Marxist-Leninist (relatively novice) with an umbrella ☔

  • 6 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 1st, 2024

help-circle



  • People who make fun of LLMs most often do get LLMs and try to point out how they tend to spew out factually incorrect information, which is a good thing since many many people out there do not, in fact, “get” LLMs (most are not even acquainted with the acronym, referring to the catch-all term “AI” instead) and there is no better way to make a precaution about the inaccuracy of output produced by LLMs –however realistic it might sound– than to point it out with examples with ridiculously wrong answers to simple questions.

    Edit: minor rewording to clarify


  • Here in Greece we have raging wildfires for yet another summer, one enormous fire (30km 40km wide) raging so close to the capital the smoke has enveloped the sky in many parts of the city, and the lib government praises itself over its “quick reaction time”. Very few precautions have been taken since last year, so now fire fighters are risking their lives to contain the crisis, working for more than 24h in a row, unfortunately without much success. Some buildings (mainly houses) have already been burnt by the fire, fortunately no casualties for now.

    Edits: added second photo, updated some info

    Yesterday's photo of the smoke from the National Observatory webcam

    An eerie photograph of a big cloud of smoke over Athens. No, this isn't on Mars.

    Today's photo, the flames near the National Observatory itself



  • Thanks for sharing! This mostly mirrors my own short experience in PRC (a short visit to Shanghai). Can’t wait for a chance to visit China again!

    Nature, technology, buildings, culture, the museums, the people, just about everything is amazing.

    Some problems I encountered as a non-Chinese person, and tips to overcome them, for anyone interested in visiting China to be ready for:

    1. Connecting to the Internet, even to Wi-Fi, requires verification with a Chinese SIM card. I didn’t care to get one in time so I was mostly offline for much of the time.
    2. Many people, especially older people, don’t know foreign languages, esp. English. You can use the great voice recognition translator in the AliPay app, but you need Internet for that.
    3. Don’t forget to bring an adaptor for the power outlets!

    Also, for anyone who wants to buy theory books in PRC: unfortunately literature in foreign languages seems extremely scarce, since the vast majority of books is of course in Chinese. Only once did I find an English translation of Xi’s works.





  • I like the simplicity of openrc and runit, they are as stable as a rock and their functions are easy to grasp. Systemd, on the other hand, while I can understand some of the motivation behind it, it still seems like a bad idea and an even worse implementation. In my experience –and I do understand that this might not be the case for many users– it and its modules has been the cause for some really cryptic bugs that took me valuable time to resolve, and which would not have occurred if it was just a init/service management system. On the contrary, openrc just does one job, and does it well. Haven’t much experience with BSD but heard they are rock solid too.













  • Well, it’s not good. People in Greece are already working the most hours in EU, now their bosses will be able to ask them to work an additional day, for which they will be paid 40% more (but that’s hardly a big benefit since wages already already low and product prices are among the most expensive in Europe). Taking into consideration also the high retirement age of 67, you can see how the system tries to maximize output by squeezing more and more out of the working class, a small gain at a time. The high bills for basic services (water and power supply) and other expenses as well as products being expensive as mentioned above, as well as the fear of being fired (syndicalism is not the same strong everywhere) will sure make a lot of workers accept the sixth working day, even if it means it will tire them out.