No Stupid Questions

like, let's say i'm talking to my boss or a coworker through email!! and i type those emojis, like "^u^" or ":3" (those text emojis), would that be considered a bad idea?? i would use them because i would want people to know how i'm feeling through text and also because i think not using text emojis feels a bit empty, it maybe even makes the message sound rude or angry!! but i could not use emojis if it's not a good thing

my sister, her friends, and some of mine seem to have this inside joke about a man called dr. bollock/bollocks?

is there a real celebrity/character called this, or is this some sort of OC?

I'm assuming that if I lose two hours of sleep for five non-consecutive days that I won't have to sleep for ten hours straight in addition to the eight-ish I'd normally be asleep for. How well does the body keep track of this stuff? How much will it forgive?

Bear with me as I'm not thinking super clearly from the caffeine crash and messed-up sleep

There appears to be no active asexual community, so I’m turning to the active general ones. The only ones I see seem to be for news articles and I want one that’s for discussion, like how Transfem is for transfem people.

Its 2nd time I quit smoking for last year. Previous was around 10 months ago. Both times, few days after I quit I have started to see something funny in dreams and waking up laughing. I am pretty sure its related because I don't remember myself laughing in dreams for many many years. Is it related and is there explanation why it happening?

Explanation: male, 38, 130 pounds. Skinny, low muscle mass but have a beer keg belly.

My day is 7am wake up. Get kids to school. Work until 5. Get kids from school. Cook, shower and then I'm exhausted AF.

I'm semi fit? I'm a mechanic professionally and spring til summer I mountain bike regularly. So my calves are monsters.

But would like.. basic at home sit ups. Push ups etc like on a Saturday, would that help at all?

Hello,

I could use an online friend who wants to help me focus on what's most important in life.

I wasted most of my last 15 years. In last year or so, I lost +30kg, started hiking, physiotherapy, weightlifting, therapy, social dancing. My life changed twice. Second change was almost too good to be true.

My todos are related to

1. health (discipline, routine, self care),
2. relationships (facing my fear or what I avoid, choosing right person(s)) and
3. financial life (adding value to land I own, choosing a business to focus on).

I'm in my early 30s, straight M, and I am usually in EU. I can probably visit you if you are in EU.

I'm not from the US so all of this is baffling. In Europe and even South America there's tons of mechanisms to stop that from happening, and this kind of meddling would seriously result in arrests. However this is happening in the US with these people going completely unchecked. How is that even possible?!

Hello everyone,

There's a rhythm that I like but I'm not all too familiar with its name. Here are some examples:

• Doechii TinyDesk concert: https://youtu.be/-91vymvIH0c (22:56)
• DRUM GO DUM by KDA: https://youtu.be/VLE6Y1q13qE (2:53)
• Replay by Landon Conrath: https://youtu.be/m55UdZh4xXg (0:23)

It could be that they're not related at all and I just like hearing double time, but I think I've heard the term DnB before, but I've never had it properly defined. Thanks!

It seems like with the current progress in ML models, doing OCR should be an easy task. After all, recognizing handwritten numbers was one of the prime benchmarks for image recognition (MNIST was released in 1994).

Yet, when I try to OCR any of my handwritten notes all I ever get is a jumbled mess of nonsense. Am I missing something, is my handwriting really that atrocious or is it the models?

Here's a quick example, a random passage from a scientific article:

I tried EasyOCR, Tesseract, PPOCR and a few online tools. Only PPOCR was able to correctly identify the numbers and the words "J." and "Chem.". The rest is just a random mess of characters.

Edit: thank you all for shitting on my handwriting. That was not asked for, and also not helpful. That sample was intentionally "not nice" but is how I would write a note for myself. (You should see how my notes look like when I don't need to read them again, lol)

chatGPT can transcribe it perfectly, and also works on a slightly larger sample. Deepseek works ok-ish but made some mistakes, and gemini is apparently not available in my country atm. I guess the context awareness is what makes those models better in transcription, and also why I can read it back without problems.

I just though about Steve Huffman's comment editing shenanigan, and started wondering...

I mean...

Your devices might have backdoors, and even if not, there might be zero day exploits just waiting to be found, or perhaps the government already have them.

The US government could just...

Create a "Antifa PDF", filled with instructions on how to commit terrorism, and all of its contents which are written by the CIA, and the contents are made to be worded to be as violent as possible, then infect every registered Democrat (whose phone numbers are in the voter registration btw) with Pegasus, then inject that PDF into the files.

Then just call tell the FBI to go arrest them. They arrest the people and just "finds" those PDF document. Now they have "proof" of terrorist activities.

And they might even use Pegasus to just fabricate entire phone conversations.

Like, they can:

Create a fake conversation between Democrat A anf Democrat B and fabricate a convincing exchange about them "plotting a terrorist act", use the most violent words possible. Voila, more of those "evidence".

They could just arrest Democrats en masse in swing states.

I mean at this point, they probably could justify Martial Law and there would be zero objections from the military because this would all just "seems legit".

Like, you wanna criticize trump? Boom, random "terrorist looking" PDF document is in your files (done by the CIA).

Like...

Have anyone though about this?

Am I just being over paranoid? Perhaps I watch too much movies...

LLMs are built by generating a network of weights based on a large volume of training data. Some models have made those weights public/open, meaning you could, in principle, go in and manually edit the weights individually to change the outcomes. In practice, you would never do this because it would only ruin the output.

However, you could theoretically nudge a lot of values in just the right way to change the model to favor an ideology, have a different attitude, produce disinformation etc.

Right now, this is done practically in a brute force manner. The program will have certain instructions and parameters appended to the input in order to force a certain disposition, limit the scope, etc.

There are a lot of reasons to want to adjust the fundamentals of a model, but AFAIK such a technology doesn't exist yet (publicly). For example, this could be used for political gain, or for positive purposes like removing racism that has been well documented.

Is anyone working on such a thing?

Note: This community is "no stupid questions," but I am actually pretty stupid and I probably misunderstood some (all) of the fundamentals of how this works. Please respond to any part of my question.

I heard two people arguing about whether or not someone farted.

Why the names of (real world, not made-up) video games and other media are usually changed when used in fiction?

What do you think of the name "Ligyron", the original name of the hero Achilles?

I mean, it used to only Apple products. But now Windows is trying to force an online activation (I know theres a bypass CMD command, but still... they could remove it in the future).

Android phones, while do no require "Activation" are arealy trying to nudge you into connecting to the internet and making an account.

Some OEMs are trying to get you to make an account with them.

I could see a future where some OEMs are starting for force you to go online before the device can be used, or just outright done for every Android device if its Google wanting that to happen.

The most popular Drone manufacturer, DJI, requires online activation. Same with the second leading one, Autel. (Cheaper brands don't require them, but those drones suck).

If you want to install a security cameras, most of them will require an app 🤮 (they do know that web-browser interface, such as 192.168.1.1 for routers, exists, right? they could just set up a similar thing for those cameras... oh yea thats right, they want to harvest data, thats why the app). And some, especially those "Ring" types, require an account (I haven't used them, correct me if I'm wrong).

How long before everything is "CONNECT YOUR WIFI" or "DOWNLOAD THE APP".

Like what next? Do car makers just get rid of the fob all together and be like "DOWNLOAD APP" and use that to open doors and ignition? House door being "Use the App to unlock door"?

🤔

(Are be going towards a technological dystopia?)

🤔🤔🤔

(Oh btw, cars now have this GPS thing. Dealers getting excited like "DOWNLOAD OUR APP" to instantly track your car's location, and know the tire pressures and everything, and remote start. I'm like... all that is available through an app?... seems like a security/privacy nightmare. Whats stops a crazy ex from knowing where you are? I don't even drive btw, was with parents at the dealership to translate, parents did not seem worried about the privacy concerns... 🤷‍♂️)

A specific question, but maybe someone here knows! My shower has a drain. When I remove the cover and the "thing" inside of it, there's a stopper with an O-Ring.

We used to be able to pull the stopper out and clean inside the pipe (suggested by a plumber), but I now can't remove the stopper anymore. It appears to be quite stuck, and the angle is also terrible to get a better grip on it. I don't want to use pliers, because I'm afraid I might snap the thing that you hold, and then I'm really in trouble.

Can anyone give me suggestions what I can do to get the stopper out? Is there a technique I don't know? A device I could buy?

Thank you!

There is no rule of law, then what are we doing here? Why are we playing ball?

Ok, MAGA wants to burn it down. Good for MAGA, they still don't get to decide for everyone.

I won't be able to do this for long. Why aren't we in the streets? What's so great about your life that authoritarian rule is not a threat to you?

I realize this is my second post in two days about smells, but it is totally unrelated, I swear.

I am in the UK, but I have been trying to explain this smell to my wife for days...

The bathroom in the place we are renting short-term has a really weird smell in it. It's not a good smell, but it's not a smell that makes me want to run out and never go back in. I would describe it as 'sort of unpleasant.' Like absolutely tolerable, but I wouldn't want to hang around.

It doesn't smell biological. It doesn't smell like human or animal or mold. It doesn't smell like some sort of cleaning or construction chemical either.

The closest I have come to be able to describe it is like the stale breath of a smoker, except without the burnt things part. Like everything else in old cigarette smell but that. Except that's not really right either.

This place used to contain (I think) a printing press and then was turned into apartments, so maybe it's something left over from that? I don't know, but I wish I could explain it!

Hey so I googled the steps. I guess we gotta form committees, mobilize, raise public awareness, I got the syllabus. So like how do we get this thing going? Are there organisations already working on this or do we gotta grassroots this?