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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • “Crust” makes it sound like superfluous detritus. It’s cornicione! Pizza is mostly bread, so if the bread is bad then it’s not worth eating.

    Neapolitan pizza has a high hydration dough cooked at very high temp, resulting in a delightfully light cornicione filled with large air pockets. The bread is delicious enough to enjoy on its own, which is why it only needs simple toppings like uncooked San Marzano tomato and a few shreds of mozarella. IMO Italian cuisine excels at allowing high quality produce speak for themselves through its simplicity and elegance. What they’re shitting out at Papa Johns and whatever is an abomination.




  • I used to use FL Studio, but hated using Windows. I got almost all features (including VSTs) to work in Ubuntu under Wine, but had a problem with WineASIO, which I seemed to require to use the USB sound card properly.

    Because of that, I since changed to a DAW called REAPER which is built natively for Linux and works flawlessly and is very nice. There is a program called Yabridge to help run Windows VSTs. I even got more complicated plugins with authentication like Addictive Drums 2 to work using Wine no problem.

    If you want a fully FOSS solution there is Ardour which is also great but a little less slick than Reaper IMO.










  • I think it does look pretty cool. I applaud automotive design that dares to be different. Everything nowadays is a giant snarling grill with angry anime eye headlights up front, then a bunch of superfluous sharp creases and fake air vents to add visual elements for the sake of it. Tesla took a boldly minimalist approach with this one.

    Before you crucify me, note that I don’t particularly like the vehicle overall - it doesn’t seem to be a design that translates well to mass production, practicality of maintenance, or pedestrian safety. It’s no Alfa 33 Stradale, but I think visual flare isn’t an area you can fault it much.

    Rivian has done a good job of embracing EV design features (e.g. lack of need for frontal air intakes) in a more conventional way.




  • I have used Ubuntu as the daily driver for the last 10 years, because support and tools are widespread and easy, and I don’t need any extra pain in my life. Drivers are mostly present and working upon a clean install, and in the one case where the touchpad wasn’t recognized, it was super easy to find an ubuntu forum post containing a 1-line command to fix it. But everybody says i should hate it and use Mint instead.

    I’m open to give it a go, but in general, will most of the tutorials and fixes you find for Ubuntu also work with Mint?


  • The advances in LLMs and Diffusion models over the past couple of years are remarkable technological achievements that should be celebrated. We shouldn’t be stifling scientific progress in the name of protecting intellectual property, we should be keen to develop the next generation of systems that mitigate hallucination and achieve new capabilities, such as is proposed in Yann Lecun’s Autonomous Machine Intelligence concept.

    I can sorta sympathise with those whose work is “stolen” for use as training data, but really whatever you put online in any form is fair game to be consumed by any kind of crawler or surveillance system, so if you don’t want that then don’t put your shit in the street. This “right” to be omitted from training datasets directly conflicts with our ability to progress a new frontier of science.

    The actual problem is that all this work is undertaken by a cartel of companies with a stranglehold on compute power and resources to crawl and clean all that data. As with all natural monopolies (transportation, utilities, etc.) it should be undertaken for the public good, in such as way that we can all benefit from the profits.

    And the millionth argument quibbling about whether LLMs are “truly intelligent” is a totally orthogonal philosophical tangent.