batmaniam

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Sadly that's not going to be BMW specific for much longer, they're all taking a page out of that book. 2022 Hyundai, long story on how I managed to kill a single spark plug at 30k miles, but this time last year the part wasn't listed anywhere. It was FORTY DOLLARS for a SINGLE plug from Hyundai. I'm sure there were alternates that would work but I wasn't going to risk it over 40 bucks at that low mileage.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

"what do you mean it's not a real show? Does my agent know? I still get paid with real money though right?"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

The poems of Thomas Zane in the old gods of asgard concert in the book about max Payne in the video game Allen wake in the video game control in the amazing TV series the threshold kids in that song the janitor is singing.

... Pretty sure that's the continuity.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Somewhere, some patent lawyers are going to make millions debating about whether or not this constitutes "public disclosure".

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago

Dude, they flubbed this so damn hard by over reaching. A few years ago, when they mentioned there would be a button in word that you could use to make a slide deck of your word dock, I was so excited. The teams meeting part where it will summarize meetings is honestly fantastic in doing Roberts rules of order type stuff. My response was "I hate what this means in terms of privacy, but godamn that sounds useful".

In turning into an everything all or nothing they massively screwed up. I have a self hosted instance of llama-gpt that I use to solve the "blank page" problem that AI was actually great at.

I have a lot of issues with AI on principle, like a lot of folks. But it blows my mind how hard they screwed up delivery (and I don't just mean the startups, that's to be expected). There's plenty to be said about uber at a principle level, but it's still bloody convenient. The entire roll out of a AI-ecosystem reeks of this meme: "but we made plans!".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Life arises from beautiful choas, where in the random but rhythmic dance of chance evolution gives rise to incomprehensible and beautiful complexity made possible by rafts of soul crushing failures buoying the statistical miracle of success.

I am sorry your genes are of bad stock and you've been deprived of enjoying the best of this world.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I really dislike that kind of animation style, just isn't my taste. But in Ghibli, I love it and the stories. I run a plex server for my family and had to warn my mom. My 3 y/o niece doesn't need to see "grave of the fire flies" just yet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I mean you're spot on, it's really not the end of the world, and you're correct on the parks and rec.

I think people get prickly because of what you mentioned about the substance of the article probably being way worse, everyone's just primed these days lol. We're kind of sorting some shit out over here...

Anyway thanks for the conversation, it's always fun to see your own culture through someone else's eyes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I guess what it comes down to is there a plenty of things, big and small, that I don't have an issue with as an American but I know matter to the other person. Usually it's small stuff (how people comport themselves in relation to work, the line between direct and rude, etc) , but when it comes to things where people died, I think it's best to defer to the people involved.

Maybe that's a trap of my upbringing as well but I don't see that as American lens, I see that as recognizing there are a lot of lenses.

And again, the original joke is decent, its a role reversal and punches up not down, but I wouldn't want an American paper making jokes about Finnish biathalon Olympians spanking the Russians.

Any joke with cultural baggage carries the risk you miss context. Again, I don't think that's just true for Americans.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (5 children)

You do you, it's just in poor taste. It's not the end of the world or anything, it's just funny to me that it's the same thing "boorish Americans" get flack for.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (7 children)

What's ironic is you're displaying exactly what you're critiquing. This joke is a bit funny, but it's on par with something like "Prince Charles asks NRA to fix his car". There's just baggage. And lord knows Italy has plenty of its own.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

how much you can build without a complete understanding

We've never actually never had one. I'd have to check the timelines but Tesla was almost certainly working on a functional, but inaccurate atomic model (Bohr). Medicine is actually a great example of all this. We are so used to just kind of knowing "there's a bad bug or bad gene that's making me sick". Like you may not know the details, but you've got some loose concept a bunch of cells in your body are pissed off. For the vast, vasssssssst history of medicine, it was all empirical, and the thing is, it kind of worked... sometimes.

My favorite example of "knowing without fully understanding" is Mendel and his peas. If you do a 4x4 punnet square (that gene cross thing), and look at the frequency of co-inheritance, you can track how far genes are from on another (because the further they are, the more likely there will be a swap during the shuffle). Thing is... because DNA is an integer thing (no such thing as 'half a base pair') it works DOWN TO THE SINGLE BASE PAIR. Mendel was accurately counting the number of freaking base pairs separating genes without knowing what a base pair, or indeed even really a molecule, was.

Tesla would have lived to see some absolutely nutty stuff in physics. Boltzman, Einstein with relativity, it must have seemed like pure madness at the time.

So yeah, we discover new and interesting stuff all the time. I personally think that some of the weird quantum stuff is going seem as rote in the future as germs do to us now. As in, the same way any lay-person shoved into a time machine would at least be able to give the basics to a medieval European, someone from the future would be like "well I don't remember much about quantum tunneling, but...".

And that's all before getting into some of the bizarre things going on in math itself. Be careful if you look into that stuff though, it's easy to fall into the "Terrance Howard" style rabbit hole. Suffice to say there is some really interesting and unexpected implications we're discovering, but if you don't have a solid grasp of theory, it is easy to be led astray but sources that want to gloss over details to talk about a conclusion that isn't actually supported. It's like if you tried to explain time dilation to an ancient Greek, and they excitedly hopped on their fastest chariot thinking they could "fast forward" to the future, because time moves "more slowly" for you when you're going faster, right?

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