lightstream

lightstream, 8 months ago

Yes it totally does. My teachers got a load of disembodied teeth when I was about 6, and we tied them to string and left them suspended in various drinks. The ones in coca cola had completely disappeared by the end of the experiment.

lightstream, 9 months ago

privacy on that site was horrible, and I stoped de-selecting vendors who want permission to track me after two minutes.

Just open the page in a private window at that point, and click the “yeah sure track everything bro” button.

lightstream, 10 months ago

It’s not the image, it’s a normal image. The server does the hard work when you make the request, and then it just builds the image accordingly.

lightstream, 10 months ago

Tramways and Light Rails are much more silent

From inside, maybe? Berlin, where I live, has lots of trams all over the city. I admit I rarely use them as I much prefer my bicycle, but they are seriously noisy. During the day the noise is somewhat lost in the general cacophony of city life, but in the evenings you can hear them rattling and crashing along from streets away. And if you live on a road with a tramline, you just have to accept this horrible metal-on-metal screeching and rattling at almost all hours.

lightstream, 10 months ago

How would I even know if this is correct?

You’re gonna have to go to a lot of parties

lightstream, 10 months ago

Those poor Iranians

I suggest you try to analyse the data. Iranians have a very high energy usage per capita - at least as high as any EU country and probably higher. The country is a major oil and gas producer, and the population is accustomed to cheap petrol prices due to heavy subsidisation by the government. You won’t find many Iranians opting to use public transport for the good of the environment. Like Americans, they would rather sit in their own air-conditioned vehicles in interminable traffic jams.

lightstream, 10 months ago

I cannot wait until architecture-agnostic ML libraries are dominant and I can kiss CUDA goodbye for good

I really hope this happens. After being on Nvidia for over a decade (960 for 5 years and similar midrange cards before that), I finally went AMD at the end of last year. Then of course AI burst onto the scene this year, and I’ve not yet managed to get stable diffusion running to the point it’s made me wonder if I might have made a bad choice.

lightstream, 11 months ago

Capitalism requires coercion to function. The ‘incentive’ is goddamn starvation and being exposed to the raw elements with no shelter.

You’re thinking of nature. It’s nature that does that.

And it’s what we humans are fighting against, the natural order of things. Nature doesn’t care about the weak, it doesn’t care about justice. We’re in a battle to design and build systems that we can install on top of nature and which do provide those things. There is still much to be done, but over the course of human history we have accomplished a lot and we are in a better place today than we have ever been.

The term capitalism has become a meme, conveying little meaning, just a word we can invoke to rally others in a brief cathartic moment of finger pointing and doom-saying. If it’s what you want to do then fine, go ahead and when you finish, wash your hands and clear your mind, then come back and help think of positive steps forward we can make as a society.

lightstream, 11 months ago

It’s worth mentioning that the word bilingual has different meanings in US English and in British English.

For native British speakers, someone who is bilingual is someone who speaks two languages at a native level, while the accepted US meaning is someone who can speak two languages, especially with equal or nearly equal fluency.

With the British definition, it’s pretty clear whether someone is bilingual or not. Most people are not, and it’s almost impossible for an adult to become bilingual later in life. Generally it only happens when someone has two parents each with a different mother tongue.

The US meaning is much wider than the British one, and I guess it’s the meaning you’re intending with your question. It basically comes down to the definition of fluent. It’s completely possible to be fluent in a language while still having a foreign accent and still making the occasional grammar mistake. My personal definition of fluency is when you are able to talk to native speakers on pretty much any subject without serious misunderstandings. You don’t need to know every word you may encounter, as you can simply ask the other person what a word means just as native speakers do all the time.

lightstream, 11 months ago

Well there’s a huge variety of different accents in England, even more if you include the whole UK. British people themselves can struggle understanding other Brits from just 100 or 200 miles down the road. I say that as a Brit - I’ve worked in call centres where there would frequently be Liverpudlians, Geordies, Cornish etc calling back in a rage after being hung up on multiple times by colleagues who couldn’t understand them.