fiasco

joined 2 years ago
[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Probably the biggest issue is getting all the "find a community" stuff together: the communities for new communities, and the crawlers that list communities and let you search them.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 2 points 2 years ago

And it isn't actually clear if rate hikes affect inflation anyway. Since the interbank rate also benchmarks the Treasury yield, for example, higher interest rates will cause the government to spend more on debt service. If inflation is supposed to be related to the amount of money, then why is increasing public spending the preferred way of decreasing the availability of money?

Interest rates for inflation targeting are in fact pure class war. The fear is something called a wage-price spiral. Basically, inflation erodes real incomes, and the question is, whose income should be eroded? Workers or owners? In the presence of strong labor unions, inflation becomes an intense battlefield, of whose income gets eroded. Labor negotiation raises wages, which maintains higher demand, which raises inflation, so unions demand yet higher wages. But this is also because the companies aren't willing to take the hit to prices, so they ratchet prices up in tandem with wage increases. The result is a feedback loop: unions score higher wages, businesses raise prices to compensate, unions need to push for higher wages to compensate, and so on.

This is what the interest rates are about. The goal is to create a recession, by making both investment and debt-financed consumption more expensive, to kill off workers' ability to negotiate higher wages.

This form of class war gets masked behind economic terms like the Phillips Curve and the Nonaccelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, since after all, that sounds a lot better than Get Fucked, Workers.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 4 points 2 years ago

Glow-in-the-dark heating elements...

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

There's something important missing from most of the other answers. There's a lot of different kinds of network and internet traffic. Web browsing, email, instant messaging, online video games...

By formal standard, certain port numbers are designated for certain functions. Web traffic happens on port 80. Incoming email is sent on port 143, outgoing email is sent on port 456 or 587. Something like Discord will have a specific port it uses for both sending and receiving messages. Word of Warcraft has certain ports its uses for telling the server when you cast a spell, and for the server to tell your client when you take damage.

So yes, ports are like PO boxes at a post office, but the analogy doesn't quite capture it. Port 80 is always web traffic, and this is important, since your web browser requests pages on port 80, just as a web server returns web pages on port 80. The web server probably has other ports on it, like FTP (ports 20 and 21) or SFPT (port 22). If you connect to a web server on port 80, that means you're asking for its webpages. If you connect on 20, 21, or 22, it means you're trying to transfer files to it.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 3 points 2 years ago

Alternatively, Shia LaBeouf appears from the edge of the map and starts chasing the king impostors. But their legs, they're caught in a bear trap! Gnawing off their legs, limping toward the cottage, now they're on the doorstep, sitting inside, Shia LaBeouf, sharpening an axe, Shia LaBeouf.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I feel the other thing missing from all this Discourse is, IBM made UNIX. If they want to act all proprietary, why don't they abandon Linux and return to their own operating system?

That's right, because of the enormous amount of free labor they get from the open source community.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 2 points 2 years ago

At the moment I'm trying https://gpt4all.io/index.html, a big part of the problem is that I just haven't had a lot of time to deal with it, and the model parameter files are large downloads.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I've used it a bit to try and work on my Spanish. That is, using it as a sophisticated chatbot. Unfortunately it's still quite frustrating for that: I figured I'd ask it to play un juego de rol (a roleplaying game), and it kinda sucks at it. I'm gonna give it a go with an open source alternative, hopefully they're less aggressively calibrated toward being tedious and awful. It's just, getting an open source language model running takes a decent amount of time and effort, so I'm sorta midway through that.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 2 points 2 years ago

Don't forget: congress checking the power of the supreme court is an unacceptable violation of the principle of checks and balances, at least if you ask John Roberts about it. Luckily he's totally unbiased on this issue.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 2 points 2 years ago

"Plagued by visions" just sounds like a particularly obnoxious middle manager.

[–] fiasco@possumpat.io 4 points 2 years ago

Wouldn't surprise me.

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