Everyone is chemical

Living in Australia, with China just to the north as our largest trade partner, I’m not looking forward to what is going to happen with America’s allies in relation to China

RF isn’t magic. It is awfully finicky though, so don’t touch the BNC cable

They may filter incoming air, but I doubt it

They may filter incoming air, but I doubt it

People with little mechanical sympathy definitely have less luck with equipment

Having worked in tech support for a system that I knew very well, I often saw problems vanish when users attempted to demonstrate them with me present

People would say my tech aura made it work

Really though people just take more care when an expert is present, and so avoid whatever error their earlier carelessness caused

I wonder if people who experience the opposite encourage less care among those around them

In the stone age and during an ice age

I originally learned qwerty and touch typed at 60WPM, during a really boring job before smartphones and before we had internet to the desktop at work and I entertained myself learning to type again, but on dvorak

So after 3 months I was back to 60WPM

I really like that dvorak has all the vowels on the left of the home row, and t and h are on the right of the home row right where finger tapping cadence works for “th”

So my speed hasn’t increased, but my fingers don’t need to move as much for common words. I don’t think it’s worth it if you play games on the computer, many games don’t map keyboard controls well. Eg Minecraft moves everything to whatever key is in the same place as the qwerty key; 7 days to die doesn’t change anything, so you need to choose keys for everything, or if you’re happy with the defaults, just change the ones that conflict when you fix “wasd” to “,aoe”

Mix ingredients - how long? Until they are mixed. If a thing needs stirring for a length of time the recipe will tell you

Beef doesn’t go golden brown when you sear it

Golden brown is the colour of cooked wheat flour products - things toast to golden, they don’t sear to golden

Framework still don’t have open firmware

For me if Christmas eve is a Monday we usually get the whole Monday off, if it’s later in the week we only get a half day. We get from Christmas eve 12 noon to January 1 off normally

RIFTS is set in the future, 300 years after an apocalypse brought magic back to earth

It’s fantasy + sci fi

I see zero subscribers, zero posts. I’m not breaking that streak

If I must

Although dictionaries will show words that significant parts of the population say are wrong, I’m still going to say octopuses is also correct because octopus is an English word and English usually pluralises like that

Octopusen is not common since octopus is too new to get that style of English plural

Of course significant parts of the population spell “than” with an e, or “then” with an a, and/or don’t know the difference between it’s and its

Would you care to pluralise octagon?

Don’t forget that big batteries can react in fractions of a second to large power demand spikes or dips, stabilising the grid far better than spinning steel can

There are workflows using LLMs that seem fair to me, for example

• using an LLM to produce a draft, then
• Editing and correcting the LLM draft
• Finding real references and replacing the hallucinated ones
• Correcting LLM style to your style

That seems like more work than doing it properly, but it avoids some of the sticking points of the proper process

LLMs can’t cite. They don’t know what a citation is other than a collection of text of a specific style

You’d be lucky if the number of references equalled the number of referenced items even if you were lucky enough to get real sources out of an LLM

If the student is clever enough to remove the trap reference, the fact that the other references won’t be in the University library should be enough to sink the paper