ImpossibilityBox @ ImpossibilityBox @lemmy.world

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9

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212

Joined

2 yr. ago

If they are speaking about heat pumps then they are technically correct. A heat pump uses energy to move heat from one location to another instead of converting heat from form to form. It's the conversion that causes inefficiency.

I'm not nearly smart enough to properly explain the physics of it but there are plenty of articles and YouTube videos available if you want to go down that rabbit hole.

This was a solid case of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" the thermostat and heating system in question was from the 60's or 70's and had served us with no issues for as long as we had been there. Hindsight 20/20 and all that jazz.

Cautionary tale:

For us it was trial and error. We thought we were doing pretty well by keeping track of the weather and balancing the whole house heating vs single room. Until we had a snap freeze that plummeted the temps overnight to an obscene degree. We were comfortably warm in our bedroom as all the pipes in the kitchen and bathroom were bursting.

10's of thousands of dollars in demolition and reconstruction later we have decided that in this instance it's better to waste some small amount of energy keeping the whole house heated rather than risking another catastrophic failure.

Your mileage may vary.

Apparently you and I have polar opposite tastes in those areas. Risa was the first thing I blocked and I've been slowly working my way through blocking all the Piracy communities.

I'm here for formula 1, mechanical keyboards, and obscure stuff like weirdly specific playlists.

I personally go with: no thanks I'm still on probation from the last time I used the stuff and beat a man mostly to death.

My wife and I were (emphasis on WERE) raised in very religious circles and as such we were "saving ourselves" for marriage at the beginning of our relationship. I was already drifting away from the religious world and thought this practice was dumb but loved her enough for innumerable other reasons that I would go through basically whatever to wait for her.

4 years into our 7 year dating relationship I was very stupid and ended up having a drunken three way with two of her best friends in a public park. Long story. My S.O. never found out from any of us.

One of the women contacted me nearly a decade later drunk and crying in order to confess that she had gotten pregnant from the encounter and had gotten an abortion with her parents help but never told anyone else.

My wife and I dated for 7 years and have been married for just short of 9 years. I moved us to the other side of the country for work to limit the possible interactions with her former friends, and encouraged her in many ways to have as large a friend group as possible in our new life to curtail the desire to reach out to our old group. New address and new phone numbers to make it more difficult for people to find us out of the blue. This will never see the light of day in our relationship.

I love my wife to the ends of the earth and back, this is the one thing (other than the consistency of my bowel movements) I will ever keep from her.

Edit: Spelling

Man, now that's a subreddit that I miss and haven't seen here yet.

If I could send cash to companies from other continents for their goods/services I would do so but that isn't a thing sooooo... Credit cards it is.

Seems like kind of a weird take to me. If I can create a reasonable privacy barrier with a service like privacy.com (not saying they are good or otherwise) then I have no problems with using a card. You can't buy everything with cash.

Ooooh yeah it's a thing. There are enough of them that some one created a compilation of their favorites. I think they left out some of the most entertaining but it's still great to watch people from all different walks of life get their brains exploded.

There is one and ONLY one type of reaction video I watch. People discovering Devin Townsend for the first time. Specifically his EMGtv performance of Kingdom.

I'm going to try and say this without sounding excessively depressing but... There are few things in my life that bring me joy or excitement so when I find something that does I latch on to it and don't let it go. Even if it's a small relatively inconsequential thing let it bring joy into your life no matter how little the amount.

I've got a 1/2 cube made of tungsten that is just satisfying to hold onto and it's one of my favorite things.

Thanks! California, Colorado, and New York for the scenic photos. We always try to find beautiful off the beaten places to travel too and explore.

There is weirdly enough another user in this thread who holds conversation with stuffed turtles. They are his wife's and he talks with them about his job as a finance journalist.

Pretty much anything that is heavy and malleable. We have a weighted blanket that I sometimes use but it's not really heavy enough for my liking sometimes. The cat food/dog food didn't always work because sometimes the bag is semi-permeable and you can smell the food.

In order of preference it is probably soil (loam or aquarium), Rice, and then sand.

No worries!

Weight is an advantage. While a heavier sled is harder to accelerate they build up more speed over the course of the run.

The minimum weight for the sled is 170kg. The maximum weight for sled and athletes combined is 390kg (Men) and 340kg (Women)

Preservation only but not likely any better than a linguistic historian.

But it gets tricky because LLMs only function on HUGE sets of data. LLMs are nothing more than complicated probability engines. Give it the question "What color is the sky?" and the math extracted from the massive databases that it has says the highest probability answer is "Blue". It doesn't actually KNOW the answer it just knows the probabilities of different words.

Without large amounts of data on the dying language current gen LLM's won't be accurate or able to generate reliable answers. Shoot... LLMs can barely generate reliable answers with the massive datasets they currently have.

I strongly recommend anyone even remotely interested in LLMs to read this interactive article:

https://ig.ft.com/generative-ai/

If I could figure out how to move all my favorites and playlists AND continue discovering obscure music from around the world with ease, I would replace Spotify.

I can't think of another way for me to discover something like Indian Metal, all female Cuban acapella group, or power ambient deep in the middle of nowhere farmland NY. It's not like those are going to be played on the radio. But I can type a random combo of letters and numbers into Spotify and start a radio based on the first band I don't recognize. Let the discovery commence.

This is a pet peeve of mine right up there with the never ending stream of people calling machine learning AI. We do not have any real kind of AI at all at the moment but I digress.

LLM is literally just a probability engine. LLM's are trained on huge libraries of content. What they do is assign a token(id) to each word (or part of word) and then note down the frequency of the words before and after the word as well as looking specifically for words that NEVER come before or after the word in question.

This creates a data set that can be compared to other tokenized words. Words with vary similar data sets can often be replaced with each other with no detriment to the sentence being created.

There is something called a transformer that has changed how efficiently LLM'S work and has allowed parsing of larger volumes by looking at the relation of each tokenized word to every word in the sentence simultaneously instead of one at a time which generates better more accurate data.

But the real bread and butter comes when it starts generating new text it starts with a word and literally chooses the most probable word to come next based off of its extensive training data. It does this over and over again and looks at the ending probability of the generated text. If it's over a certain threshold it says GOOD ENOUGH and there is your text.

You as a human (I assume)do this kind of thing all ready. If someone walked up too you and said "Hi! How are you..." by the time they got there you have probably already guessed that the next words are going to be "doing today?" Or some slight variation thereof. Why were you able to do this? Because of your past experiences, aka, trained data. Because of the volume of LLM'S data set it can guess with surprisingly good accuracy what comes next. This however is why the data it is trained on is important. If there were more people writing more articles,more papers,more comments about how the earth was flat vs people writing about it being round then the PROBABLE outcome is that the LLM would output that the earth is flat because that's what the data says is probable.

There are variations called the Greedy Search and the Beam Search but they are difficult for me to explain but still just variations of a probability generator.

Uhm, I really like laying on the floor with the largest bag of cat food/litter/dried corn/rice that I have available on my head.