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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Well, the answer is “at least 1”. We don’t know the destination of the polygamist or whether there were other travellers with less remarkable entourages.

    St. Ives is a popular tourist destination, but stupidly remote and takes a long time to reach. It’s likely that there are several people travelling to St. Ives at any given moment.



  • I recommend wrapping the git cli commands using subprocess, using porcelain output modes etc, and parsing the output.

    We have had stability problems with GitPython (which wraps gitdb). On Linux gitdb does clever things with sliding mmap, which caused some crashes (in a multi threaded environment), and I found simple race conditions in the code for writing loose objects, which is about as simple an operation as can be, so I lost faith with it. I do use gitdb in one read-only single-threaded system; it’s undoubtedly fast.

    The biggest issues with git libraries are around the complexity of git configurations. Any independent reimplementation is probably going to support the most common 99% of features but that 1% always comes back to bite you! We use a lot of git features in service of a gigantic monorepo, like alternates and partial clones and config tricks.

    If we use command-line git we get 100% compatibility with all git configuration and ODB features, and it’s hard to ensure that with an independent git implementation (even libgit2).

    When you say “that solution doesn’t scale well” - we have made it scale. git itself scales well for operations it can perform natively, you just have to use the features effectively, often the high-level operations but sometimes lower-level commands like git cat-file --batch, git mktree --batch, etc. It’s not as fast as gitdb but fast enough, and I can have high confidence that I can write something once and it won’t break or cause problems later.


  • I doubt they are using Johansson’s voice. I expect they need much more studio-quality training data than they would have for her.

    The desire to create a “Her” might be real but explains why they chose a similar voice actress, made Sky the default, and continued to pursue Johansson to some day create the real thing.

    Suspending the Sky voice looks guilty but it might be a temporary action while the legal team considers their response. There might be a non-zero risk of being found liable if there were directions in the voice casting process to seek a result comparable to Scarlet Johansson. You’d want to collect and assess correspondence to see if that’s a possibility, which might take a while.



  • lordmauve@programming.devtoMemes@sopuli.xyzSolve a puzzle for me
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    6 months ago

    I don’t deny that this kind of thing is useful for understanding the capabilities and limitations of LLMs but I don’t agree that “the best match of a next phrase given his question, and not because it can actually consider the situation.” is an accurate description of an LLM’s capabilities.

    While they are dumb and unworldly they can consider the situation: they evaluate a learned model of concepts in the world to decide if the first word of the correct answer is more likely to be yes or no. They can solve unseen problems that require this kind of cognition.

    But they are only book-learned and so they are kind of stupid about common sense things like frying pans and ovens.



  • lordmauve@programming.devtoScience Memes@mander.xyzVoyager 1
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    6 months ago

    No, it doesn’t. Commands could be authenticated using a pre-shared secret. Even public cryptography existed prior to Voyager 1’s launch (by a year).

    Based on the state of computer security at that time I would guess that’s unlikely, but then again it was the Cold War.

    Anyway, just because it is possible it doesn’t mean anyone can do it.








  • I have always been very confused about whether the tip line on the receipt in the US works with my British cards given that I enter a PIN into a terminal that doesn’t show that tip amount.

    As of last year I’m pretty sure the tip is deducted from my card, but I don’t think that has always been the case. I understand it works based on PIN-authenticated pre-authorisation for a higher amount and they later take your tip+bill from that pre-authorisation.

    It doesn’t seem very secure but the US always seems behind on card security.

    When I first started travelling to the US for work restaurant staff were always extremely confused about why my card needed a PIN. They often tried again and again or said my card wouldn’t go through, then worked out that it needed a PIN. Lots of places then had no way to hand you the terminal to enter it, like they would have to push aside mountains of junk to get the terminal out, or invite me round to the other side of the bar because it’s literally screwed down.