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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Y’know that physics principle called the lever principle, or principle of moment…?

    Thing is, if you grab a bottle by the neck and try to tilt it, you have to deal with the whole momentum / mass of the bottle, which is a significant amount of torque on your wrist, especially if you’re awkwardly trying to hold a cap that’s clearly not designed to be held this way at the same time.

    If you instead violently rip the cap out in an entirely justified fit of righteous rage and grab the bottle by it’s center of mass, as normal people do and have done since bottles have existed (well, except for the cap bit; that shit is rather new), you can effortlessly spin it to whatever angle you want, with perfect control all the way.

    Of course you can always hold it with two hands, which might be what you meant, but that’s a rather stupid waste of a free hand when most bottles are designed to be holdable with one single hand.


  • Luckily I’m not American, but I’ve never seen one of these contraptions that didn’t spin freely (and most of the ones I’ve seen spin freely and dangle all over the place, since the cap is tethered to the ring with a flexible strip of plastic).

    It’s a weight attached to a ring placed around a cylinder, after all. It’s bound to spin freely, it’s inherent to the design.


  • leftzero@lemmynsfw.comtoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldTethered Bottle Caps
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    3 days ago

    You can rotate the bottle before taking a sip to position it such that the cap doesn’t hit your face.

    And gravity will make the cap spin around, hit your face, get in the way of the liquid, and make it splash everywhere but your mouth.

    You can also pour liquid out of the bottle without having it run into the cap using the same rotation technique before pouring.

    Same issue. As soon as you tip the bottle the cap will spin (apparently whatever genius designed this useless annoyance didn’t realise that bottle necks are cylindrical), get in the way of the liquid, and make it spill everywhere but the container you’re trying to pour it into.

    They’re like a Pythagorean cup without the temperance lesson and well thought out design.

    The only way to use these without wasting 99% of the liquid and making a mess is to either awkwardly try to hold them up as you pour, or to violently rip them out before pouring in an entirely justified fit of righteous rage.

    What an utterly infuriating waste of plastic, time, and money.







  • The problem is not them being random.

    They are not random, that’s the point. They’re entirely deterministic and very precise, and they aren’t hiding anything; they will give you the most likely (not blacklisted) sequence of characters to follow your input according to their model. What they won’t give you is information, except by accident.

    If they were random (hidden or not) they’d be harmless, no one would trust them any more than one of those eight ball toys, or your average horoscope.

    The issue is that they’re very not random, so much that there’s no way to know if what they are saying bears any accidental semblance to the truth without fact checking… and that very soon they’ll have replaced any feasible way to fact check them, since all the supposed “facts” we’ll have access to will have been generated by LLMs train on LLM generated garbage.


  • If the models are random then we shouldn’t be trusting them to do anything, let alone serious applications.

    That’s not the reason we shouldn’t be using them for anything other than generating lorem ipsum style text or dialogue for non quest critical NPCs in games.

    The reason is that, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, LLMs don’t generate information, they generate information shaped sentences.

    Specifically, an LLM takes a sequence of characters (not a word or text; LLMs have no concept of words, or text, or anything else for that matter; they’re just an application of statistics on large volumes of sequences of characters; no meaning or intelligence involved, artificial or not)… as I was saying, an LLM takes a sequence of characters, pushes it through its model, and outputs the sequence of characters most likely to follow it in the texts its model has been trained on (or rather, the most likely after discarding the ones its creators have labelled as politically incorrect).

    That’s all they do, and they’ll excellent at it (or would be if it weren’t for the aforementioned filters), but that’ll never give you a cure for cancer unless there already was one in their training data.

    They take texts written by humans, shred them, and give you their badly put back together dessicated corpses, drained of any and all meaning or information, but looking very convincingly (until you fact check them) like actually meaningful or informative texts.

    That is what makes them dangerous. That and the fact that the bastards selling them are marketing them for the jobs they’re least capable of doing, that is, providing reliable information.

    (And that’s while they can still be trained on meaningful and informative texts written by humans — inasmuch as anything found on reddit, facebook, or xitter can be considered to be meaningful or informative —, but given that a higher and higher percentage of the text on the internet is being generated by LLMs soon enough it’ll be impossible to train new models on anything but 99% LLM generated garbage, at which point the whole bubble will implode, as anyone who’s wasted time, paper, and toner playing with a photocopier or anyone familiar with the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” will already have realised… which is probably why the LLM peddlers are ignoring robots.txt and copyright laws in a desperate effort to scrape whatever’s left of the bottom of the barrel.)







  • Someone learning Spanish as a second language will have to remember that it’s máquina and not máquino when speaking or writing it, though (and will then probably be quite confused if they ever meet some guy nicknamed El Máquina, which would somehow be a perfectly cromulent nickname in Spanish).

    Confusing genders when speaking or writing is one of the most common mistakes amongst people new to the language, because while everything else has some form of rule, this doesn’t (sure, when reading or listening you can most of the time use the word ending, and you’ll probably have an article, too, but when you are the one speaking or writing you have no option but to just know a word’s gender, or how it ends, which is the same thing).