inflation goes up too much.

now when you have lots of buyers for your currency, but too little supply, of course the exchange rate will go up. But those buyers also look for alternatives that are almost as good as just money.

well it’s not actually money you hoard, but debts that can be exchanged for money. First government bonds, those are stable and can be exchanged for money easily. Those also have limited supply, so the next best thing, corporate loans. Less stable but better than nothing. Those dry up, etc. and you end up at subprime mortgages. Those suck, but hey, they are still dollars, kind of. So you have more and more financial instruments created that pretend to be actual money.

on the flip side, in the reserve currency country, borrowing becomes easy, Companies and people that should not get this much cash now can easily get it. You have lots of bad investment as no one knows what to do with all that money. Houses get built that shouldn’t be. There’s more and more risk in the system.

Until it fails and blows up. We know what that looks like.

being the reserve currency is first and foremost nice for the government in question. If it’s nice for the people depends on how the government manages it and what it does with the money and how it controls it. And the longer it goes on, the more unsustainable it is. Countries getting too much investment often do worse than countries getting little

Techies interested in privacy and fairness is just another target/focus group to be marketed to…

But even given that every company sucks(eventually) and every ceo is an asshole. there’s something to be said about about spreading out and e.g. using proton over gmail and other google services.they might both suck, but at least if it’s spread out, there’s not one asshole ceo that controls all our stuff at once. You can’t vote with your wallet, but preventing monopolies (the natural end game of a free market) by supporting smaller alternatives can still be worthwile. Not that it solves the underlying issues, but i think it can at least slow the decay a bit.

Maybe email is a better comparison for federated stuff than phpbb? You wouldn’t tell someone to ‘just get an email adress’. You’d recommend a specific email provider.

Buddy Guy. the concert was pretty posh (think bankers in suits), with everyone having arranged seating, audience sitting still and quiet like at a classical music concert.

he was like ‘fuck this, this isn’t a proper concert, my guitar is wireless, let’s stand up, go to the entry hall and jam’. so he’s just standing in the middle of the crowd and going nuts, at like 83 years of age. That was amazing.

I would say it is specifically a problem with crypto, i addition to what you said.

you wouldn’t be able to do the above with a bank. They’d just make the transaction not to have happened.

with crypto, e.g. btc, you’d have to convince 2-3 of the big mining pools to undo the transction, so random private actors. and it undo all other transactions done as well.

maybe that it happens is not due to crypto. That it cant be remedied is certainly because crypto.

One problem with reporting private messages on Lermy is, as an admin i don’t see who sent the message. I only see who reported it. And i don’t have any actlon available, other than marking the report as handled.

with reported posts, i can ban the poster. With reported messages i’d have to ask the reporter who it was, trust their answer, search for the account manually and then i could ban. Not really efficient or fast if there ever was a spam wave.

of course sparmers could then just register a new account on a open instance and i might need to defederates which would lead to a fractured landscape of spammy open instances and likely inactive private instances.

there’s also not even rudimantary spam filtering in lemmy.

The main saving grace is that Lemmy is too small to attract a ton of spam yet.

maybe some of the above is just due my pick of clients (jerboa and the web interface), and there’s better tools? If so, i’d love to hear. But as things stand right now, there’s a lot to be desired

Apple TV the devices or the streaming service? Because the streaming service has pretty good content, especially compared to the other streaming services. Pretty stupid to have named those two the same, though, so many people dont know that it’s just a regular streaming service that works on every device.

everything else Apple sucks though

I used to believe that it merely moves jobs, but recently started having doubts. Given the increase in productivity in the past 50 years and the stagnating wages, it’s hard to still believe. I mean, sure people will get new jobs, but I doubt it’s with similar wages and benefits.

which is pretty self defeating as there will be no one left to buy the goods produced.

i have a venta lw45. same principle, but instead of a wick, it has these rotating disks that the water sticks to (with a little soap in the water). Works incredibly well, still uses next to no energy (<8W) and the disks are super easy to clean. It’s a beast, goes through 9 liters of water in a bit over a day. All the parts are easily accessible for maintenance and there’s replacement parts if anything ever were to break (though i havent needed those yet).

the disks are especially nice when you have hard water, the calcium can be a pain to remove from a wick, but you can put the venta plastic disks (and lower housing, if you can fit it) in the dishwasher to get them good as new. And calcium does not stick to them weld, so a quick rinse under a strong showerhead is usually enough to clean the disks. Definitely one of the best appliance purchases i ever made.

It’s also the plot of Forego Quest (a short novelette included in the book Dragons Banker). the hero is not just the chosen one, he’s THE chosen one, as in, the chosen one of every prophecy and myth. His body is covered in different birthmarks from hundreds of prophecies, he stumbles on unique magic weapons to defaet a dark lord at every coner (they sell for a nice profit), every inn he enters, the maid is suddenly super pretty and starts going on about actually being a princess in distress or some such. And he’s having none of it.

i quite enjoyed that one, and as a novelette it’s short enough to not overstay its welcome.

The main book was ok, had some nice ideas but nothing too spectacular. It’s about some magic kingdom intoducing bank notes instead of gold and a dragon hiring a banker to convert its hoard of gold into this new currency without being noticed or crashing the market.