BoxOfRain

> Calling it "training LLM" is a bit misleading. This is a small GPT-2-sized model (~160M params), while the "L" in "LLM" stands for large... I've always felt the…

The exclusion of women from clinic trials is one of those things that makes me really angry, there's many women in my life who've been adversely affected by various medications and essential…

I think the problem is we'd then have to include a high number of other objects further than Pluto and Eris, so it makes more sense to change the definition in a way 'planet' is a bit…

The water infrastructure isn't great in the UK (there's a lot of first-mover curses in UK infrastructure generally), specifically there's quite a lot of shared sewage and storm drains. …

No they can browse them, Ofcom literally compiled the sites it doesn't want everyone to browse in an easily-accessible list.

I genuinely think the public sector being a bit hopeless is a major check on tyranny in the UK. Ofcom (the communications regulator charged with imposing the censorship laws) literally maintains a pub…

You probably can take an ox to Oxford, there's horses there so I don't see why oxen would be ruled out. What you probably can't do is get an ox through the traffic on Abingdon Road if y…

As an Oxford native I'd advise that anyone attempting to do this checks Thames Water's sewage dumping schedule beforehand!

This would be an excellent way to make sure the standup stays terse, we could even put lead weights in the handsets to further increase this virtue.

Honestly I've been pleasantly surprised with CachyOS, admittedly I've been using Linux for over a decade but it was my first foray into Arch-land and I'm genuinely impressed with it. Th…

I like Orwell a lot, especially as a political writer. I do think Newspeak would have got a rethink if Orwell had lived today though; as irritating as algospeak words like 'unalived', '…

Interesting, definitely agree it likely shares an underlying cause with tinnitus. It's also linked to migraine and was sometimes conflated with unusual forms of migraine in the past, although it&…

Ah that's interesting, mine is omnipresent and occasionally bad enough I have to take days off work as I can't read my own code; it's like there's a baseline of it that occasionall…

Isn't this idea demonstrably false due to the existence of various sensory disorders too? I have a disorder characterised by the brain failing to filter own its own sensory noise, my vision is fu…

Yeah the industrialised world wasn't maligned by Blake as 'dark Satanic mills' or as Mordor by Tolkien because they found it an artistically fulfilling place.

If you cough up for private healthcare maybe, when it comes to the NHS if it's not going to kill you immediately it's more or less 'take a spot in the waiting list and God will sort it …

> Real engineers can face personal liability and even jail time for negligence. To be fair, software engineers can face similar liabilities in highly-regulated fields. When you're dealing with…

> everything slows down during storms One problem I've found in my current house is that the connection becomes flakier in heavy rain, presumably due to poor connections between the cabinet an…

Yeah British trains are often absolutely awful for this, I started putting music on my phone locally to deal with the abysmal coverage.

I think that's a little simplistic, I have liberal (in the British English sense) views specifically because I think humanity is fundamentally flawed. If we are all flawed particularly when it …

'Oxford Time' is still used for a few things in Oxford, the clock at Christ Church reads five minutes slow with respect to GMT for example.

Interestingly part of the UK approach then was to make street lighting more efficient, around that time a lot of low-pressure sodium lamps were installed. They used so little energy they were only bea…

There's quite a few extensive underground structures scattered around the UK too that were built to defend against Soviet bombers, some of them started life as part of the original Chain Home sys…

Is it even worth it to pirate on FM these days? People don't really scan the band looking for new stations, I know the aim is often to provide for an underserved audience but anyone can set up a …

I obviously can't prove they're conscious in a rigorous way, but it's a reasonable assumption to make that other humans are conscious. "I think therefore I am" and since there…

Is there a plausible situation where a humanity-killing superintelligence isn't vulnerable to nuclear weapons? If a genuine AGI-driven human extinction scenario arises, what's to stop the wo…

Say we do have a 1:1 representation of the human brain in software. How could we know if we're talking to a conscious simulation of a human being, versus some kind of philosophical zombie which a…

I don't like hereditary privilege at all, but the enormous constitutional headache removing the monarchy would cause might well outweight the practical benefits of doing away with it.

I've found swearing to be a pretty decent heuristic for whether I'm talking to an actual person or not. Either it'll remain a decent heuristic or we'll get some Malcolm Tucker-esqu…

KDE is my daily driver at home and work now, it really is fantastic! One minor thing I love is how the old-school wobbly windows, desktop cube etc are still something you can toggle easily.