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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • A non-conventional choice would be a pair of Beoplay (Bang&Olufsen) Portal, IF you can get a good deal. My partner has them and they’re awesome. I think they’re recently discontinued (nothing wrong with them really) which means that even though their retail price is much higher, they can often be found refurbished / for sale within that bracket. The only word of advice is that there is a separate PlayStation and an Xbox+PC version, so you’d need to make sure to get the right one. No idea what the difference is but internet comments made it sound like they wouldn’t be properly compatible across systems.


  • This can be correct, if they’re talking about training smaller models.

    Imagine this case. You are an automotive manufacturer that uses ML to detect pedestrians, vehicles, etc with cameras. Like what Tesla does, for example. This needs to be done with a small, relatively low power footprint model that can run in a car, not a datacentre. To improve its performance you need to finetune it with labelled data of traffic situations with pedestrians, vehicles, etc. That labeling would be done manually…

    … except when we get to a point where the latest Gemini/LLAMA/GPT/Whatever, which is so beefy that could never be run in that low power application… is also beefy enough to accurately classify and label the things that the smaller model needs to get trained.

    It’s like an older sibling teaching a small kid how to do sums, not an actual maths teacher but does the job and a lot cheaper or semi-free.











  • Jrockwar@feddit.uktoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldSelf-care
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    1 month ago

    I can keep habits until I travel. 8 months of gym, then go on holiday for a long weekend, and forget that the gym ever existed.

    It seems meds have been preventing this and the gym habit has persisted through a couple of trips. But I’m fairly new to meds, so we’ll see how long I can keep this up…




  • My mom (78) got a new kindle a couple years ago, after the previous one lasting over 10 years.

    She’s not been using it now because “it’s not okay” anymore. After a lot of poking and prodding remotely (we live in different countries) to get to understand what the issue was for the kindle to “not be okay”, I managed to get her to tell me that “the screen is blank”. I said I’d check it soon after when I went to her place.

    When I travelled there, not long after, I checked the kindle, turned on the screen, and it was blank. Because she’d finished a book and the last page was blank. All worked fine.

    I have told her, but she refuses to use the kindle because “it’s not okay”.

    In a separate conversation I offered to give my sister my really old kindle as hers is actually broken. My mom heard that and said she wanted it because hers is… Not okay.

    The insistence and willful ignoring of what I said is the most infuriating part.



  • Also because, as a person who has studied multiple languages, German is hard and English is Easy with capital E.

    No genders for nouns (German has three), no declinations, no conjugations other than “add an s for third person singular”, somewhat permissive grammar…

    It has its quirks, and pronunciation is the biggest one, but nowhere near German (or Russian!) declinations, Japanese kanjis, etc.

    Out of the wannabe-esperanto languages, English is in my opinion the easiest one, so I’m thankful it’s become the technical Lingua Franca.


  • Jrockwar@feddit.uktoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldBadminton
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    3 months ago

    Insulin, like most meds in the US, is expensive because of the free market.

    If you have a free market on life-saving medicine, guess what, people will pay however much they can afford and then some - because people are keen to survive.

    In most (all?) European countries medicines are regulated. Some medicines have many manufacturers, some have a “government-enforced” monopoly but without free market, and the result is that no matter the country, insulin is free or almost free. The reason is that when you regulate this, and the only possible buyer for a whole country is “the government”, the seller is forced to negotiate with the whole government to be able to sell to X million people. And the government is not in a life or death situation, so it’s less vulnerable to price gouging.

    If the governments can negotiate a low enough price, then they can subsidise the last bit via taxes and people get free life-saving drugs. Yet big-pharma still gets profits at these lower prices, as evidenced by the number of pharma companies there are in Europe (including non-eu countries that work similarly in terms of healthcare such as UK, Switzerland).

    Free market works, until the seller has a life-threatening reason why the buyer will be forced to pay whatever the price is. The drug situation in the US is not free market, it’s free blackmail.