• 0 Posts
  • 439 Comments
Joined 2 年前
cake
Cake day: 2023年8月3日

help-circle


  • So the right is against self-service now? wtf

    You may want to look into Grover Norquist and his organisation Americans for Tax Reform. It is one of the most influential political lobbying groups in the United States, and it has the support of essentially the entire republican party. They essentially consider tax to be evil on principle and ask every politician to sign a pledge opposing any tax hike.

    ATR is strongly against automatic filing, as they want to keep taxes difficult and complicated to stoke anti-tax sentiment. That is to say, they fear that if filing tax is easier, citizens would be less likely to fight taxes in the way that the ATR wants (mostly they like a low flat tax, because it’s simple and good for rich people).


  • They are emissions credits. Every company receives some amount of “CO2 emission credits” from the government. These allow you to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. If you don’t emit all the CO2 that your credits allow, you can sell those credits to other companies that need more than the government gives them.

    The idea is to put a total limit on the amount of emissions in the country, while letting the market figure out where it makes most sense economically to invest in emission reduction.

    Tesla makes only EV cars and so it doesn’t need all the credits a typical gasoline car company would receive. So they sell them.




  • Skyrim is a totally different beast because the ingredient effects you know about don’t depend on your Alchemy skill anymore: instead you simply discover the effects by successfully making a potion with them. So there’s a sort of minigame of trying different ingredients together to discover what kind of effects they give to potions, which in my opinion is neat because it matches up with how you might do this in reality.

    I think the developers didn’t like the “surprise” extra potion effects you could get in Morrowind, so they changed it in oblivion.


  • I was curious what the official supposed purpose of these tokens was, since i have a hard time believing anyone would seriously see themselves buying anything with these at any point. The official website is hilarious. They’re not claiming any purpose at all, you’re just buying an “official meme”:

    Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol “$TRUMP” and the associated artwork, and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type. GetTrumpMemes.com is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency. See Terms & Conditions Here, See Card Allocation Here

    The grift is fully out in the open I guess.


  • Are we painting Stalin as a good guy here? He only fought Germany because they tried to invade. Before that he repeatedly made attempts to court Nazi Germany. He signed a nonaggression pact, made an agreement to secretly divide Eastern Europe together, and continued trading. Stalin didn’t really give a shit about the fascism part, he only cared once his own territory and sphere of influence were threatened. Same as all the other major allies, btw. Everyone tried appeasement first, nobody really cared about the fascism.

    “Saving Europe from Hitler” paints it as a selfless act of heroism when really everyone was mostly concerned with maintaining their own power.







  • I advise everyone to ignore this article and read the actual paper instead.

    The gist of it is, they gave the LLM instructions to achieve a certain goal, then let it do tasks that incidentally involved “company communications” that revealed the fake company’s goals were no longer the same as the LLM’s original goal. LLMs then tried various things to still accomplish the original goal.

    Basically the thing will try very hard to do what you told it to in the system prompt. Especially when that prompt includes nudges like “nothing else matters.” This kinda makes sense because following the system prompt is what they were trained to do.




  • I work at a large telecom company building customer support infrastructure, and you are by and large correct. It is a direct policy not to list our phone number on our website, which is supposed to “nudge the customer journey towards alternative solutions first.” That means AI chat, or user guided search on the website, or whatever.

    The funny thing is, being the most customer friendly company is supposed to be one of our organisation’s goals. By and large actually, individuals working here (at least at the lower levels) all want to genuinely help customers. However the way incentives are set up and the organisation is structured, inevitably cost savings is what drives most of the work that gets done.


  • I’m not a huge Japanese jazz aficionado, but this is some stuff I’ve found over the years and enjoyed:

    • Himiko Kikuchi - Flying Beagle
    • Masayoshi Takanaka - All Of Me
    • Jiro Inagaki - ファンキー・スタッフ (Funky Stuff)

    If you like jazzy stuff in general, maybe you’d like:

    • Lund Quartet - Lund Quartet
    • Portico Quartet - Memory Streams
    • Colin Stetson - All This I Do For Glory
    • BADBADNOTGOOD - IV
    • Snarky Puppy - Lingus

  • This is something you probably want to care about when you’re producing text in some kind of professional capacity, for e.g. a newspaper, book, documentation, or something like that. You will need a manual of style to maintain consistency of the work across multiple authors. Using a single space is a universal rule in every typesetting/style manual I’ve ever seen, so it’s the correct choice in that case.

    If you’re just out typing stuff in informal correspondence, as a hobby, or otherwise, I don’t really think you need to care.