Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

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  • 2 Posts
  • 139 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • That is a critical mass thing. Reddit 15 years ago didn’t have a thriving pokemon community either. Things grow naturally over time. I think Lemmy is in a good place :)

    But, for example, on Reddit there is r/hockey and a sub for each team. On Lemmy those team subs are graveyards, but if you post on c/hockey you might get enough traction to have a conversation. Find the larger community and help grow that first before fracturing to smaller ones.



  • So, I’m going to offer a dissenting opinion. Please hear me out before piling on.

    The anonymous internet is going to kill the internet. Without verification and attachment back to a real human, eventually the internet will just be flooded with bots, misinformation, and unverifiable information. The dead internet theory.

    So, yes, we all worry about “Chinese style social credit scores” or corporate ownership of ID or whatever other dystopian bullshit… But what if you just want to have a site where people can talk to one another and know that they’re people that actually have to take responsibility for what they say.

    Anyway, I suspect that this will start in isolation. Like when the internet was young and communities were forming with knots of small people… Forums with full verification requirements or similar. Then they will grow once their quality exceeds everything else.

    Discuss!



  • I’ve got it on my three windows machines – all of them required for various work tasks where Linux doesn’t make sense. Been using it in that context since circa 2012 when you still had to install it with the KDE on Windows installer. I was actually surprised to see an automated update on windows. Very nice!

    I don’t have time to work on KDE anymore, but perhaps drop me a current donation link?





  • Troy@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldOnyx Solar launches walkable PV tiles
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    3 months ago

    This depends on what you’re optimizing for. If you are optimizing for total energy captured per square metre, then you’re right about the benches.

    But suppose you have a sufficient flux even with some areas being covered so you aren’t bothered by the shadows. Wouldn’t it be aesthetically superior to have uniform tile types? Or would you prefer they micromanage the tile placement such that the tiles below the bench shadows are different?

    Anyway, I think it is a good idea. Better than the silly solar roadways crap.



  • I love hitting these things in the real world. Not the big, but the comment. You just know someone spent a fortune in time and company resources to never solve the problem and their frustration level was ragequit. But then something stupid like adding

    while (0){};

    Suddenly made it work and they were like, fuckit.

    Usually it’s a bug somewhere in a compiler trying to over optimize or something and putting the line in there caused the optimization not to happen or something. Black magic.

    The downside is that the compiler bug probably gets fixed, and then decades later the comment and line are still there…




  • Troy@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe Pythonic Emptiness
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    3 months ago

    Duck typing is the best if fully embraced. But it also means you have to worry just a little bit about clean failures once the project grows a little. I like this better than type checking relentlessly.

    It also means that your test suite or doctests or whatever should throw some unexpected types around now and again to check how it handles ducks and chickens and such :)


  • Troy@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldStack Overflow Website Traffic
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    3 months ago

    The ideal result? LLMs are just early versions of much better things that come later.

    The unlikely result: we develop a separate human curated internet somewhere, complete with verification that a human wrote every bit. Basically verifiable digital id and signing on everything. Maybe.

    The probable result: the internet turns to shit as AIs are trained on content created by AIs.