Marxist-Leninist (relatively novice) with an umbrella ☔

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 1st, 2024

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  • People who make fun of LLMs most often do get LLMs and try to point out how they tend to spew out factually incorrect information, which is a good thing since many many people out there do not, in fact, “get” LLMs (most are not even acquainted with the acronym, referring to the catch-all term “AI” instead) and there is no better way to make a precaution about the inaccuracy of output produced by LLMs –however realistic it might sound– than to point it out with examples with ridiculously wrong answers to simple questions.

    Edit: minor rewording to clarify


  • Here in Greece we have raging wildfires for yet another summer, one enormous (30km) fire raging so close to the capital the smoke has enveloped the sky in many parts of the city, and the lib government praises itself over its “quick reaction time”. Very few precautions have been taken since last year, so now fire fighters are risking their lives to contain the crisis, unfortunately without much success.

    Yesterday's photo of the smoke from the National Observatory from a webcam

    An eerie photograph of a big cloud of smoke over Athens. No, this isn't on Mars.



  • Thanks for sharing! This mostly mirrors my own short experience in PRC (a short visit to Shanghai). Can’t wait for a chance to visit China again!

    Nature, technology, buildings, culture, the museums, the people, just about everything is amazing.

    Some problems I encountered as a non-Chinese person, and tips to overcome them, for anyone interested in visiting China to be ready for:

    1. Connecting to the Internet, even to Wi-Fi, requires verification with a Chinese SIM card. I didn’t care to get one in time so I was mostly offline for much of the time.
    2. Many people, especially older people, don’t know foreign languages, esp. English. You can use the great voice recognition translator in the AliPay app, but you need Internet for that.
    3. Don’t forget to bring an adaptor for the power outlets!

    Also, for anyone who wants to buy theory books in PRC: unfortunately literature in foreign languages seems extremely scarce, since the vast majority of books is of course in Chinese. Only once did I find an English translation of Xi’s works.



  • I like the simplicity of openrc and runit, they are as stable as a rock and their functions are easy to grasp. Systemd, on the other hand, while I can understand some of the motivation behind it, it still seems like a bad idea and an even worse implementation. In my experience –and I do understand that this might not be the case for many users– it and its modules has been the cause for some really cryptic bugs that took me valuable time to resolve, and which would not have occurred if it was just a init/service management system. On the contrary, openrc just does one job, and does it well. Haven’t much experience with BSD but heard they are rock solid too.