I don’t know if Clifford D. Simak is lesser known, but his work is pretty foundational for a lot of more modern sci-fi. Before there was “I, Robot”, there was “City”. Before there were Ewoks, there was “Little Fuzzy”. Before there were living ships like in Farscape, Lexx, or Xenogenesis, there was “The Visitors”.

I should have remembered that was H. Beam Piper. Also great.

I don’t think that’s going to go the way you think it will. Exhibit A: Freeing the Genie

Could they not think of an original name? Calling it YouTube-dl is just unnecessarily lazy and confusing. This appears to be mostly a docker image of yt-dlp, which is itself a fork of youtube-dl.

Well, it seems that every time a search engine’s AI gives me a definitive and wordy “answer” to a question I search and provides a helpful citation of the page from which it got that answer, it is ALWAYS just a completely hallucinated answer that the cited page in no way supports. This isn’t just hyperbole, this has been my experience with every single search engine AI summary

And I find myself having to go back and fix the autocorrect that my phone keyboard “helpfully” makes with increasing frequency. It used to be that autocorrect would just fix a typo when I’d obviously typed gibberish because I missed a key. But now, it is regularly replacing entire words that I’ve typed completely correctly with some other word that makes absolutely no sense.

I’m all for some specific uses of AI. Things like speech to text or images to text? Sure that’s a great use. But when it comes to research, writing, or spreadsheets, AI tools just need to shut up and stay the fuck out of my way. I’m becoming convinced a little more everyday that anyone using AI to summarize articles or search results is a complete moron and shouldn’t be trusted.

Same energy as:

You know, I can eat a peach for hours.

Just one paragraph? I understand why that feels like an indicator of LLM use these days, but that actually sounds like a fairly common mistake human writers might make. Author decides to move a topic to a different section, copies it and rewords to suite new placement and forgets to remove the section from it’s original spot. A pro shouldn’t be making that kind of mistake, but it’s a particularly difficult one to spot in reviewing the article. It’s an error that is especially difficult to spot if you’re the author because of your own familiarity with the article. The only effective way I found to combat those kinds of mistakes in my writing was to delay my own review of my writing (sometimes as long as a day or two) after significant writing or edits. Clearly that strategy is unworkable in a fast paced journalism setting, where that kind of space between writing and editing cannot meet deadlines.

This would look a lot different than the similar AI slop tell I see in news articles that repeat the headline across multiple paragraphs in a row with different wording and no new details or clarifications. I don’t see any of this in the article. I could not find the repeated paragraphs that you’re talking about. Calling back to previous points in an essay with various subsections, even repeating important points and details is often just good writing.

That also sounds a lot like the kind of comments that Reddit (and Lemmy, and really any social network with votes) grooms for if you prefer up votes to arguing with pedants and trolls. Eventually all your left with are boring overqualified comments or inflammatory comments when the mob rules and you are striving/solving for the most popular/engaging answer. It’s like conversational least squares analysis.

I wonder where the LLM trolls are? Maybe they are just so subtle, we haven’t noticed them. Maybe LLMs aren’t hallucinating answers, so much as they and trolling us. And here is where I qualify my answer in an attempt to quell the fools that might think anything I’ve said here implies that LLMs are anything close to sapient.

It’s because the precision is overstated in the conversion to imperial. If they’re going to convert units they could at least give the correct significant digits. It should have read (if one insists on not just leaving it in metric):

• Operational altitude: nearly 1 mile (1.5km)
• Weight: Under 1 ton (imperial or metric. Take your pick, it hardly matter.)

Why is the thumbnail preview throbbing?

You’ve just traded down votes for the report button.

I say they are two different use cases. There is often a very wide gulf between a comment that I feel does not contribute to good discussion and one that is so heinous that it needs to be removed. Most of your comments for instance: pretty naive and banal adding little good to the discussion overall, but I don’t feel that you’ve said anything hateful, obscene, or aggressive enough to warrant total removal. Usually I just downvote and move on, especially when I don’t want to hear that person’s bad take reply on my own point of view. I’ve made an exception here for you simply because you are trolling all over this thread, seemingly inviting downvotes. But, I’m going to block you and move on because you’ve killed any interest I have in this thread or the larger discussion. I still don’t think your comments rise to the level of reporting.

Reports and blocks aren’t a replacement for downvotes and if your instances doesn’t federate downvotes you shouldn’t use them that way.

Yes, I read your comment. It’s okay if you didn’t understand my comment. Clearly you don’t understand how filesystems and drive mounting works under Linux or the role of desktop environments in managing filesystems, mounting, and permissions. I don’t doubt that you’re genuinely struggling here, but there is no call for that kind of hostility. You might have some hope for figuring it out if you open your mind to the fact that you don’t fully understand what your problem is.

Steam expects the games to be in a particular place with a particular set of permissions and ownership relative to the user(s) and/or group(s) expected to use those game files. I’m telling that Linux doesn’t care where those files physically reside. You can tell Steam that those files are exactly where Steam expects them to be at the filesystem level, without messing with Steam configs, nautilus, gnome, or KDE. There are several ways to do this, but without understanding the requirements of your machine no one here will be able to give you effective advice.

I’ve seen some other comments from you about running something or other as root or just blanket chmods to 777 and I can tell you from experience that those are rarely effective solutions and can sometimes make things worse (just try something like that when configuring ssh configs, keys, and permissions).

What does any of this have to do with KDE, Gnome, or nautilus? If symlinks aren’t working, I’d dedicate an entire drive to Steam by mounting that drive (with matching permissions) right where Steam expects to find them. You can mount a filesystem/disc/ISO/drive/network share practically anywhere you want. If your network is fast enough, I bet you could even access your games over NFS, though I wouldn’t recommend it.

What’s that? Is it like IRC with a GUI? /s

Are you the same person (Kream) being snarky and rude to the developers in the bug report?

Those sun visors (and pretty much any soft case or sleeve type holder) absolutely devoured CDs. I had one too, everybody did, but I only let mine eat my burned CDs (mostly mixes I crafted with cross-fades and normalized levels using foobar2000 and a pirated copy of SoundForge) and carefully curated MP3-CDs. Scratched? Who cares, I burned multiple copies to pass around and trade with friends anyway.

migrants took over [an area] they took refuge on and made an apartheid for them.

That sounds familiar.

You seem to have almost completely missed the point of allegory and metaphor in TOS. “Time after humanity has dealt with” as you put it is just a literary device to soften the impact when the show was inevitably confronted or viewed by real racists. It was never a really view of the future. It was always a reflection of our present through the lens of futurism, a clever narrative framing device. That narrative framing device could not possibly remain unchangeable through multiple generations without loosing everything that made it work. Attempting to do so, i.e. keeping the storytelling framework completely unchanged and not adapting to new generations and new social dynamics, would have shown a lack of creativity and imagination.

The show was from a time when the U.S. thought they had beaten fascism (past tense, done, a part of the past) and would soon beat racism, classism, etc. From a time when imperialism was seen as a fundamentally good social force by most of the imperialist public. Today we (mostly) know better. We will probably never truly erase any of them. They are things we’ll have to remain vigilant for. A show today patronizing us with their perfected utopian society which remains VERY imperialist without shining a light on that contradiction just would not work. A show lacking any interpersonal drama also would not work and it’s not even something that was really true for TOS, just a weird kink Roddenberry got into when producing TNG. That’s the context of the way Star Trek has changed and it matters.

Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.

Properly designed speed tables should be able to be safety traversed at speed. Speed bumps force you to slow down to under the speed limit, sometimes far under, in order to traverse safely. That said, I’ve seen many many many more examples of things like: speed bumps with signs for speed tables, poorly designed humps that are neither speed bumps nor speed table, poorly designed speed bumps that are dangerous at practically any speed, or speed bumps without proper warning signs or paint to warn drivers, speed bumps in parking lots that just encourage people to drive wrecklessly around them. The absolute worst are those bolt-on DIY atrocities. Really, I’ve only ever seen properly designed speed tables in the richest of neighborhoods. All the other HOAs and towns seem to think they can get away with just hiring an asphalt guy or sending out a road maintenance crew to throw a speed bump and some paint down without any kind of survey, design, or traffic study.

Just a reminder that everyone is a criminal, but only the out group get the punishments. It’s practically impossible these days to do anything without running afoul of some law somewhere, especially when the new fascist regime is turning your old civil rights into new felonies every day. Fed the homeless? Criminal. Shelter an abused person? Trafficking. Give water to a protestor? To an immigrant? Aiding terrorists. Exercising your right to protest? Actual terrorist. Be a librarian? Obscenity. Report facts and statistics? Treason. Give medical care to the wrong person? Felony. Fail to pay debt? (often debt you had no choice about taking on, like debts to courts, medical, and school debts) Criminal. Insist on a separation between church and state? Hate speech. Resist a kidnapping by anonymous men in an anonymous van? Resisting arrest and deported, yes even the legal citizens. These are just the spicy examples. There are plenty of other more mundane crimes that everyone commits every day. The system is too corrupt and complicated to completely avoid breaking the law.