merc

joined 2 years ago
[–] merc 1 points 1 day ago

I wonder what it will do to kids these days that they don't use their imaginations like this. Kids today will be glued to electronic devices.

[–] merc 2 points 1 day ago

Yep, dirt bike for me too. Maybe it's a lack of really creative imagination, but someone doing parkour couldn't have kept up. A dirt bike makes sense because it could do highway speeds.

[–] merc 1 points 1 day ago

Especially because the data it has been trained on is probably not typical for a CFO in the real world. In the real world it's a lot of boring day-to-day stuff, that isn't worth writing up. The stuff worth writing up is exciting thrillers where a CFO steals money, or news reports where a CFO embezzles.

Imagine prompting it with "It was a dark and stormy night" and expecting it to complete that with "so David got out his umbrella, went home, ate dinner in front of the TV then went to bed." It's probably what most "David"s would actually do, but it's not what the training data is going to associate with dark and stormy nights.

[–] merc 11 points 2 days ago

Generally not the entire lower face, the way men do.

[–] merc 27 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Women shave all the time, they just don't tend to shave their faces.

[–] merc 1 points 3 days ago

I think "I don't know" might sometimes be found in the training data. But, I'm sure they optimize the meta-prompts so that it never shows up in a response to people. While it might be the "honest" answer a lot of the time, the makers of these LLMs seem to believe that people would prefer confident bullshit that's wrong over "I don't know".

[–] merc 1 points 3 days ago

Yeah, and it sometimes makes sense just from an acting PoV, so you can forgive it. It's hard to fit all the characters and cameras in a scene if someone lives in a typical cramped apartment. So, like in the Friends TV show, none of them has jobs that should indicate they're rich. But, the sets they use for the apartments suggest they have huge apartments. In that show, Joey's apartment isn't beautifully furnished, it looks fairly cheap. But, it's really spacious for NYC. But, it seems like it's all about giving the director the freedom to frame shots to get everybody involved, and to allow characters to move around.

OTOH, A recent movie, "Black Bag" was terrible for this. I hated the movie because it was just impossible to believe. This guy, who's supposed to be a British intelligence officer (i.e. living on government wages). His wife is also an intelligence officer. Yet, somehow, they live in this condo that looks like it would be about £5m to buy, or about £5000/month. Since the plot revolves around whether one of them is a traitor and is selling state secrets, it seems pretty obvious it's this guy or his wife because no civil servant is living in a place like that on just a government salary.

[–] merc 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I remember that from S1, but it doesn't show up in S2, does it? Maybe they took it down?

[–] merc 2 points 3 days ago

If you're a Baron, maybe.

[–] merc 11 points 3 days ago (11 children)

It's not just Home Alone for me. Almost every show I watch, I look at the places where the characters live with immense envy.

Lord of the Rings: Man, I'd love to live in that hobbit house. That looks incredibly cozy.

Daredevil: That is such a nice loft, and it has such great light. It's unfair that a guy who's blind doesn't truly appreciate his great apartment because he can't see.

Futurama: Fry's a delivery boy and he lives in a robot's closet, and it's still better than where I live.

Only Murders in the Building: NYC and these guys have those kinds of amazing places? (To be fair, this is a major plot element of the 4th season)

[–] merc 4 points 3 days ago

If you were white, and it was immediately after WWII when every other major country in the world had been pulverized in WWII while the US was essentially untouched.

Even if it were possible to bring back the strong unions from the end of the great depression, and to bring back the laws from the New Deal which were in force at the end of WWII. And even if you did those things while simultaneously taking away the rights from black people so that they had the pre-civil-rights lifestyle. Even then, you couldn't get to this level of wealth for a truck driver without also having a world war that smashed every other country and left the US whole.

[–] merc 79 points 3 days ago (8 children)

What's interesting is that the ones who don't have peach fuzz are men who shave. If a perfectly smooth face is what you find attractive, you want a man's face.

 

1:20 AM EST

210/266 polls reporting

| Name | Party | Votes | % | |


|


|


|


| | Bruce Fanjoy | Liberal | 27,220 | 50.4 | | Pierre Poilievre | Conservative | 24,927 | 46.1|

 

Stocks have almost returned to where they were 5 days ago after his latest change to the tariffs.

 

I need some new earbuds, and live in a place with severe winters. I want to be able to access the controls using gloves or mittens if possible.

The online reviews I've seen all assume that you can just touch the earbuds with bare hands, but when it's well below freezing, that sometimes isn't possible. If I have to take off a mitt to use my earbuds my hand might not warm up until I can get back indoors again. Earbuds that work with touchscreen-capable gloves aren't good enough either. I've never seen touchscreen-capable gloves that keep your hands warm at -40C.

Any suggestions?

3
New shirt (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 month ago by merc to c/[email protected]
 
181
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by merc to c/[email protected]
 

First time home buyers will not be charged GST (5%) when buying a home, as long as the place they're buying costs less than $1M. This means that people buying a home for the first time will save up to $50k on their purchase.

Edit: Note, GST is mostly only charged when buying newly built homes, so this won't have any effect for people buying used homes.

 

Currently the PM doesn't have a seat in the house. If he visited the house, he'd have to go to the visitor's gallery.

It's an interesting situation. The PM is the leader of the federal liberal party, but he's not a member of parliament. But, does he need to be? Is the PM sitting in the house of commons just a tradition that nobody has challenged yet? Could the PM delegate things inside the house of commons to their deputy-PM and then do things like give speeches, attend diplomatic functions, etc.?

The US has a very different system where the president isn't part of the legislative branch at all. But, typically presidents don't twiddle their thumbs waiting for something to do. Being the head of state keeps most presidents busy. It makes me wonder if technically Carney could choose not to run for office, and just spend his time doing head-of-state things rather than legislative things.

40
submitted 3 months ago by merc to c/games
 

"Sports Interactive regret to inform that, following extensive internal discussion and careful consideration with SEGA, we have made the difficult decision to cancel Football Manager 25 and shift our focus to the next release."

 

This sounds like a disaster.

For those who don't know, Football Manager has a yearly release schedule, and the highlight of the release is that it has a database of nearly every professional player in the world, the club they play for, and an attempt to "scout" them, giving all their various attributes from passing ability, to height and weight, to their determination.

By releasing in March 2025, they're going to release the game essentially at the end of the 2024/2025 season right before players start moving to new clubs and the database becomes obsolete. Typically, around March is when they're giving deep discounts on the yearly release because they know there won't be much remaining interest in playing a game that's almost out of date.

They really shot themselves in the foot. They could have released a Football Manager 25 that was 100% FM 24 but with an updated database, they've done it before. They could have called "Football Manager 25" something like "Football Manager Next Gen" and not tied themselves to a certain season. And, if they do manage to get Football Manager 25 out in March, are they really going to be able to do FM 26 half a year later? Will anybody buy FM 25 if they know there's a FM 26 coming out so soon?

 

It's amazing to me that they can even measure a 0.01 XG shot. This comes from James Benge's twitter account.

The XG graph is also interesting. Tottenham has a continuous stream of very low quality shots, resulting in the graph going up in tiny increments. Arsenal has a series of decent chances near minute 17, and then the one high-quality shot resulting in Gabriel's goal.

Arsenal vs. Tottenham XG graph

https://understat.com/match/26640

I'm sure part of it is Arsenal defending in a low block after scoring. But, it also smacks of desperation on Tottenham's part. If you're taking a shot that has a 1% chance of going in, rather than passing and waiting for a better opportunity, you don't believe that you're going to get a better opportunity.

 

Maybe the "great" America that Donald wants to take us back to is the 1860s?

 

Note: National Bank of Canada is a commercial bank, not the Bank of Canada which is Canada's national bank. Um. Which is Canada's central bank.

The graphs in the presentation are the key takeaway for me. But, some key words:

"Canada is caught in a population trap that has historically been the preserve of emerging economies. We currently lack the infrastructure and capital stock in this country to adequately absorb current population growth and improve our standard of living."

...

"To put things in perspective, Canada's population growth in 2023 was 3.2%, five times higher than the OECD average."

...

"But to meet current demand and reduce shelter cost inflation, Canada would need to double its housing construction capacity to approximately 700,000 starts per year, an unattainable goal."

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