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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I realized a while back that one of the primary goals of these LLMs is to get people to continue using them. While that’s not especially notable - the same could be said of many consumer products and services - the way in which this manifests in LLMs is pretty heinous.

    This need for continued use is why, for example, Google’s AI was returning absolute nonsense when asked about the origins of fictitious idioms. These models are designed to return something, and to make that something pleasing to the reader, truth and utility be damned. As long as the user thinks that they’re getting what they wanted, it’s mission accomplished.


  • Our first also needed a frenotomy, and we had to go to a specialist clinic outside the hospital.

    My best understanding of that situation was that they first wanted to make sure it was actually a problem over a week or two of observation. Then, the procedure was technically classified as dental surgery, so a doctor at a hospital couldn’t perform it for professional/ethical/insurance reasons.


  • How much support new parents get seems to vary by city (and maybe province?).

    I’ve also had two children born in Canada in the past few years, but in different cities (and provinces). Neither gave us a baby box, but the first provided a free and unprompted hearing test right in the recovery room, while the other required us to make a seperate appointment in the weeks following the birth for that same service.




  • A few months ago, my work got everyone Copilot 365 licences. I have yet to use it, and I haven’t seen anyone in my immediate vicinity using it either. So from my perspective, it’s wasted money and bandwidth. I do work at a very large organization, so maybe there are people elsewhere who do use it, but it has yet to contribute anything to my work.

    You want to know what would make my job easier? A password manager or unified login of some sort. I’m currently juggling nearly a dozen unique passwords, and it’s mentally taxing.



  • BenVimestoComic Strips@lemmy.world[InkyRickshaw] Hoarding
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    1 month ago

    This recently happened in my campaign.

    We were fighting a dragon, and it kept flying around its lair, making it very hard for my Barbarian to hit it. We ultimately won, but 3 of the party of 5 died.

    Later, while dividing loot, I saw that I had been carrying a Potion of Flying the whole time, and the fight probably would have gone better if I had used it.



  • BenVimestomemes@lemmy.worldthe invite the....
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    2 months ago

    You’re right, they don’t.

    The ones beginning with “d” generally translate as “of the,” while the “à” ones generally translate as “to the” or “at the.”

    French has three words that mean “the”: “le” (masculine), “la” (feminine), and “les” (plural).


  • I had an surprising one, actually: I went to a private religious school, but I had a strangely comprehensive sex education.

    It started with unvarnished discussions of human anatomy and cautions about sexual abuse around age 8, and then moved on to the basics of (hetero)sexuality by the time I was a preteen. In high school that continued, though talk about birth control was postponed until the health units of later physical education courses, which not everyone took. Of course, the stress was always that sexual activity should be limited to monogamous (heterosexual) marriage, and there was no mention of anything outside of the hetero-normative.

    The last wrinkle was that it was all opt-out. At every point, there was at least one person who would leave the room for the duration of the class because their parents really didn’t want them learning about naughty bits.

    So it ended up actually providing a pretty good foundation. It was still incomplete and biased, but a lot better than what you would expect when you hear “private religious school.”


  • I’ve been cautioning people as well. Right-wing politics aren’t unpopular in Canada, it’s just that the the centrist voters got spooked my Trump.

    No one should bet on another miracle for the next election. The best case scenario may be that the PC wing retakes control of the federal Conservatives and we just get a raft of deregulation and privatization without all the culture war grievances.









  • BenVimestoCanadaAll for this.
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    4 months ago

    That’s a sea border, but the idea is the same.

    In fact, the distance between the shores of Newfoundland and St. Pierre and Miquelon is shorter than the width of the English Channel at the Straits of Dover (25km vs 34km).