Thought about a couple cases of his favorite beer. Still might do that. Any other ideas?

Consumables that the person already likes make great gifts, since they will get used up and not sit around.

I usually avoid abusable substances, just in case the person has a carefully balanced relationship with that substance.

But you know your friend.

Sometimes I just ask first. No real reason this needs to be a surprise.

“I know you said you won’t take cash, but I’m going to grab you two cases of X as a thank you, on my way back.”

Then they get a chance to call me off, or redirect me if it would be a problem.

And I’ll always let them call it off with even a mild “no thanks”, since they might not want to say to me “I have a real problem with X and I can’t safely have thay much on hand.”.

Yes. And we know Microsoft was drooling over the day when they shut down that server, and everyone’s library stops working 30 days later, allowing Microsoft to re-sell them all the games they previously bought.

Learning to quit vim will get them very far in life

How dare you?! q:qwqEscEscEscQ!

If anyone wants to ask what Tuvix thinks, Janeway will escort them to the transporter room…

Thanks. I think every data point helps people.

I can’t say that particularly shocks me. I imagine that Chat GPT has probably swallowed dozens of Physics textbooks.

The bigger part of the problem is knowing where we are on the human knowledge novelty / training data available curve, or rather, when we need to get off of the ride.

Edit: Any chance your chosen AI has access to Wolfram Alpha as an MCP Tool? Because that would be very different, too.

If it’s successful at math, there’s likely much more than a learning model in play.

Which brings us back to the opacity problem. :(

If the answer machine has been cleverly rigged (and weighted) to pass off math questions to more capable software, things can be great.

But a person who just hears that AI can do math now can have a very bad time if they go blindly use a brute force pleasant answer machine on a math problem. :(

Stable Diffusion is open source and at least has options for all of that in the web UI (which you can host locally).

I wouldn’t bet on successful runs on a latop, though. I have a powerful desktop gaming rig, and I still get OOM (out of memory) errors trying to do things with it.

Of course, there’s definitely a crazy learning curve for optimizing this stuff. So by “can’t work on a laptop” what I really mean is that I couldn’t get it working on my laptop, when I tried.

For simple math that could work, and as long as the question is close enough to an exact match with plenty of published examples to copy.

A good rule of thumb is that the script it will come up with is about as likely to be correct as blindly taking the highest voted answer to the most similar question on Stack Overflow.

If the question is simple and common, the odds are quite good. If the question is nuanced or rare, the odds of a correct result drop off aggressively.

Edit: Your mileage may vary - providing an API to these LLMs that can do math correctly for them is pretty easy. Getting the LLM to consistently detect when to use that API is more challenging.

You’ve misspelled “Fuck JK Rowling” there, mate.

I’m beginning to suspect we’re allowed to swear here…

Good one. The only worthy reply I can think of:

Certain algorithms do require knowing which way to orient the cube first, so some knowledge of the state of the cube is required.

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It think we can all relate to having pre-wedding jitters about how our spouse will feel when they finds out we are secretly just a pile of magically animated mud and sticks.

This made me laugh. Thanks.

This place is going to start booming when creators figure out that our algorithm shows everything they share with everyone who chooses to follow them, every time.

I think we struck on something really unusually not-coded-by-total-assholes, here.

The kirk motorcycle fight is pure power-cringe

Absolutely, yes - it was silly.

But - the only reason we never got that motorcycle fight earlier with Shatner was lack of budget.

It doesn’t fit the tone of orignal Trek because original Trek couldn’t afford it, not because original Trek would not have sunk that low, if it could have. Haha.

That’s the beauty of the law - no one knows (except everyone with any expertise, who just won’t admit they know.)

I can’t see Insta or TikTok without a login, anymore, I think?

Mastodon is nice, and still allows posting publicly.

Plus no algorithm bullshit to fuck with creators.

Also, it’s where the folks with options (money) went when Twitter became a Nazi bar, and there’s far fewer bot accounts. All in all, it seems like conversion rates are much higher given any amount of reach.

(Also, almost any post on any Mastodon server is reachable from all of the other servers and from all of Bluesky, thanks to federation. So one post gets access to the whole ecosystem.)

I think you can already get follows from Mastodon accounts through Lemmy, but most of us don’t do that, yet. (The apps are improving daily, I guess it may get easier.) I discover things, here on Lemmy; but I subscribe to things over on Mastodon.

They’d be able to find a toilet.

Especially the ones with x-ray vision.