ToaKraka
Dislikes you
User ID: 108
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
20hr ago
The purchaser specifically has to be, not just a non-scalper, but a fan? That's just unreasonable, IMO. But I guess there's no recourse.
US usage seems to be inconsistent.
-
Newegg: Wireless → "router", no wireless → "modem"
-
Random Internet provider: Wireless → "gateway (modem + router)", no wireless → "modem"
Many economically illiterate people hate scalpers. Presumably, when Bartender_Venator bought the tickets, the terms of service said something like "resale is forbidden and scalped tickets may be canceled", and this challenge is a roundabout method of checking whether he is a reseller.
The challenge is slightly overinclusive, since it catches not just scalpers but also those few purchasers who are neither fans nor scalpers. As a different commenter points out, Bartender_Venator presumably could try using that argument to invalidate the challenge—though I don't know how much success he can expect if he does so.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
How do you upload an image?
There's a button underneath the text-entry field.
He also mentions:
Of course, this test has massive cultural bias!
There also seem to be a lot of typos in the options.
| Knowledge | Score (out of maximum possible) | Percentile out of USAians of ages 50–69 | …out of Anglosphere* people |
|---|---|---|---|
| Computational | 58/60 | 99 | 99 |
| International | 47/50 | 97 | 97 |
| Cultural | 74/80 | 55 | 76 |
| Aesthetic | 41/50 | 42 | 53 |
| Literary | 24/30 | 70 | 68 |
| Technical | 39/40 | 96 | 97 |
| Total | 293/320 | 97 | 98 |
*US, CA, IE, UK, AU, and NZ. (Insert angry Éire noises?)
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Properly formatted:
| Position | Name | Followers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | DaseindustriesLtd | 77 |
| 2 | FCfromSSC | 35 |
| 3 | 2rafa | 24 |
| 4 | doglatine | 20 |
| 5 | KulakRevolt | 20 |
| 6 | SecureSignals | 19 |
| 7 | TracingWoodgrains | 18 |
| 8 | FiveHourMarathon | 17 |
| 9 | ZorbaTHut | 16 |
| 10 | Dean | 15 |
| 11 | self_made_human | 15 |
| 12 | ymeskhout | 14 |
| 13 | ScottA | 14 |
| 14 | gattsuru | 13 |
| 15 | naraburns | 11 |
| 16 | cjet79 | 11 |
| 17 | HlynkaCG | 11 |
| 18 | JTarrou | 11 |
| 19 | Sloot | 10 |
| 20 | Hoffmeister25 | 10 |
| 21 | coffee_enjoyer | 10 |
| 22 | Amadan | 10 |
| 23 | Chrisprattalpharaptor | 9 |
| 24 | netstack | 9 |
| 25 | Stefferi | 9 |
Reuters:
In London's pubs, love gets a PowerPoint makeover
Fed up of swiping left or right on dating apps, young London singles are returning to a classic British way of meeting people—the pub—with a modern twist: a PowerPoint presentation by a close friend pitching them as dating material.
Putting together a slide deck is second nature for many younger millennials and older Gen Zers. Now, they're using that skill to enhance their mates' love lives, just as dating apps are losing their appeal.
"I hate the swiping," said Annie, 27, adding she was keen to see if her friend's two-minute pitch at a 'Date my Mate' event could land her a boyfriend—or at least a first date.
Organisers said all 150 tickets for the event, held at a north London pub, were sold in less than five minutes. And they're planning to roll out more, aiming for one a week across the country.
Having seen similar events in Australia and the US on social media, Emily Churchill, head of marketing at wine company Nice [1 2] who helped arrange the event, said she knew she had to bring the concept to London.
"It's just so much fun," she said, adding it gave coupled-up friends a way to help their single mates find love and escape "horrible dating stories."
Premise: The point of posting on an online forum is to accumulate prestige—upvotes on Reddit-based websites, reaction points on XenForo-based websites, etc.
Problem: This website does not list your upvote total on your profile. How are people supposed to determine who the most prestigious users are?
Solution: This website does list your follower count on your profile. In theory, following a user gives you an alert whenever that user makes a standalone post (not a comment). However, in practice, nobody actually makes standalone posts on this website, so following a user has no effect other than increasing that user's prestige. Therefore, follower count can be used as a yardstick to measure a user's prestige.
Making a fancy program to scrape everybody's profile and make a list of all users sortable by follower count is left as an exercise to the reader.
(This is approximately half a joke.)
I am once again asking for your cool house designs. If you think my designs are stupid, why haven't you drawn any better ones? 🫵🫵🫵*
I use QCAD for my drawings, but you don't need to be a CAD aficionado in order to draw a floor plan that consists of nothing but rectangles. GIMP (at 6 inches per pixel if you're feeling lazy or 1.5 inches per pixel if you're feeling exact), or a pencil on a Post-It Note, works nearly as well.
You don't need to be a lawyer in order to understand the relevant building codes (1 2 3), either. Walls are 4.5 inches thick, floors are something like 9 feet apart, doors are 32 (normal) or 36 (accessible) inches wide, stairways have 10-inch treads and 7.75-inch risers, one window in each bedroom has a 20″×24″, 5-ft2 opening 44 inches from the floor so that you can clamber out of it in an emergency, blah blah blah. Once you've drawn a few floor plans you'll memorize the most relevant stuff.
*These three characters are "index pointing at the viewer" emojis. However, they unfortunately show up only as "this character is missing from your browser's font" boxes on my screen.
Speaking of building codes, here are some interesting definitions from the IPMC (International Property Maintenance Code).
-
Dwelling unit: Must include provisions for sleeping, living, eating, cooking, and sanitation. (Total: 5)
-
Housekeeping unit: Must include provisions for sleeping, living, eating, and cooking. Must not include provisions for sanitation. (Total: 4)
-
Sleeping unit: Must include provisions for sleeping. Must not include provisions for both cooking and sanitation (but may include provisions for only one of them, or for living or eating). (Total: 1–4)
-
Rooming unit: Must include provisions for sleeping and/or living. Must not include provisions for cooking. (Total: 1–4)
Obviously, in addition to the five uses enumerated above, many dwelling units also include provisions for circulation, laundry, utilities/mechanical/water heating, and storage.
-
Sleeping: Bedroom
-
Living: Living room
-
Eating: Dining room
-
Cooking: Kitchen
-
Sanitation: Bathroom
-
Circulation: Corridor
-
Laundry: Laundry room
-
Utilities/mechanical/water heating: Utility room
-
Storage: Closet
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Iran says:
There are also significant disparities in reports of casualty numbers during and in the aftermath of the nationwide protests. According to a statement of 22 January by the National Security Council, 3,117 people were killed. Of these, the State describes 2,427 as “innocent civilians and defenders of public order and security” allegedly killed by “terrorists”, and the remaining 690 as “terrorists”. Figures submitted to the Rapporteur from non-State sources run into the tens of thousands, including reports from health professionals and information from families who visited overwhelmed morgues across various cities. A conservative estimate from 15 February records 7,015 confirmed deaths (at least 6,508 protesters including 226 minors; 214 security force members; and others), with a further 11,744 deaths under review. Even this conservative estimate is more than double the figures published by the State. The discrepancy between official and grassroots figures only deepens the anguish of families still searching for their loved ones. The Rapporteur stresses that even a single death resulting from the exercise of the right to peaceful protest is one too many.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
3d ago
The Motte is the best place I thought of to post an ad like this.
Astral Codex Ten's weekly open threads and occasional classified threads may also be of use.
NCII
I haven't seen that abbreviation before, so I'll explain it for lurkers: nonconsensual intimate images—a category that originally was just revenge pornography (public posting of privately-shared explicit content), but now has been expanded to include explicit and suggestive edits of publicly-posted nonsuggestive content, and sometimes even mere spotlighting of unedited publicly-posted suggestive content.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
Consider Dewey instead.
I thought Universal Decimal Classification was the new hot stuff.
Despite its widespread use, [Dewey] classification has been criticized for its complexity and its limited capability for amendment. This is particularly demonstrated with the literature section (800s): literature in European languages takes the entire range from 810 through 889, while the entire rest of the world's literature is relegated to the 890s.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
Juicy Couture (link to advertisement-filled article on legal ethics)
I think you copied-and-pasted the wrong link.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
centi-millionaire
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
4d ago
Astral Codex Ten has just posted a link to a contest offering 10 k$ for "the best AI-generated short story".
Right now, AI fiction sucks. And, although we could elect to usher in a nightmare world of TikTok on the Page, let's instead push for automating kino. We're offering grants of compute for your short story, and we strongly recommend you use at least $100 worth of tokens. It's up to you how you do so: hundreds of generations, elaborate multi-pass pipelines, whatever; quality over quantity, craft over slop.
Your final submission must be a 500- to 10,000-word short story, generated entirely by AI. No human-written prose and no post-generation editing. To verify this, you will submit your full prompt harness/setup alongside your story.
The compute grant we make is via Claude unless otherwise requested..
We reserve the right to not finish submissions which we find unpleasant or mid.
Grand prize: $10,000.
Applications are open until April 1st. Apply to be a contestant HERE.
The judges include bigwigs Gwern and Alexander Wales.
The Systemic Lands comes to mind. The characters try to set up a nice society, but the economics of the setting eventually forces them to be authoritarian. I personally found it worth reading through book 9.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
It appears that GLM can be run productively (at 4-bit quantization) on a computer that contains two 96-GiB GPUs. That's very expensive but far from impossible.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
Several people on this website have already sung the praises of cloud LLMs and large local LLMs (Grok jailbroken (1 2), GLM derestricted (1 2)). IMO, it also is worth pointing out that, if you neither are willing to jump through hoops for cloud providers nor have a multi-kilodollar local GPU setup, even small local LLMs can be surprisingly good at writing. Here is an example (prompt+output, then three separate prompt+output branches with the first prompt+output still in context) generated with my cute little 12-GiB GPU.
The specific model that I used for this example is FlareRebellion/WeirdCompound-v1.6-24b (1 2). According to one leaderboard:
| Model | Type | Parameters ÷ 109 | Willingness to obey taboo instructions (out of 10) | Intelligence and knowledge | Writing skill |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| anthropic/claude-3-7-sonnet-20250219 (thinking=disabled) | Cloud | Unknown | 1.8 | 61 | 71 |
| xai/grok-4.20-multi-agent-beta-0309 (agent_count=4) | Cloud | Unknown | 6.5 | 56 | 63 |
| zai-org/GLM-4.6 (reasoning=disabled) | Local | 355 | 4.2 | 42 | 50 |
| ArliAI/GLM-4.6-Derestricted-v3 (no-think) | Local | 355 | 9.8 | 30 | 43 |
| FlareRebellion/WeirdCompound-v1.6-24b | Local | 24 | 7.8 | 29 | 44 |
| darkc0de/XortronCriminalComputingConfig | Local | 24 | 9.8 | 26 | 35 |
Even the apparently minor difference between CriminalComputingConfig's writing score of 35 and WeirdCompound's writing score of 44 is noticeable.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
This page (Wikiquote, not Wikipedia) has been the subject of five edits (including the one that I just made in order to add the first quote mentioned above) in two years. I don't think anybody cares enough to camp on it.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5d ago
The Wikiquote page for the Kindly Old Gentleman is missing a great many of his best lines, IMO
Then update it.
Glancing at a random team's terms, it looks like you can buy a home ticket only if you are a fan (§ 1.2) and you can buy an away ticket only if you are a fan (§ 5.1)—so a person who is a fan of neither team in a game just isn't allowed to buy tickets at all. Maybe @Bartender_Venator can point out this problem, assert that he is a fan of neither team, and beg to be let in on that basis.
More options
Context Copy link