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Alan Turing
  • I know you're just joking but I think it's better to stick to openly confirmed LGBTQ people.

  • Gen Z commit to ‘canceling out’ their MAGA parents votes in new TikTok trend
  • Do we have any evidence that they are actually voting and not just filming videos they hope will become popular without really going to vote?

  • Alan Turing
  • I don't know. I said "one of the few" and not "the only" because I didn't want to be wrong in case there was another LGBTQ person on a banknote I wasn't aware of.

  • Texas bars federal election monitors from state polling stations
  • nooooo don't take away my socialism

  • Linux distros not shipping Gavin Howard's bc for licensing reasons
  • Did any distro give concrete reasons for why they have actively chosen not to package it, or perhaps they just haven't given it much thought yet?

  • Alan Turing
  • Turing is one of the few LGBTQ people in the world who have ever been featured on a banknote!

  • Linux distros not shipping Gavin Howard's bc for licensing reasons
  • This is not what I would consider a "political reason". A political reason would be something like refusing to package it because of what political party Howard supports.

    There is plenty of software you'll find in these repositories that aren't under the GPL. CMake uses BSD, the Apache web server uses the eponymous Apache license, LibreOffice and Firefox use MPL, Godot and Bitcoin Core use the MIT license, and I'm sure there are plenty of other software licenses that I haven't thought of yet.

  • ur dada so buff he falls significantly faster than g
  • So obviously I ended up in the middle of this bell curve. How would that cause the perception of the ball's acceleration to differ?

  • Texas bars federal election monitors from state polling stations
  • Either that or because they want to feel like a big boy all mighty and powerful by telling the federal government to kick rocks

  • Do any non-corpos actually like AI slop?
  • An LLM (large language model, a.k.a. an AI whose output is natural language text based on a natural language text prompt) is useful for the tasks when you're okay with 90% accuracy generated at 10% of the cost and 1,000% faster. And where the output will solely be used in-house by yourself and not served to other people. For example, if your goal is to generate an abstract for a paper you've written, AI might be the way to go since it turns a writing problem into a proofreading problem.

    The Google Search LLM which summarises search results is good enough for most purposes. I wouldn't rely on it for in-depth research but like I said, it's 90% accurate and 1,000% faster. You just have to be mindful of this limitation.

    I don't personally like interacting with customer service LLMs because they can only serve up help articles from the company's help pages, but they are still remarkably good at that task. I don't need help pages because the reason I'm contacting customer service to begin with is because I couldn't find the solution using the help pages. It doesn't help me, but it will no doubt help plenty of other people whose first instinct is not to read the f***ing manual. Of course, I'm not going to pretend customer service LLMs are perfect. In fact, the most common problem with them seems to be that they go "off the script" and hallucinate solutions that obviously don't work, or pretend that they've scheduled a callback with a human when you request it, but they actually haven't. This is a really common problem with any sort of LLM.

    At the same time, if you try to serve content generated by an LLM and then present it as anything of higher quality than it actually is, customers immediately detest it. Most LLM writing is of pretty low quality anyway and sounds formulaic, because to an extent, it was generated by a formula.

    Consumers don't like being tricked, and especially when it comes to creative content, I think that most people appreciate the human effort that goes into creating it. In that sense, serving AI content is synonymous with a lack of effort and laziness on the part of whoever decided to put that AI there.

    But yeah, for a specific subset of limited use cases, LLMs can indeed be a good tool. They aren't good enough to replace humans, but they can certainly help humans and reduce the amount of human workload needed.

  • Tough choice
  • The US has no mechanisms to ban political parties

  • Oh boy what a beautiful regex. I'm sure it does something logical and easy to understand.
  • If the set of all strings of composite length is a regular language, you can use that to prove the set of all strings of prime length are also a regular language.

    But it's also easy to prove that the set of language of strings of prime length is not regular, and thus the language of strings of composite length also can't be regular.

    A more formal proof.

  • Oh boy what a beautiful regex. I'm sure it does something logical and easy to understand.
  • You got downvoted here but you're absolutely right. It's easy to prove that the set of strings with prime length is not a regular language using the pumping lemma for regular languages. And in typical StackExchange fashion, someone's already done it.

    Here's their proof.

    Claim 1: The language consisting of the character 1 repeated a prime number of times is not regular.

    A further argument to justify your claim—

    Claim 2: If the language described in Claim 1 is not regular, then the language consisting of the character 1 repeated a composite number of times is not regular.

    Proof: Suppose the language described in Claim 2 is regular if the language described in Claim 1 is not. Then there must exist a finite-state automaton A that recognises it. If we create a new finite-state automaton B which (1) checks whether the string has length 1 and rejects it, and (2) then passes the string to automaton A and rejects when automaton A accepts and accepts when automaton A rejects, then we can see that automaton B accepts the set of all strings of non-composite length that are not of length 1, i.e. the set of all strings of prime length. But since the language consisting of all strings of prime length is non-regular, there cannot exist such an automaton. Therefore, the assumption that the language described in Claim 2 being regular is false.

  • Oh boy what a beautiful regex. I'm sure it does something logical and easy to understand.
  • "at least 2 characters repeated [at least] twice" implies the string's length is divisible by a number greater than 1.

  • Oh boy what a beautiful regex. I'm sure it does something logical and easy to understand.
  • Yeah but it's just so tempting... It validates so many inputs so easily...

  • Oh boy what a beautiful regex. I'm sure it does something logical and easy to understand.
  • They said—

    A line with exactly 0 or 1 characters, or a line with a sequence of 1 or 3 or more characters, repeated at least twice

    Note—

    ...or a line with a sequence of 1 or 3 or more characters, repeated at least twice

    It should be—

    ...or a line with a sequence of 2 or more characters, repeated at least twice

    The regex in the post will match "abab". Their original description (line 2 of this comment) will not match "abab".

  • Oh boy what a beautiful regex. I'm sure it does something logical and easy to understand.
  • It's a line with a sequence of two or more characters repeated at least twice.

  • Oh boy what a beautiful regex. I'm sure it does something logical and easy to understand.

    ^.?$|^(..+?)\1+$

    <answer>

    Matches strings of any character repeated a non-prime number of times

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vbk0TwkokM

    82
    Hezbollah orders evacuation of 25 Israeli settlements in north
  • Yeah, and what the fuck else might I be referring to, hmmmm?

  • What are your opinions on Measure 117?

    Measure 117 would change the voting system from first-past-the-post to ranked-choice instant-runoff voting for presidential, state executive offices, and Congress.

    I believe it doesn't go far enough. They should have it for Legislative Assembly elections as well. That being said, I'm still going to vote for it and tell all my friends and family to do the same.

    1
    Israeli strike kills dozens in Gaza humanitarian area

    At least 40 were killed after missiles struck a tent camp in Khan Younis, Gaza Civil Defense officials said. The Israeli military said it was targeting Hamas operatives.

    (Washington Post gift article, no paywall)

    13
    The number 1 easiest way to convince carbrains to support non-car-centric transportation infrastructure (in my experience)

    "Giving people more viable alternatives to driving means more people will choose not to drive, so there will be fewer cars on the road, reducing traffic for drivers."

    Concise, easy to understand, and accurate. I have used it at least a dozen times and it is remarkable how well it works.

    Also—

    "A bus is about twice as long as a car so it only needs to have four to six passengers on board to be more efficient than two cars."

    134
    Thoughts on Hong Kong urbanism?

    This image is from Google Maps and depicts Maritime Square on Tsing Yi, the island where my grandmother lives. I chose it because I think it is the embodiment of the new millennium Hong Kong urban development.

    The entire development is built by the MTR Corporation, a Government-owned publicly traded company that is primarily known for running the Hong Kong metro system of the same name.

    The primary attraction of this development is the eponymous Maritime Square Mall, a large five-storey indoor shopping arcade. It is attached to Tsing Yi Station, a metro station on the overground Tung Chung Line and there is a small bus interchange on the ground floor.

    The mall has shops including a grocery store, around a dozen restaurants, a Marks & Spencer, bakeries, clothing retailers, electronics stores, a few banks, and some miscellaneous other stores. Notably NOT in the building is a school, otherwise, you might even be able to spend your whole life without leaving it.

    There are several towers extending out of the main mall complex which contain hundreds of units of (unaffordable) housing. I think there is a botanical garden on the roof, too. The entrance to these towers is inside the mall, where there's just a lift lobby where you'd expect a shop to be. The lift lobby is closed to the public; a keycard or code is required to enter.

    I think it's a similar concept to a 15-minute city, but more like a 15-minute building.

    7
    U.S. sends Ukraine seized Iranian-made weapons
    wapo.st U.S. sends Ukraine seized Iranian-made weapons

    The circuitous supply of Iranian-made weapons to Ukraine comes as Russia mounts an aggressive push and House Republicans stall further U.S. military assistance.

    The Pentagon has provided Ukraine with thousands of Iranian-made weapons seized before they could reach Houthi militants in Yemen, U.S. officials said Tuesday. It’s the Biden administration’s latest infusion of emergency military support for Kyiv while a multibillion-dollar aid package remains stalled in the Republican-led House.

    The weapons include 5,000 Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, along with a half-million rounds of ammunition. They were seized from four “stateless vessels” between 2021 and 2023 and made available for transfer to Ukraine through a Justice Department civil forfeiture program targeting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.

    Officials said Iran intended to supply the weapons to the Houthis, who have staged a months-long assault on commercial and military vessels transiting off the Arabian Peninsula. Central Command said the cache is enough to supply rifles to an entire Ukrainian brigade, which vary in size but typically include a few thousand soldiers.

    4
    U.S. sends Ukraine seized Iranian-made weapons

    The Pentagon has provided Ukraine with thousands of Iranian-made weapons seized before they could reach Houthi militants in Yemen, U.S. officials said Tuesday. It’s the Biden administration’s latest infusion of emergency military support for Kyiv while a multibillion-dollar aid package remains stalled in the Republican-led House.

    The weapons include 5,000 Kalashnikov rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, along with a half-million rounds of ammunition. They were seized from four “stateless vessels” between 2021 and 2023 and made available for transfer to Ukraine through a Justice Department civil forfeiture program targeting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East.

    Officials said Iran intended to supply the weapons to the Houthis, who have staged a months-long assault on commercial and military vessels transiting off the Arabian Peninsula. Central Command said the cache is enough to supply rifles to an entire Ukrainian brigade, which vary in size but typically include a few thousand soldiers.

    2
    Is there a way to donate outside of Google Play?

    Google eats 30% of in-app purchases so I'd like to donate directly if possible.

    If there is a way to do this, perhaps add it to the community's sidebar?

    3
    Expelled congressman George Santos plans another House bid
    wapo.st Expelled congressman George Santos plans another House bid

    Paperwork filed with the FEC indicates George Santos will run in New York’s 1st Congressional District against one of the Republicans who helped oust him.

    5
    Tesla repays San Jose pie shop owner after last-minute cancellation
    abc7news.com Tesla repays San Jose pie shop owner after last-minute cancellation

    "I'm so super grateful": More than an hour after Rasetarinera's Monday interview with ABC7 News, she confirmed that Tesla had officially repaid the $2,000 that she was out for the purchase of the ingredients.

    Tesla repays San Jose pie shop owner after last-minute cancellation

    tl;dr After local news aired the story, Tesla has paid the pie shop $2,000, the cost of ingredients for the cancelled order.

    44
    Capital One-Discover merger may face stiff antitrust review in Washington
    wapo.st Capital One-Discover merger may face stiff antitrust review in Washington

    Before the two companies can close the $35.3 billion merger, they must obtain approval from federal antitrust watchdogs who have challenged other recent deals.

    Capital One-Discover merger may face stiff antitrust review in Washington
    34
    It is a huge failure in communication to pretend that distro upgrades are entirely different versions of the operating system. It does nothing but make Linux seem more complex than it actually is.

    The jump in distro versions, say, from Fedora 38 to Fedora 39, is not the same as the jump from Windows 10 to Windows 11. It's more like the jump from version 23H2 to 24H2.

    Now, I'm sure even most Windows users among those reading will ask "wtf are 23H2 and 24H2"? The answer is that those version numbers are the Windows analogue to the "23.10" at the end of "Ubuntu 23.10". But the difference is that this distinction is invisible to Windows users.

    Why?

    Linux distros present these as "operating system upgrades", which makes it seem like you're moving from two different and incompatible operating systems. Windows calls them "feature updates". They're presented as a big deal in Linux, whereas on Windows, it's just an unusually large update.

    This has the effect of making it seem like Linux is constantly breaking software and that you need to move to a completely different OS every six to nine months, which is completely false. While that might've been true in the past, it is increasingly true today that anything that will run on, say, Ubuntu 22.04 can also run without modification (except maybe for hardcoded version checks/repository names) on Ubuntu 23.10, and will still probably work on Ubuntu 24.04. It's not guaranteed, but neither is it on Windows, and the odds are very good either way.

    I will end on the remark that for many distros, a version upgrade is implemented as nothing more than changing the repositories and then downloading the new versions of all the packages present and running a few scripts. The only relevant changes (from the user's perspective) is usually the implementation of new features and maybe a few changes to the UI. In other words, "feature update" describes it perfectly.

    41
    Banks in Hong Kong can print their own money. There are 8 different designs in circulation.

    Before someone asks why there isn't insane inflation from banks printing an infinite amount of money for themselves, the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the US dollar. In order to be allowed to print HKD, banks must have an equivalent amount of USD on deposit.

    11
    NateNate60 NateNate60 @lemmy.world
    Posts 18
    Comments 1.1K