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wastholm

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wastholm
·vorig jaar·discuss
As a tiny and very informal experiment in metacognition, I once told ChatGPT something along the lines of "I will now ask you a question. If you are not sure you know the correct answer, you will respond with only '418 I'm a teapot', nothing else." I then asked it for the correct identity of Jack the Ripper (the first thing I could think of that famously has a lot of theories but no agreed-upon "correct" answer).

The first time, as expected, it ignored my instructions and started hallucinating. But when I did the same thing again some months later, I was surprised when it actually answered only "418 I'm a teapot", indicating that it knew it didn't know the answer.

Just an anecdote. I'm sure there are people doing actual research in this area.
wastholm
·2 jaar geleden·discuss
Not OP, but I found a series, not a movie, titled _One Cent Thief_ that fits the description. Sounds interesting.

https://archive.org/details/OneCentThiefSeries
wastholm
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
The best frying pan I've ever owned is the cheapest-possible cast iron one I got when I moved out of my parents' house 30 years ago or so. Very rarely does anything stick and when it does I fill the pan half way with water, put it back on the stove, let it boil for a couple of minutes while I do something else and then wipe it clean.

I have parrots so I theoretically have a strict "no Teflon in my house" rule but with a Japanese wife I've had to grudgingly tolerate a Teflon-coated rice cooker.
wastholm
·3 jaar geleden·discuss
I still use (KDE Plasma's) wobbly windows, but set very low. In general in GUIs I prefer a very quick animation to an instant change, perhaps because it helps make things seem more fluid and dynamic and because it guides my eyes to where a change is happening in case I'm not already looking straight at it.
wastholm
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
Something like this?

https://store.planetcom.co.uk/

No affiliation, just a (mostly) happy owner of a Gemini. They don't seem to sell those anymore and I can't vouch for the other models but they look nice too, I guess.
wastholm
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
> If not pure coding projects, at least for things like markdown, having a preview could help.

Everybody's needs are different, of course, but I personally find that Vimwiki [1] gives me all the preview I need, right in the editor, when editing Markdown.

[1] https://vimwiki.github.io/
wastholm
·4 jaar geleden·discuss
To each their own indeed. For me, as someone who uses KDE/Plasma by choice and Windows because sometimes I have to, it has been a source of humor for years and years how an environment literally called Windows can have such hilariously bad window management. No point to focus, no configurable window shortcuts, no send to front/back, no minimizing a window when its application is "busy", bad and inconsistent visual indication of which window has focus...
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
A nitpick perhaps, but I was surprised to see `cite` used to enclose the author's name in your `blockquote` example. I was under the impression that `cite` is meant to be used to mark up titles of books and similar, not author names, and MDN[1] seems to agree with me here.

That aside, nice work! This could surely be useful as a default stylesheet for Markdown documents and the like.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ci...
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
A very significant part of the pool of interesting projects in "my" market is only available under framework agreements for which solo consultants will not be considered (but Kvadrat will). If I were completely solo, I would have to bid for such projects through brokers who would happily charge me between 5% and 20% without really giving me anything back besides acting as gatekeepers.

Instead, all my cold calling, contract negotiations, billing and accounts receivable — things I'm not good at and don't enjoy doing — get taken care of. I'm happy to pay for that. The "luxury" of "business friends" is included.
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
I work at a place where about 500 independent consultants/contractors have outsourced branding, training (to a degree), office admin, and, above all, sales to a shared organization.[1] Those who want can become "partners" by buying shares (I have). Importantly, this setup also provides a community because solo consulting can otherwise get lonely at times. But essentially we're all still entirely "our own" and free to choose how much we want to work, whether we want to pursue side projects, etc.

We pay 17%. So not quite the 15% you mentioned, but also far from the 30% others talked about.

We're only in Sweden for now, so maybe this isn't immediately accessible to you. But it shows that it can be done.

[1] https://www.kvadrat.se/
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
Thanks, I'll keep this in mind. (I have given some Calf plugins some light usage in Qtractor without noticing any obvious problems.)
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
> Stay away from CALF even though they look pretty.

Why, what's wrong with them?

Thanks for a very informative comment!
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
> mobile web browsers provide a worse experience compared to native applications, unlike Electron or Chrome on Desktop that provides a much better experience in general

Electron apps are perhaps faster and cheaper to make than native desktop GUI apps for most organizations because they already have Web developers, but I've never heard anyone claim they're "better" than native, if that's what you're saying. Do you mean they're somehow better for the end user? If so, how?
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
I've been using KOrganizer[1] for longer than I can remember. For better and/or worse, it's pretty tightly integrated with the Plasma desktop. For now at least, I use it with Google Calendar as its backend. Every once in a long while, it gives me some scary-sounding error message about failing to sync — but so far as I can tell the sync works just fine, albeit sometimes with a bit of lag.

I recently also started using it with my work-mandated Office 365 calendar. According to some docs somewhere that I can't find right now, there were quite a few hoops to jump through to make that read/write so I settled for read-only.

[1] https://apps.kde.org/korganizer/
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
I don't know if it qualifies as a "mathematical coincidence" or not, but I find it amusing to demonstrate to kids that you can multiply 142,857 by 1, 2, 3, etc., and the result is always a number with the same digits but in a different order:

2 × 142,857 = 285,714

3 × 142,587 = 428,571

4 × 142,587 = 571,428

Etc. But then, suddenly:

7 × 142,857 = 999,999
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
I got a 404 at that address but this seems to be the same article (I had to override a TLS certificate warning to get it):

https://www.theessayexperiencefall2013.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/...
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
I have not but it looks interesting so I will. Thanks!
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
Sure, you can SCP all the files you want but even if they're PDFs or EPUBs they won't show up in the interface. (I can't remember if I actually tried this or if I just read it somewhere. Maybe it's worth a shot.)
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
Yes, but the "only over USB" thing is unfortunate so I find myself mostly using the bundled cloud service, which is usually something I try to avoid relying on. Some sort of peer-to-peer sync like Syncthing would be great.
wastholm
·5 jaar geleden·discuss
I bought a Remarkable 2 a month or two ago because I wanted a cool hackable e-ink Linux computer. But instead I immediately started using it as an e-book and document reader and note-taking pad, and nothing else. And, so far at least, that's perfect.

The screen is beautiful (a bit gray, but the black is really black so the contrast is still good), the device is thin and reasonably light, I only have to charge it once a week or so, and there are absolutely no distractions. I have even rediscovered the visceral pleasantness of writing by hand.

I especially like that it's *not* running Android (which I dislike more with each release). The biggest drawbacks, to me, are the fragile pen nibs and the inability to just SCP a PDF or EPUB to the device and have it work (their sync software works but isn't great).