chaosCruiser

Having a compact energy storage. Coal was fine for steam engines, but gasoline, diesel and related fossil fuels were a game changer. Sure, they pollute, have destroyed our environment, cause various diseases and might even result in our extinction sooner rather than later, but hear me out.

Liquid fuels made it possible to build and operate compact and light engines that provide an amazing amount of power. Also, the fuel lasts a long time compared to coal and wood. This means that we can transport items and people across the globe, visit distant places within a single day, and commute to work in places that have barely any infrastructure.

All of this has transformed individual lives, large parts of the society and even the global economy. Imagine doing all that a hundred years before knowing how to build solar panels and batteries. That sort of global change was totally unimaginable in the 1600s.

But seriously though, that change didn’t come for free, and it’s about time we stop relying on this shortcut. It was literally quick and dirty, so we really need to switch to something more sustainable. If only solar panels had been invented before oil…

You know, you are allowed to cheat in this test. Just write those numbers on your arm with a permanent marker or whatever. Get a fake tattoo, if you want.

That account seems to be posting once every hour, which is more cautious than what I’ve seen with some other bots. Some other accounts just sleep for a few months and then suddenly wake up to spam 10 posts within two hours.

Can’t help you with the relationships, but I can help you with long posts and online stuff. Yes, I know, the irony is getting real thick here… LOL

Wall of text

When a complex idea manifests as a wall of text, dump the early draft to an LLM, and tell it to squeeze it into a tighter package. Tell it to delete the unnecessary ramblings and repetitions while keeping the core message intact. Before LLMs, I had to manually tidy up my posts and long comments, but nowadays LLMs can handle that sort of stuff for you.

BTW I totally agree that screens tend to be too interesting to humans, so here are a few ideas to help with that.

Be intentional

Make a habit of making your interactions with digital technology more intentional.

This philosophy applies to mobile apps too. Instead of starting an app by tapping an icon on the home screen, use the search feature on your phone to type the name of the app and launch it that way. Muscle memory tends to lead to starting apps even when you don’t really intend to, but using the search as a means to starting apps adds a layer of friction between you and wasting your time on brainrot. This method works best when your home screen doesn’t have any interesting apps to distract you. Put only boring apps in there or make it entirely empty if you want to go full detox. Having a really nice wallpaper helps with that.

Watch videos on your computer, not your phone or tablet. Uninstall the YT app from everything, and use it on a browser instead. This adds a little more friction, making it harder to mindlessly watch videos. When you do watch them, it’s deliberate instead of accidental.

Limit exposure

Limit your online exposure by using whitelists instead of blacklists. On YouTube, you can do this by ignoring main feed and sticking to your subscriptions. BTW, the PocketTube browser extension makes this even nicer, but is it useful to make the experience that nice though? If not, disable uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and PocketTube to speed up the detox process. You’ll end up hating YT so much that watching paint dry will become surprisingly appealing. Maybe that’s a bit hard-core… Better start with smaller steps and try full detox later.

Anyway, the same approach works for Lemmy too. Subscribe to the stuff you really care about, and ignore the rest. This way, you’ll be exposed to less Internet overall, and the part you do see is more likely to be worth your time. As a result, you’ll run out of top-tier material rather quickly, and the internet becomes boring to you. As soon as you get bored, take your eyes off the screen. Look out the window. Take a deep breath. Let your mind wander, and you might suddenly remember you still need to take out the trash (or whatever task you’ve been putting off).

Edit: I wasn’t happy with the initial version, so I let an LLM suggest minor tweaks. Only some of them were included.

I can imagine the body paint story ended badly… No need to look up the facts with an introduction like that.

Wasn’t there also a Russian RTG core that was so hot it would melt the snow around it? Some scavengers found it, and got immediately blasted with a lethal does of radiation—as you would expect.

With this post, OP was clearly aiming for a minor annoyance or a frustrating little prank, but that story just gave me an idea that goes a fair bit beyond that… More like diabolical malice, but here goes anyway.

Sending one of those plutonium cores back in time to the neanderthals would be a pretty good candidate too. It doesn’t really glow, which is a bummer, but it has other “magical” properties to compensate. The heat might still attract them to it, and the intense radiation would kill them within a day or two. If they somehow manage to touch the plutonium itself—a feat worthy of recognition—they could also experience its toxicity.

A bottle with a highly concentrated solution of polonium, radium, plutonium or anything spicy and ionizing.

Preferably coupled with something that glows nicely, like ZnS. Just pick a suitable fluorescent dye and make it blue or green for bonus points.

Just use whatever LLM you consider acceptable. However, don’t trust the initial summary or simplified version. Always ask follow-up questions and you may find that the first version had some flaws. You could ask the LLM something like: “Is Facebook saying that they may sell my data to anyone? Answer based on the provided EULA.” Tell it to quote the relevant part of the document to back up the claim. See if the original EULA actually has that part. If so, read it a few times and let it sink in. Using this method, you can jump quickly to the part you find most relevant to any concerns you may have about the contract.

Yeah, that’s just a shorter way to say: “open hostility, verbal assault, hate speech, various kinds of unethical or even criminal activity, and general online nastiness”.

Side note: The atmosphere on Lemmy is very pro-queer. Mastodon seems to be pretty queer too, but the number of users is a lot bigger, so you might see more diversity in answers. If you asked the same question on Reddit or X, you would absolutely find lots of unsavory comments.

Glad I could help! Have fun with all the alternatives to everything.

When I have questions like this, I tend to check this site first. You can also filter the results based on your criteria.

The way I see it, that’s just different wording for the same thing. More patient friendly, for sure.

Yeah. Roll the dice, hope for the best and all that. If power goes out, you could be looking at several days of troubleshooting, but it is unlikely to happen.

On the other hand, you could get that UPS, but that’s going to take time, and the server really needs those security patches today. Are you going to roll that dice instead and hope nobody tries to exploit a new vulnerability discovered this morning?

Either way, it’s pretty bad.

It’s highly context dependent.

In medicine, you face this question all the time. Will a surgery do more harm than good. Can I just leave that person suffering, or should I roll the dice with this surgery? It’s a proper dilemma to ponder. How about this medication that improves the patient’s quality of life in one area, but causes some side effects that are less horrifying than the underlying condition. Sounds like a win, but is it really?

In various technical contexts, you often find yourself comparing two bad options and pick the one that is “less bad”. Neither of them are evil, good, great or even acceptable. They’re both bad, and you have to pick one so that the machine can work for a while longer until you get the real spare parts and fix it properly. For example, you may end up running a water pump at lower speed for the time being. It wears down the bearing, moves less water, consumes too much energy etc, but it’s still better than shutting the pump down for two weeks.

You know those business books that combine flimsy pop psychology and self help literature with personal development and business goals? Yeah, those books with 300 pages and only one good idea per 100 pages if you’re lucky. Rest of it is just fabricated stories, ideas copied from other books and regurgitation of ideas from the previous chapters to fluff up the page count. Yes, that category!

Well guess what? GPT can generate precisely that level of quality without any effort. In fact, it seems to gravitate towards that style unless you specifically work hard to steer it to aim higher. It has never been easier to become a business book author! Zero editing required. Just prompt and publish.

It feels like this is the one area where GPT truly excels.

It’s just wild. Goes to show how strongly people feel about AI. maybe !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world could be a safe space for a question like this. Wasn’t expecting aklemmy to be so hostile though. I mean, I knew there are lots of people who hate AI with a burning passion, but this is a bit much.

That’s a common pattern. Countless tasks don’t get done because we don’t have enough employees, nor the money to hire more. The current employees take care of all the crucial tasks that are basic necessities for the company to survive. The “nice to have” task list is very long, so if AI can take make some crucial tasks easier or faster, that only means that those employees can spend some of their time doing some of the “nice to have” tasks. In cases like these, AI is not taking any jobs from anyone. If your company has no entries in the “nice to have” task list, it means management has zero vision and zero chance of making the company survive the next recession.

AI isn’t the solution to everything, despite what some tech companies might want you to believe. Many companies are pushing AI into products where it’s not particularly helpful, leading to frustration among users, and that’s the sentiment you’re picking up.

Specifically, the backlash is usually directed at LLMs and image-generating AIs. You don’t hear people complaining about useful AI applications, like background blurring in Teams meetings. This feature uses AI to determine which parts of the image to blur and which to keep sharp, and it’s a great example of AI being used correctly.

Signal processing is another area where AI excels. Cleaning audio signals with AI can yield amazing results, though I haven’t heard people complain about this use. In fact, many might not even realize that AI is being used to enhance their audio experience.

AI is just a tool, and like any tool, it needs to be used appropriately. You just need to know when and how to use AI—and when to opt for other methods.

BTW even this text went through some AI modifiations. The early draft was a bit messy, I used an LLM to clean it up. As usual, the LLM went too far in some aspects, so I fixed the remaining issues manually.

Yeah, “wan” would make 5000% more sense.

Subtle, rhythm, and Wednesday. The spelling is just absolutely wild.

It’s about as messy as old British coins and Roman measures.