• 5 Posts
  • 93 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: February 15th, 2024

help-circle
  • wjrii@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    3 days ago

    If you traveled to the 800s England, you wouldn’t understand the English they would speak.

    Yup. You could probably go back to the late 1300s and get a grasp within weeks instead of months, at least in the southern half of England, and it would get easier with each passing decade, but you’d probably have to drop in a couple of generations after Shakespeare to be sure of being mostly functional on Day One.




  • this tendency in the past decade to base entire shows on tense anxiety.

    Yup. I call it the “drama of paranoia,” and it’s exhausting after a while. It also gives you a veneer of “prestige” without having to make characters I give a shit about or plots that fit together at all. As a good example of a show that realized this, Mad Men always struggled with a certain early-season plotline until they finally just ripped off the band-aid and said,

    spoiler

    the “real” Don Draper’s widow handwaves something out with our boy Dick, and literally nobody else gives a shit.

    What worked about that show had nothing to do with “ONE BIG SECRET.”


  • Same. I was adopted as an infant, and I actually used all the DNA sites to triangulate my birth family (some nice folks, some asses). I did it over ten years ago, but it would have been a lot easier today. I think it hits a lot of people, especially on a platform like Lemmy, in their Sci-Fi dystopia feels in an inchoate kind of way that makes them recoil, and it’s not that there isn’t any potential for abuse, just that this is a genie that’s very much out of the bottle. Frankly, if anything truly awful is going to be done with autosomal DNA, the people who want to do it will simply mandate it.

    Records-wise, it’s a large universe and impressively interconnected. I’ve learned a lot about all of my families (birth, adopted, marriage), and I was able to track down the documentation necessary to support a successful application get an EU passport for my wife (her company paid for it once she told them it was plausible), and therefore our daughter. I gather that I’ll be eligible for one myself in the near future, as she was legally always a citizen, and therefore she will soon have been married for twenty years.

    If my paternal side were more forthcoming, I might have been able to work something out with them for a couple of other countries, as my great-grandfather was an illegal immigrant from Germany who jumped ship from a freighter in the 1920s and married a girl whose family fled the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI. Then their kid married a Canadian nurse who was actually born in the “Dominion of Newfoundland” before confederation. Somehow this ended up creating Floridians… 🤷

    Also, there’s a good chance your goony-ass yearbook photos are on Ancestry (among other places).



  • I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.

    I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.










  • Goddammit all y’all GPU people are right. 😂

    The 580 is definitely the current bottleneck on Starfield, and likely on any other remotely intensive games. I am going to return the old-stock 2600 as soon as it arrives and instead use an eBay 3600 I got for slightly cheaper, and I’m going to stalk 6600 class GPUs until I find a good deal. I’ve had the mobo and 2400G for 5 and half years, and the HTPC case it’s in for something like 18. The poor thing has had a couple of extra fans bolted on and almost 40 holes drilled into it to increase airflow. It has a FIREWIRE port (disconnected), a floppy bay (with 3D printed insert to mount USB3 ports) and two optical bays (one of them still filled). And I still think it looks better than the RGB monstrosities that seem to be in vogue, LOL.





  • Eh, you may be right, but I’m starting with the stuff that will also involve a clean install and maybe seeing how everything comes together. With the 30 or 40 bucks residual value of the 8GB 580, a used RX6600 should still be in the budget, which TBH is a bit artificial, but also based on the priority I place on my “gaming rig.”

    The 2600 is not much better on single threads, but has more cache and more cores, and is on the W11 list; I guess I could return it, but I’m probably topping out at the 5500. RAM for this build is cheaper than cheap right now and I do want to play with VMs a little. Storage should help with some things but is also for my own sanity.


  • It never was, but unlike the current batch of LLM assistants that are now dominating the tops of “search” results, it never claimed to be. It was more, “here’s what triggered our algorithm as “relevant.” Figure out your life, human.”

    Now, instead, you have a paragraph of natural text that will literally tell you all about cities that don’t exist and confidently assert that bestiality is celebrated in Washington DC because someone wrote popular werewolf slash fanfic set in Washington state. Teach the LLMs some fucking equivocation and this problem is immediately reduced, but then it makes it obvious that these things aren’t Majel Barrett in Star Trek and they’ve been pushed out much too quickly.