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Tolkien wasn't always the most creative with names.
  • He also called them mûmakil in elvish. In my mind, when the Hobbits call them oliphaunts it is because a long time ago someone talked about elephants, and over the years the correct pronunciation was lost.

  • Is it truly unspeakable horrors or is it lazy writing that just lets the mind of the reader do the imagining of unspeakable horrors for you?
  • Yeah that's what I thought too. The horrors are described well, they just typically don't get described through their physical form. As you say, because the human mind cannot comprehend it. There is a lot more focus on impressions, comparisons, and effects, rather than on a real physical description. Personally I thought it was quite neat!

  • Rule
  • AI is a field of research in computer science, and LLM are definitely part of that field. In that sense, LLM are AI. On the other hand, you're right that there is definitely no real intelligence in an LLM.

  • Woman Stuck in Tesla For 40 Minutes With 115 Degrees Temperature During Vehicle Update
  • According to the article she did update the car before. She just used to have it done at night, and this is the first time she was in the car during an update.

    40 minutes is a hell of a long time for a software update though.

  • who's tried it? what does it taste like?
  • That's a good tip, but I assume he meant he drinks juice of burned beans, rather than burned juice of beans. After all, coffee beans do need to be roasted (burned) before you use them!

  • Brit passengers on four-hour flight to Turkey drink entire plane dry in 25 minutes
  • Honest question: do you avoid alcohol if you'll be a passenger in a car? To me, that would seem similar to the plane situation you're describing, but I'm sure you'll agree the majority of people wouldn't do that.

  • Deleted
    Why aren't more people creating new operating systems, considering that macOS, Windows, and Linux were developed by individuals with computer science and programming skills?
  • It would also be very hard to compete with products that are this mature. Linux, Windows, and macOS have been under development for a long time, with a lot of people. If you create a new OS, people will inevitably compare your new immature product with those mature products. If you had the same resources and time, then maybe your new OS would beat them, but you don't. So at launch you will have less optimizations, features, security audits, compatibility, etc., and few people would actually consider using your OS.

  • Me after I got fired
  • That is true, but from a human perspective it can still seem non-deterministic! The behaviour of the program as a whole will be deterministic, if all inputs are always the same, in the same order, and without multithreading. On the other hand, a specific function call that is executed multiple times with the same input may occasionally give a different result.

    Most programs also have input that changes between executions. Hence you may get the same input record, but at a different place in the execution. Thus you can get a different result for the same record as well.

  • Me after I got fired
  • That exact version will end up making "true" false any time it appears on a line number that is divisible by 10.

    During the compilation, "true" would be replaced by that statement and within the statement, "__LINE__" would be replaced by the line number of the current line. So at runtime, you end up witb the line number modulo 10 (%10). In C, something is true if its value is not 0. So for e.g., lines 4, 17, 116, 39, it ends up being true. For line numbers that can be divided by 10, the result is zero, and thus false.

    In reality the compiler would optimise that modulo operation away and pre-calculate the result during compilation.

    The original version constantly behaves differently at runtime, this version would always give the same result... Unless you change any line and recompile.

    The original version is also super likely to be actually true. This version would be false very often. You could reduce the likelihood by increasing the 10, but you can't make it too high or it will never be triggered.

    One downside compared to the original version is that the value of "true" can be 10 different things (anything between 0 and 9), so you would get a lot more weird behaviour since "1 == true" would not always be true.

    A slightly more consistent version would be

    ((__LINE__ % 10) > 0)
    
  • Decimal Time
  • Makes sense, you clearly thought about this! From a world-building perspective I do have a follow-up question: 86.4k seconds is our definition of a second, but it is essentially a convention and there is no reason for it. In a society that throws out the hours and minutes, why did they keep our second? It seems like it would have made sense for them to define the day as 100k of some new (slightly smaller) unit. That could have given them 10 "hours" of 100 "minutes" of 100 "seconds".

  • Decimal Time
  • Why split the day into 8?

    You definitely have a point with base-12 though. If base-10 wasn't so ingrained already, base-12 would be a very logical choice. You can even count to 12 easily on one hand, using your thumb to keep track of where you are and counting on the segments of each of your 4 other fingers.

  • Betavolt's miniature battery could spell the end of smartphone chargers
  • According to this article, an average smartphone uses 2W when in use. That number will largely be dependent on the screen and SOC, which can be turned off or be placed in a lower power state when the phone isn't actively being used. (The 5W - 20W figure is for charging a phone.)

    With 8 of these cells, you'll have 800μW, or 0.0008W, and you need 2W. You will need to add a few more batteries... About 19,992 more. If 8 of these batteries are about the same size as a regular smartphone battery, you will need the equivalent of 2,500 smartphone batteries to power just one phone.

    Too bad they don't say how much the new batteries weigh! It would have been fun to see...

    If we ballpark it and assume something the size of a regular smartphone battery is 50g (1.7 oz), then our stack of 20,000 of these new batteries could be about 125kg (275 lbs).

    I won't be replacing any of my batteries just yet.

  • Second most taught foreign language in European secondary schools
  • That's pretty much it, yes! I'm not 100% sure about the German part, because they are are part of Wallonia (which is the southern part) but do have their own language representation so I'm not actually sure which government manages their curriculum.

    The German-speaking part isn't shown on the map, probably because it is too small or the map maker got confused with our amazing organization.

    There's also the region of Brussels, which is separate of Flanders and Wallonia, and officially bilingual french / dutch. They sort of tried to represent it on the map, but I have no idea what they tried to do there.

    It is a clusterfuck, really.

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    yggdar @lemmy.world
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