• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • This is what happened with plastic bags in some stores in the US. We passed plastic bag bans and while in a lot of cases the result was a combination of low-quality paper bags and legitimately reusable plastic totes, in the past couple of years some places have started giving out plastic bags that are way thicker than the ones we used to have and just calling them reusable. Like, yeah, they’re strong enough to be reused, but that definitely doesn’t seem to be the norm. We just ended up with single-use plastic bags that literally use more plastic.


  • I picked up a projector on sale for $50 on Newegg, usually I think they’re like $80 or something. Only problem is, I don’t know how to get the dust out of the inside of the projector lens. I’ve tried spraying canned air into the cracks around it, but it didn’t work. I even took the thing apart intending to wipe it down myself, but I couldn’t figure out how to get to the back of the lens.

    Still, for $50 it’s not too bad. The little bits of dust are kind of annoying, but they’re not in focus and it’s pretty alright for watching movies.









  • Depending on what it is you’re trying to make, it can actually be helpful as one of many components to help get your feet wet. The same way modding games can be a path to learning a lot by fiddling with something that’s complete, getting suggestions from an LLM that’s been trained on a bunch of relevant tutorials can give you enough context to get started. It will definitely hallucinate, and figuring out when it’s full of shit is part of the exercise.

    It’s like mid-way between rote following tutorials, modding, and asking for help in support channels. It isn’t as rigid as the available tutorials, and though it’s prone to hallucination and not as knowledgeable as support channel regulars, it’s also a lot more patient in many cases and doesn’t have its own life that it needs to go live.

    Decent learning tool if you’re ready to check what it’s doing step by step, look for inefficiencies and mistakes, and not blindly believe everything it says. Just copying and pasting while learning nothing and assuming it’ll work, though? That’s not going to go well at all.










  • From the Mozilla forums.

    I’m curious what “Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches, for example” means. Like, is that literally just the search I type into the browser bar, or are they talking about scraping data from my browser to improve my searches the way a lot of phone apps do?

    I could see some government somewhere passing a data security bill of some kind that makes rules around collecting and using data that redefines what that means in a way that includes something Firefox is already doing. I could also see them using this as a sneaky foot in the door as they plan to ramp up data profiteering like so many companies already have.

    It would be nice if they’d clarify their reasoning for doing this a bit more specifically.