I suppose I’m afraid that having a dog myself would be like a magnet for other dogs while on walks that I might be uncomfortable with or that my being nervous could make a normal meet and greet go poorly.

Yes. Also, your dog will pick up on your nervousness and either get nervous themselves or become defensive, neither of which are ideal and could make for a bad situation if you’re ever at a park or out for a walk. Dogs are little copycats when it comes to mirroring their owner’s anxieties and behaviors, and even if you deal with your anxiety, the dog may have adopted it in the mean time and you’d have to work to repair that damage.

Basically, you’re smart to be asking these questions before taking on the responsibility of adoption. I’d recommend waiting until you’ve worked out your issues before potentially passing them on to your four-legged friend.

Excellent catch!

“Tell me how old you are without telling me how old you are” 😢

Don’t feel bad. I was able to distinguish by ear between a T.38 fax handshake and a V.34+ modem handshake which definitely reveals my oldness 😆

So many things wrong with that though:

1. That’s a fax machine handshake not a data modem.
2. That’s a LOT of data to be hissing over dial-up in a highly compressed GSM voice channel
3. She didn’t dial anywhere near enough numbers
4. The background noise would have had that handshake repeating over and over

The most nostalgic chiptune generator you’ll ever hear.

I don’t want to repeat what others have already said as that’s all pretty accurate. As a rule of thumb, just look at the site sidebar for various instances and just avoid any that base themselves around any form of identity politics. Sadly, that’s a lot of them, but life is better without those kinds of attitudes in your face all the time.

I’ve always observed them to be the largely the same thing but on different ends of the ideological spectrum (libertarians holding a more right-wing stance to anarchism’s left-wing stances). Otherwise, they’re both essentially petulant toddlers stamping their feet and saying “I don’t want to, and you can’t make me”.

I am probably the wrong person to answer, but I usually just get a light buzz going and work on stuff around the house or yard.

Mowing the yard, pulling weeds, or working in the garden with a light buzz is pretty darn relaxing to me lol. Doing the dishes, laundry, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom? None of those are particularly fun but are necessary and greatly improved by having a light buzz.

On the rare occasion I accidentally get too buzzed and end up glued to the couch, the dogs are more than happy to take advantage and receive lots of pets and lap time.

I’m just now realizing that’s probably my resting face.

Chuck Norris never dies. He just waits.

TIL and nice bit of trivia!

Disclaimer: : All of my LLM experience is with local models in Ollama on extremely modest hardware (an old laptop with NVidia graphics) , so I can’t speak for the technical reasons the context window isn’t infinite or at least larger on the big player’s models. My understanding is that the context window is basically its short term memory. In humans, short term memory is also fairly limited in capacity. But unlike humans, the LLM can’t really see (or hold) the big picture in its mind.

But yeah, all you said is correct. Expanding on that, if you try to get it to generate something long-form, such as a novel, it’s basically just generating infinite chapters using the previous chapter (or as much of the history fits into its context window) as reference for the next. This means, at minimum, it’s going to be full of plot holes and will never reach a conclusion unless explicitly directed to wrap things up. And, again, given the limited context window, the ending will be full of plot holes and essentially based only on the previous chapter or two.

It’s funny because I recently found an old backup drive from high school with some half-written Jurassic Park fan fiction on it, so I tasked an LLM with fleshing it out, mostly for shits and giggles. The result is pure slop that seems like it’s building to something and ultimately goes nowhere. The other funny thing is that it reads almost exactly like a season of Camp Cretaceous / Chaos Theory (the animated kids JP series) and I now fully believe those are also LLM-generated.

That makes way more sense than Riker-maneuvering yourself around these awkward things:

Edit: Riker Maneuver if you’re unfamiliar with the term.

Shame me 4 times? Shame on you for picking on a vulnerable man.

😂

I can see that. Kinda like only enjoying the first 1/3 of each season of American Idol.

“Sadly” lol

(I dunno, I’ve never seen it but it just does not sound like compelling television to me)

Sounds about right. I dropped cable in 2010 or thereabouts so probably right around the time that shifted.

Not to be confused with MILF Island which was a fake show on “30 Rock” that was intended to be so over-the-top trashy no could assume it was real.

The worst part is when you do see something that seems like a legit history show, towards the end it’s like “but what if it was aliens??”

Bamboozle me once, shame on you. Bamboozle me four or more times, shame on me.

I don’t remember that one.

Is it this one? If so, that was before my time which might explain it.