Which could have been the weirdest tangent on a Wikipedia page. Jim Henson, Muppets, Sesame Street, retired characters, Big Bird, oh was that an early version of Abelardo?, Challenger shuttle dis-- what. What? What the fuck?!

When the guy who played Mr. Hooper died, they worked that into the show. The cast, sincerely grieving, had to explain to a seven-foot-tall canary that he wasn’t coming back. That’s not really he same kind of intrusion from reality, as acknowledging the same giant fowl fucking exploded on national television.

The only possible comparison would be if some show had a gimmicky live episode that happened to be scheduled for 9 AM, on a Tuesday, in September of 2001.

Same. I think that episode was shown in-class, too, so I came alarmingly close to the XKCD.

This thread has been fucking great for blocking people who would have insisted, whatever this new Auschwitz thing is, it’s just as bad as something Hindenburg did.

No. They weren’t.

Generic percentage increases to immigration enforcement are not the same as Kristi Noem tweeting about SIXTY-FIVE MILLION PEOPLE, no matter how strongly you feel about the shit we were doing before.

The Idiot is talking about stripping natural-born citizens of that citizenship, and sending them all to cat-food factories in Sudan, and y’all still wanna bicker about Obama catching people crossing the border. Like you can’t figure out there’s a difference between a little over a million people, across eight years, and every Hispanic in America facing a no-trial black-hood flight to fuckoff nowhere, as soon as practically possible.

Oh right, I’m on ML. Where whatever a building is used for now is the fault of whoever built it.

No difference between fighting human trafficking and separating all children from all parents.

No difference between having immigration laws and shipping random brown people to Sudan.

Same same same nuh uh always same.

They weren’t planning to round up an entire fifth of the US population and put them in concentration camps.

I feel like that alone counts for a lot. Sorry you seem to disagree.

This is just “both sides” with more steps.

But they can’t just patch out always-online DRM! Think of all the no more money they’d lose!

how many ways can you really communicate with a cell tower?

Analog encoding assigns each device in a cell its own frequency range.

Time-domain multiplexing assigns each device a fraction of a second to transmit.

Quadrature phase-shift keying alters the timing of a signal to convey data.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing has each device transmit the same signal over P out of Q bands, such that each device’s signal can be reconstructed by knowing which bands it transmitted on.

There’s a fucking reason your phone is faster now than in 2010.

How cell phones work is ridiculously complicated. Going from analog, to time-domain shenanigans, to binary wizard math, is why you can watch 720p video and whine that it’s not 1080p.

Evaporative cooling is a bitch. You have some community about the problems with X, and there’s a range of opinions about how bad X is. Anyone mildly affected won’t post much or stick around. People with intense opinions exaggerate. Whether it’s for comedy or rhetoric, ‘X will be the death of us all!’ chases out even more mild users. Now you have a vicious circle of X haters.

If that’s popular enough to form a meaningful audience, you see careers made, serving that conclusion. Shockingly few of them are grifters. They just posted something honestly critical that the haters really enjoyed, and the likeminded engagement made the author’s brain do the happy chemicals, so now they’re the weekly go-to for obsessively complaining about the evils of X. Still naming any actual problems with X, on par with their original independent criticism… but in the new fire-breathing style that makes even half-true non-issues sound like the worst event in recorded history.

The same can happen for positive attitudes, but the result is less circlejerk, and more… cult. Like that DRSyourGME instance. Or Qanon. When sensible people start toward the exits, that doesn’t mean the party’s over.

Rule: No comparing artificial intelligence/machine learning to simple text prediction algorithms.

That’s an overstep. “Spicy autocorrect” is not a joke exclusive to trolls. LLMs genuinely are simpler than they have any right to be, and it’s ridiculous they work anywhere near this well.

Then again, rigidly defining bad behavior is a poor move anyway, when you’re trying to say “don’t be a tedious asshole.” Tedious assholes will gladly slip around whatever specific problems you name, and bait other people into unwitting violations. The general version of this is enforced civility, i.e. “Rule 1: Be nice! >:(”, and that becomes a duck-blind for infuriating liars. Sometimes “fuck off” is a perfectly reasonable response.

Just write “don’t be a tedious asshole.” Hash out what that means amongst the mod team. Do not be afraid to give people a week-long time-out for things you did not pre-emptively wag a finger about. If they mewl ‘but it didn’t say!,’ tell them, it doesn’t have to. I think everyone is happier when they can trust moderators to make a judgement call on who’s being a dick. And so long as the stakes are temporary, don’t be afraid to get it wrong sometimes.

You don’t.

But when you eventually reinstall, because Ubuntu crossed the line, Mint is just Ubuntu without the bullshit.

Previously? Some schmuck changing all the windows to be left-handed, immediately before a long-term-support feature freeze.

Zero percent surprised by many other comments throwing shade at Ubuntu.

Just use Mint.

Fuck off with hiding the URL, ever. Including the protocol.

For the last fifteen years, the best course of action has been, STOP COPYING CHROME. People who want what Chrome does - just use Chrome! We didn’t choose a different browser because we want a different icon!

I fondly remember having 8 GB of storage, because I could back up my hard drive on like two dollars worth of CD-Rs.

I feared no virus. Reinstalling XP was a monthly affair regardless.

2005 post, s/LLM/Google/g.

2035: BASIC supremacy.

Don’t need eight billion parameters to go “But why do you want that?”