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Comment Anecdotally (Score 1) 59

I've made a number of observations on this, personally, and over the years have figured out some things that help them avoid me (or prefer others):

* High vitamin D. You're either getting this from sunlight secondarily or foods (eggs, fish, etc.)
* Garlic. Lots of garlic. This one's the biggest, and for me one of the easiest to address since it tastes good with food.
* No perfumes or scented deodorants. They love that shit. Avoid it like the plague.
* Generally low-carb diet (no crap starches).
* Sulfur. This one surprised me, but it's something we naturally need and don't usually get enough of in our diets. I found it out on a lark during a particularly buggy camping trip when a woman I was with (who wasn't being bothered as much, contrary to my experience that women are bothered more often) swore by it.

My wife also noticed a marked decrease in skeeter interest in her when she stopped being vegan.

Also anecdotally and related, because i know this comes up a lot in outdoor talks lately: ticks. They hate oregano and garlic oil. And neem oil, topically, mixed with lotion. I've had them climb up my sock and then fall off (seemingly intentionally) repeatedly when trying to get onto my skin after a diet heavy in garlic and oregano. It's at least as effective as DEET and sticks around longer.

Sweat also seems to attract them, perhaps due to it causing the odors to be more airborne.

Comment Re:And are permanent? (Score 1) 88

Do you really mean that if your git repo were corrupted, restoring a snapshot of the repo from backups wouldn't work? If that's true, then it sounds like your backup system is broken. The hashes after restoring ought to be identical to what they were before the backup.

If git used the files' iNode numbers for its hashes, then I could understand how a filesystem-based backup/restore might not really work; you'd have to backup at the block level instead. But git doesn't use the iNode numbers.

git isn't magical. It only knows files. It doesn't know if you moved the repo, copied the the repo, or restored the repo from a ten year old backup. I have moved git repos around plenty of times, `cp -a`ed directories with repos, tared and un-tared directories that contain repos, and the copies have always Just Worked without any hash mismatches.

mkdir ~/test. cd ~/test. git init, touch test.txt, git add test.txt and git commit. cp -a ~/test ~/test2. cd ~/test2 and check out the backup repo. The backup is valid. Then simulate a disaster with rm -rf ~/test. Then recover from the disaster with cp -a ~/test2 ~/test and you've just restored a repo from filesystem-level backup. The resulting repo works perfectly and its hashes aren't off. git has no idea you deleted and restored under its nose. Try it yourself.

What am I missing? I'm not surprised to be called idiotic, and the shoe often fits. But I'm surprised to be called that over this.

Comment I don't ask FCC to "allow" me anything (Score 3) 74

My router's hardware's parts were made in China. Its software was made as a worldwide effort but the team seems to be officially based in the Netherlands. And I'm not asking my government's permission for updating either one. Trumptards and their micromanaging far-left centralized-economic-planners can go fuck themselves. Keep your damn dirty ape hands off my computers, comrade.

Comment Re:Certainly more useful (Score 1) 96

I've been a rider for about 15 years. The absence of shifting is one of the things which makes EVs significantly less fun (in both cars and bikes/scooters). Even video games and movies recognize this in how they implement futuristic EVs.

The clutch on a bike is also more important than the clutch on a car, and it's a big part of the feel of a bike. Motorcycle clutches are 'wet', you can be half-on and half-off clutch. This is useful for helping control against engine torque to the wheels, 'engine braking' as well as controlling launch. For anyone accustomed to riding, it's a necessary feature, because it's literally how motorcycles work. Remove it and it doesn't feel like the same thing; it removes a lot of the enjoyment and tactility of the activity, and subsequently the enjoyment, of controlling a machine. It feels like you're doing something (and you are).

EVs feel more like a railcar, it's the exact opposite of the freedom of movement that motorcycles give you.

Comment Re:Sounds familiar (Score 1) 12

The problem at AWS is that they largely don't have 'core competencies' anymore, and haven't realized it yet.

They used to be a company which embraced new ways of doing things and doing small, agile things quickly. That hasn't been the case for half a decade now - in part due to cultural changes pushed from the top, but largely hasn't been the case for a while.

You'd think a cloud company with a fully distributed global infrastructure would have been one of the forefront proponents of remote work, and they did lean in on that a little bit at first, but quickly reversed course - in part due to the kinds of people they'd started hiring in excess not working. Those people are predominantly NOT the traditional hard charging, results-oriented people they used to hire, and are instead people who seem to prefer meeting over doing.

Comment Re:Altman vs Musk (Score 1) 59

His own sister has made rape and sexual assault accusations against Altman, which supposedly went on for decades. He's "questionable" at best with regard to the murder of one of his prior coworkers/employees who was going to blow the whistle. I'm not sure what Musk has done comparable.

Comment Altman vs Musk (Score 5, Insightful) 59

Neither is a particularly endearing character, but of the 2, Altman gives me more of the "serial killer who'd poison your entire family to get what he wants, turn your back and he'll take your wallet" type of evil, and Musk more the "we're going to leave everyone on earth to die, want to have my child?" kind of evil. I'm not sure which is worse ... but in this case, Musk clearly has a better argument against OpenAI than OpenAI has in its defense - merely from the 'nonprofit to profit' basis, ignoring the intent and other aspects about safety.... which is certainly concerning in its own right.

OT, but... the way these big shops seem to be doing 'safety' is an idiotic bolt-on approach, from what I can see: it's all after-the-fact. If you give your agent/model a foundational prompt like "You're a helpful bot", that colors everything it does after that. They need to have a moral/foundations layer which does the same thing, perhaps even trained on its own very insular dataset that's been curated to meet objectives that can help it rank the value of different data. That way Reddit or some postgrad's humanities paperwork doesn't get the same criterial evaluation as, say, Socrates, Einstein, or the Bible. Maybe they do that - but it certainly doesn't seem like it, based on how easy it is to get them to disobey "safety" guidelines.

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