tal

joined 2 days ago
[–] tal@olio.cafe 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 48 minutes ago) (1 children)

I'm not going to watch the video


I like most context in text rather than video form


but while I will very well believe that:

  • It's possible to optimize LLMs to make smaller models more effective than they are today. It would be very surprising if they were already optimal, given that the field is immature.

  • It's possible to do a series of smaller, specialized models and keep models not-relevant to the current context unloaded from VRAM


I believe that the "splitting into smaller specialized networks" approach is referred to as Mixture of Experts. This should improve memory efficiency for many problems.

...this is countered by the fact that once you free up resources, I also suspect that you can then go use those now-available resources to improve the model by shoveling more data into the model. And while there might be diminishing returns, I very much doubt that there is a hard cap on which one can get better results by throwing more knowledge at a problem.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 9 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

From the blurb:

Sacrifice them to summon a mortal or kill them and use their corpses to resurrect some zombies!

That being said:

  1. I'm not totally sure that realism is necessarily the best complaint when it comes to the capabilities of a god in a god game.

  2. It seems like one could issue that complaint about most games. I don't think any, say, tennis games let you murder your opponent, though that's clearly at least a possibility in real life.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 6 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

LLMs have non-deterministic outputs, meaning you can't exactly predict what they'll say.

I mean...they can have non-deterministic outputs. There's no requirement for that to be the case.

It might be desirable in some situations; randomness can be a tactic to help provide variety in a conversation. But it might be very undesirable in others: no matter how many times I ask "What is 1+1?", I usually want the same answer.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 2 points 20 hours ago

I'm not totally sure I follow.

If you're playing to whatever sound device you want, but it's not coming out the output you want (e.g. headphones and/or speakers and you want the other), the mixer program you use probably has an option to select the output. I haven't used plasma-pa, but with pavucontrol, it's in the "Output Devices" tab. For each device, there's a "Port" drop down.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 3 points 1 day ago

Swords are off-limits:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Eliz2/1-2/14/section/1

Prevention of Crime Act 1953

Any person who without lawful authority or reasonable excuse, the proof whereof shall lie on him, has with him in any public place any offensive weapon shall be guilty of an offence

That being said:

Shields also

I'm not aware of anything restricting armor use in public in the UK.

kagis

https://www.uk.safeguardclothing.com/blogs/articles/body-armour-uk-law

UNITED KINGDOM

In the United Kingdom, there are currently no legal restrictions on the purchase and ownership of body armour.

There is a law against wearing it in Parliament.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_forbidding_Bearing_of_Armour

The Statute forbidding Bearing of Armour (7 Edw. 2. St. 1) or Coming Armed to Parliament Act 1313 (originally titled Statuto sup' Arportam'to Armor or Statutum de Defensione portandi Arma) was enacted in 1313 during the reign of Edward II of England. It decrees "that in all Parliaments, Treatises and other Assemblies, which should be made in the Realm of England for ever, that every Man shall come without all Force and Armour". The statute, which was written in the Anglo-Norman language, goes on to assert the royal power to "defend Force of Armour, and all other Force against our Peace, at all Times when it shall please Us, and to punish them which shall do contrary." It declares that "Prelates, Earls, Barons, and the Commonalty of our Realm... are bound to aid Us as their Sovereign Lord at all Seasons, when need shall be."[1]

The law is still in force today, though the Crown Prosecution Service has said that it is unaware of anyone being prosecuted under this or other archaic statutes in recent times.[4] According to a CPS spokeswoman, "If anyone was caught in the Houses of Parliament wearing armour it would first be a matter for the police."[4]

[–] tal@olio.cafe 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Looks fine to me. I don't use KDE, but searching, it looks like KDE Plasma's audio mixer is "plasma-pa". The "pa" there will stand for "PulseAudio", so at least at one point, it'll have been based on PulseAudio. I dunno if it talks natively to Pipewire now.

kagis

https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/v8hbyb/something_like_plasmapa_for_pipewire/

If you have the pipewire-pulse compatibility layer installed (which you really should), plasma-pa will work without any problems. Right now there is no pure PipeWire equivalent of it.

That was three years ago, so might be out of date, but at least then, it still used the PulseAudio API, so it may need pipewire-pulse to be active. In any event, I don't think that it'd hurt to have pipewire-pulse.

I'd check and make sure that pipewire-pulse is active too, and if so, try using plasma-pa to have PipeWire set the volume to whatever it is that you want set to. I assume that once you've set a volume with PipeWire, PipeWire will handle restoring it next time you log in. It does on my system.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

there's no need to install pavucontrol but all i need to do is set up alsamixer to make the audio work

If you want to fiddle the audio at the ALSA level


the hardware


you can, but my guess is that in 2025, unless you have some kind of exotic need, what you probably want is for PipeWire to be setting the volume.

On my system, I use pavucontrol and pipewire-pulse


using pavucontrol doesn't entail using PulseAudio. If you really know what you're doing and you're confident that you want to go bare ALSA, then you can probably go have systemd run a script at boot to run an alsactl restore command. I am pretty confident that that's not what you want to do.

It looks like there's a native console PipeWire mixer in Debian in the form of pipemixer, and I'd imagine that KDE Plasma probably has some sort of graphical mixer that either can talk natively to PipeWire or uses the pipewire-pulse PipeWire emulation of PulseAudio.

EDIT: Basically, you probably want:

------------  
|Sound Card|  
------------  

------------  
|   ALSA   |  
------------  

------------  
| PipeWire | <- You interact with the audio stack at this layer  
------------  

EDIT2: You should probably see that a user-level pipewire is running if you log into your KDE environment and open a virtual termainal and you run:

$ systemctl status --user pipewire.service  

It should say something like:

Active: active (running) since Tue 2025-09-02 00:27:11 PDT; 1 week 6 days ago  

If you have the PulseAudio emulation support active, then ditto for:

$ systemctl status --user pipewire-pulse.service  

I don't use KDE, so I don't know what the KDE mixer program is called or does, whether it talks natively to PipeWire or uses the PulseAudio interface, but KDE Plasma probably puts some sort of volume control in a system tray or something. And it'll probably use one of those two APIs to talk to PipeWire.

EDIT3: Basically, the only times I'd have been wanting to run things through ALSA directly were:

  • When it was introduced but before any standardized sound server was deployed, so maybe early 2000s.

  • Until JACK and later PipeWire showed up, talking directly to the hardware was a way to keep latency low for real-time processing, so there were some reasons you might want to do this if you were using pro audio.

  • Early PulseAudio was pretty broken, so I wound up using ALSA in preference to it.

But that's all pretty much ancient history now.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 13 points 1 day ago (3 children)

August 2024, where the minister says: "We have to break with the totally mistaken notion that it is every man's freedom to communicate on encrypted messaging services

Are you going to prevent people from using e2e encryption systems that run atop existing non-encrypted systems?

https://lemmy.world/post/28131754/16406545

[–] tal@olio.cafe 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

If you're concerned about someone being able to see your activity, no blacklisting-based system


which is what OP is talking about in terms of "blocking" would be -- on a system without expensive identifiers (which the Threadiverse is not and Reddit is not


both let you make new accounts at zero cost) will do much of anything. All someone has to do is to just make a new account to monitor your activity. Or, hell, Reddit and a ton of Threadiverse instances provide anonymous access. Not to mention that on the Threadiverse, anyone who sets up an instance can see all the data being exchanged anyway.

In practice, if your concern is your activity being monitored, then you're going to have to use a whitelisting-based system. Like, the Fediverse would need to have something like invite-only communities, and the whole protocol would have to be changed in a major way.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 21 points 1 day ago (6 children)

As Miku has no physical presence, the relationship is purely platonic.

If someone isn't already banging on that, I am pretty sure that they will be before long.

kagis

https://aimojo.io/ai-powered-female-sex-robots/

AI-Powered Female Sex Robots: Top 8 Models for 2025

Yeah.

Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind.


Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, HTML, URLs, and HTTP

[–] tal@olio.cafe 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I'm not totally sure about the chronology, but I think that the "old->new" block change on Reddit may have been due to calls from Twitter users. Most of the people I saw back on Reddit complaining about the old behavior prior to the change were saying "on Twitter, blocked users can't respond".

On Reddit, the site is basically split up into a series of forums, subreddits. On the Threadiverse, same idea, but the term is communities. And that's the basic unit of moderation


that is, people set up a set of rules for how what is permitted on a given community, and most restrictions arise from that. There are Reddit sitewide restrictions (and here, instancewide), but those don't usually play a huge rule compared to the community-level things.

So, on Twitter


and I've never made a Twitter account, and don't spend much time using it, but I believe I've got a reasonable handle on how it works


there's no concept of a topic-specific forum. The entire site is user-centric. Comments don't live in forums talking about a topic; they only are associated with the text in them and with the parent comment. So if you're on Twitter, there has to be some level of content moderation unless you want to only have sitewide restrictions. On Twitter, having a user be able to act as "moderator" for responses makes a lot more sense than on Reddit, because Twitter lacks an analog to subreddit moderators.

So Twitter users, who were accustomed to having a "block" feature, naturally found Reddit's "block" feature, which did something different from what they were used to, to be confusing. They click "block", and what it actually does is not what they expect


and worse, at a surface glance, the behavior is the same. They think that they're acting as a moderator, but they're just controlling visibility of comments to themselves. Then they have an unpleasant surprise when they realize that what they've been doing isn't what they think that they've been doing.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 59 points 1 day ago (1 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" is a short narrative poem written in Literary Chinese, composed of around 92 to 94 characters (depending on the specific version) in which every word is pronounced shi ([ʂɻ̩]) when read in modern Standard Chinese, with only the tones differing.[1]

"Shī Shì shí shī shǐ"
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

"Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den"
In a stone den was a poet called Shi Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

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