tal

joined 2 years ago
[–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

But typing stuff like: /*********************************************************/ is pretty common for me and would be annoying without auto-repeat of the respective character…

If you're coding, your code editor may have some way to input that.

Some people who frequently input something like that use a snippet system.

In emacs, hitting most keys (like "*") runs self-insert-command. That takes a numeric parameter, so one can just do something like / M-5-6 * / (slash, hold Alt, type 56, hit asterisk, slash) to get a slash followed by 56 asterisks followed by a slash.

I'm not really a serious vim person, but I'm sure that vim has similar functionality.

searches

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5054128/repeating-characters-in-vim-insert-mode

Looks like, in insert mode, / Control-o 56 a * Esc a /. Probably not using correct vim terminology for the keystrokes, but you get my drift.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 10 points 7 hours ago

On US English keyboards, there isn't a universal, standard way to do it at the keyboard level.

I use Linux, and bind my Menu key on my keyboard to Compose. With Compose, I can tap "Compose-backtick-e" and get "è".

Emacs has its own input methods, as do other environments.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 9 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

While I agree that AI is here to stay, he did say the bubble popping. I could believe that there could be a reduced level of investment for a while. In the past, we did have periods where we thought that various AI tasks would be easier to solve than they were, and investment fell back as we discovered that there were more hard problems to solve before we could accomplish a particular feat. Didn't go away, but did see a decrease in work on it for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

In the history of artificial intelligence (AI), an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in AI research.[1] The field has experienced several hype cycles, followed by disappointment and criticism, followed by funding cuts, followed by renewed interest years or even decades later.

The term first appeared in 1984 as the topic of a public debate at the annual meeting of AAAI (then called the "American Association of Artificial Intelligence").[2] Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky—two leading AI researchers who experienced the "winter" of the 1970s—warned the business community that enthusiasm for AI had spiraled out of control in the 1980s and that disappointment would certainly follow. They described a chain reaction, similar to a "nuclear winter", that would begin with pessimism in the AI community, followed by pessimism in the press, followed by a severe cutback in funding, followed by the end of serious research.[2] Three years later the billion-dollar AI industry began to collapse.

There were two major "winters" approximately 1974–1980 and 1987–2000,[3] and several smaller episodes, including the following:

  • 1966: failure of machine translation

  • 1969: criticism of perceptrons (early, single-layer artificial neural networks)

  • 1971–75: DARPA's frustration with the Speech Understanding Research program at Carnegie Mellon University

  • 1973: large decrease in AI research in the United Kingdom in response to the Lighthill report

  • 1973–74: DARPA's cutbacks to academic AI research in general

  • 1987: collapse of the LISP machine market

  • 1988: cancellation of new spending on AI by the Strategic Computing Initiative

  • 1990s: many expert systems were abandoned

  • 1990s: end of the Fifth Generation computer project's original goals

Enthusiasm and optimism about AI has generally increased since its low point in the early 1990s. Beginning about 2012, interest in artificial intelligence (and especially the sub-field of machine learning) from the research and corporate communities led to a dramatic increase in funding and investment, leading to the current (as of 2026) AI boom.

Obviously, we did achieve a number of those


like, we have pretty solid machine translation of human language today. I remember, pre-Brexit, a senior EU translator for the UK talking about EU translation work. One thing he mentioned was that he did all of his first drafts via Google Translate and then just did manual cleanup by hand


and I'd call that a fairly prestigious translation position. But it took more time and research than we initially expected.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 11 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym

In English, the word is used in two ways. In the narrow sense, an acronym is a sequence of letters (representing the initial letters of words in a phrase) when pronounced together as a single word, like NASA, NATO, or laser. In the broad sense, the term includes this kind of sequence when pronounced letter by letter (such as GDP or USA). Sources that differentiate the two often call the former acronyms and the latter initialisms[1][2][3] or alphabetisms. However, acronym is popularly used to refer to either concept,[4] and both senses of the term are attributed as far back as the 1940s.[5]

[–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 8 hours ago

Nope. But I did discover that is based in Serbia, and I felt that I couldn't recommend it based on that (e.g. if there were privacy issues, I'm not sold that the legal regimen would be strong enough for much to happen to the company).

[–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 8 hours ago

Some options in approximate order of increasing effort:

  • Drink iced beverages.

  • Have fan blowing at you.

  • Cooling vest, possibly with with ice packs.

  • If low humidity (probably not in the UK), evaporative cooler.

  • Air conditioner.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

It sounds like he doesn't want update notifications. I'm sure that that's possible, but I've no idea what sort of update notification he's upset about. Could be from some kind of package manager, Firefox itself, whatever. He might also have a nightly build version installed or something, when he could benefit from extended support version.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 10 points 16 hours ago (6 children)

I'm sure that whatever platform you're on lets you not update if you want.

I wouldn't advise that from a security standpoint, but if you're set on it...

[–] tal@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago

One gallon is about 15.642197454545 pægl.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 38 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

searches

Hmm. Apparently in said system, the wife of an earl is a countess.

searches more

Ah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl

The Norman-derived equivalent count (from Latin comes) was not introduced following the Norman Conquest of England though countess was and is used for the female title. Geoffrey Hughes writes, "It is a likely speculation that the Norman French title 'Count' was abandoned in England in favour of the Germanic 'Earl' [...] precisely because of the uncomfortable phonetic proximity to cunt".[7]

I imagine that Count Binface simply doesn't fear such proximity.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Not something that I've looked into, but if there are multiple futures markets with substantially diverging odds, I'd imagine that one could arbitrage that by placing opposing bets on them and provide a guaranteed win.

That being said, not familiar with how the payouts are computed and updated on them or what the market operator takes.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 20 points 1 day ago (8 children)

Lord Buckethead (briefly) went on Last Week Tonight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyVz5vgqBhE&t=981

I feel like Count Binface should stop trying to dodge the international press and do so himself.

 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49199407

The layoffs at one of your studios most able to ship games is a bonkers, stupid decision; but pivoting Obsidian to making a new Fallout game is a good business decision if you don't care about what your creatives feel led to create.

 

I got inspired and decided to try out a few fountain pen inks the other day. I picked up Organics Studio's Nitrogen.

This is a popular saturated blue ink that has a lot of red sheen to it, looks almost like metallic foil when written on sufficiently ink-resistant paper.

I used it with a broad-nib TWSBI Eco. And in that, that, I agree. It does show a lot of sheen.

One really needs video to see the effect, since one needs to tilt it relative to a light source. A static image doesn't really convey the effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEsHNIn1c7w&t=1460s

But there were some big caveats.

It dries out very quickly on one's nib

My big surprise was how extremely quickly the ink dried on my nib, producing a delay until the ink is flowing and a hard start after just a short time out in the air without ink flowing. People do talk about this online, now that I've gone looking for it, but I wasn't aware of it when getting the ink, and I doubt I'd have gotten it if I'd known about this going into it. One can't just stop and think for very long without needing to start writing to keep the ink flowing. For me, this is frustrating, and really kills the appeal of the ink for me. None of my other inks do this.

One really needs ink-resistant paper to see sheen

Another thing that I hadn't anticipated


not having played around with inks with a lot of sheen prior to this


is that one really needs ink-resistant paper to see the sheen. On ordinary copy paper, it just looks like a blue ink. I knew that there would be a difference, but not that there would be no sheen. On an inexpensive composition notebook I've had sitting around for probably thirty years in my desk, it looks all right, if not quite as shiny as on Iroful paper.

This probably isn't a huge surprise to people who have used inks with sheen, and it's not going to be specific to this particular sheening ink. But I'd expected some sheen to still be visible on more absorbent paper, and it isn't.

It tends to smear and get on things

In the above video, Brian Goulet does mention this and how the ink is infamous for doing this


which I find puzzling, given how quickly it seems to dry out on the nib. So I was expecting to see this. But I still managed to get smearing and blue blotches on my hands multiple times, despite being careful. I haven't seen anything like this with the other inks I've used (though I don't have a huge collection, admittedly).

Other

It has a reputation for staining clear pens. I haven't tried cleaning it out after exhausting my current fill, so no first-hand experience with this, but I thought that I'd also mention this, in case someone runs across this post when considering the ink.

Summary

The ink is pretty, if one wants something with a lot of sheen. I don't dispute that. But it really is a pain in the neck to use.

I don't know of a good "Nitrogen alternative" that performs better, but I have to say that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they are aware of what they are getting into.

 

Not sure what's going on, but for at least today and yesterday, I've seen a fairly high rate of server errors when attempting to load a number of different sorts of pages. I've seen this happen with attempting to view a post (including on communities that are not locally hosted), and attempting to view user pages.

As far as I can tell, if one keeps reloading, one eventually gets through, if you're hitting this. No idea as to cause


all I see is:

Error!

There was an error on the server. Try refreshing your browser. If that doesn't work, come back at a later time. If the problem persists, you can seek help in the Lemmy support community or Lemmy Matrix room.

Sorry I can't provide any additional information, but I can't think of much other information.

An example page:

https://lemmy.today/post/55800972

This successfully showed up on, I believe, my sixth reload. The seventh reload was an error again (so it's not a "it works once and then keeps working" problem for a given page). I've seen it on various networks on my end, so I'm pretty sure that I'm not a factor.

https://lestat.org/ doesn't show errors, so whatever it is, it's not tripping their error detector.

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