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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • I heard that argument so often that the second amendment is there to overthrow tyrannical governments and I heard that from the people claiming that they need guns for that explicit purpose. For work reasons I have quite a bit to do with people from the mountain west and that’s a very common talking point there.

    What we can do is defend our families, neighbors and ourselves when ICE comes knocking.

    That’s seriously even more whack than thinking a bunch of gun nuts could overthrow the government with a “well regulated militia”.

    When you start shooting at ICE, you get another Waco massacre.

    Look at any (and I repeat ANY) other example of a country sliding into fascism. Name even one where owning a gun and “defending” yourself or your family lead to anything but all of them laying dead on the floor.



  • It’s the old galactic algorithm. Imagine an algorithm that takes the age of the universe to compute the result, but it always takes the same time independent of the input. This makes it O(1) complexity.

    Now imagine you want to sort a list with 100 elements. Pretty much any other sorting algorithm, no matter the complexity, will finish much faster than the galactic one from above.

    Complexity matters only when n gets large enough, and in some cases n stays small enough that algorithmic complexity doesn’t matter.

    (Just to make sure I’m not misunderstood: Algorithmic complexity is an incredibly important optimization tool. Most often it’s even the best one. But it’s not the only one and there are situations where it fails. As always, a good programmer takes everything into account, not just their favourite tool.)









  • You don’t have to modify the model to parrot your opinion. You just have to put your stuff into the system prompt.

    You can even modify the system prompt on the fly depending on e.g. the user account or the specific user input. That way you can modify the responses for a far bigger subject range: whenever a keyword of a specific subject is detected, the fitting system prompt is loaded, so you don’t have to trash your system prompt full of off-topic information.

    This is so trivially simple to do that even a junior dev should be able to wrap something like that around an existing LLM.

    Edit: In fact, that’s exactly how all these customized ChatGPT versions work.