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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Yeah it’s the lack of vote counting, more than the lack of downvotes, that I really appreciate. (Not to say I really miss downvotes or anything, I just really don’t care either way.)

    I’m also on Tildes and they also lack downvotes, but once you’ve been on there a week you get the ability to label things (noise, jokes, malice), which sort of functions as a more nuanced downvote button. But they share the lack of overall karma score, which keeps that same nice non-performative vibe.



  • Even more than that, you have the idea that ‘similar users to yourself buy a lot of alcohol, so you probably will too’. Of course alcoholics, whether attempting recovery or not, are likely to buy alcohol. So if you’re a recovering alcoholic, ‘similar users to yourself’ are gonna be buying more alcohol than usual, and so you’ll see ads for it. Totally heartless and just for-profit.



  • I’d be interested to know from someone more tech-savvy whether googling advice, and then clicking on the cached version, still counts as viewing reddit. Because I’d ideally still like to append reddit to my google searches without giving them ad views.

    AKA if someone monetises advice given for free, we should be able to freely access it.





  • One exercise that I know people who’ve had success with is to be focusing on simpler scales, which will all have slightly different fingerings for both hands. Just the regular primarily white-key scales.

    E.g. C major goes 12312345 for the right hand, and 54321321 for the left hand.

    Then once that’s doable at some speed, moving onto the tricker simple scales. And then going into contrary motion (where the right hand goes up and the left hand down). I’ve found that helps people get more used to their hands working independently. Especially because it provides more structure, and just one thing (different fingering) to focus on, rather than adding in differences in tempo etc.


  • Great comment. I do find the octopus example somewhat puzzling, though, but perhaps that’s just the way the example is set up. I, personally, have never encountered a bear, I’ve only read about them and seen videos. If someone had asked me for bear advice before I’d ever read about them/seen videos, then I wouldn’t know how to respond. I might be able to infer what to do from ‘attacked’ and ‘defend’, but I think that’s possible for an LLM as well. But I’m not sure there’s a salient difference offered by this example between the octopus, and me before I learnt about bears.

    Although there’s definitely elements of bullshitting there - I just asked GPT how to defend against a wayfarble with only deens on me, and some of the advice was good (e.g. general advice when being attacked like staying calm and creating distance), and then there was this response which implies some sort of inference:

    “6. Use your deens as a distraction: Since you mentioned having deens with you, consider using them as a distraction. Throw the deens away from your position to divert the wayfarble’s attention, giving you an opportunity to escape.”

    But then there was this obvious example of bullshittery:

    “5. Make noise: Wayfarbles are known to be sensitive to certain sounds. Clap your hands, shout, or use any available tools to create loud noises. This might startle or deter the wayfarble.”

    So I’m divided on the octopus example. It seems to me that there’s potential for that kind of inference and that point 5 was really the only bullshit point that stood out to me. Whether that’s something that can be got rid of, I don’t know.




  • Note that, depending on how much of a slog you’re finding it, the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations are amazing. They’re a couple, one is a native English speaker who understands Russian, the other is a native Russian speaker who understands English. Their translations are modern, easy to read (well, relatively, given that it’s Dostoevsky lol), and accurate. Can’t recommend them highly enough.