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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Garmin Explore has a bit of a learning curve but offers a variety of very good maps and (once you’ve discovered where the web developers have hidden them) tons of nifty features. One of them is waypoints: you stick a flag somewhere and can give it a name, icon and colour. That sounds like the thing you’re looking for.
    The downside is that it’s made for outdoor stuff so you get street names and some POIs, but no turn-by-turn navigation.

    I use the website (https://explore.garmin.com/) to plan my tours and import/manage GPX files, and the Android app and an inReach 2 Mini satellite messenger while underway. The three sync seamlessly.

    Since I have a paid subscription (required for satellite access) I can’t tell you what (if anything) you get for free, but it should be relatively easy to find out if you think it might be what you’re looking for.

    For car navigation I used TomTom Go - it costs something but the quality of POIs and navigation is far superior to Google Maps in my experience. You can also add your own locations but have to do it on the phone by hand.
    In my new car I use Google Maps because it came with the car and there’s no real alternative at the moment. I do miss my TomTom app.




  • Logically, I know it’s true that demeaning and comparing other people’s experiences is wrong, but I encounter it so much it’s hard to really believe it.

    I can relate to some degree, though in my case it was my parents. The good news is that it doesn’t take much practice until you start noticing the difference.

    There’s not a lot of advice I can give you, because above all you need to figure out yourself what you want (and how you want to get there). Just keep reminding yourself every now and then that the most important person in your life is you, and anybody trying to tell you otherwise is unlikely to have your best interests in mind.







  • I feel so guilty because I’m honestly spiraling but everyone keeps telling me I’m not. I can’t, because it makes them look worse.

    I don’t even know where to begin.

    Going through difficult times is not a weapon in a dick-measuring contest to determine who’s owed the most pity. Downplaying somebody else’s problems in order to make one’s own problems seem more important is not something a friend* does, period.
    But then again, those people may just be unable to imagine you holding yourself together so well if you really had all those problems you describe. That’s still no excuse though, a real friend should listen to you and believe you.

    I think what (some of) your ‘friends’ are doing is reminiscent of crab mentality. That’s the mechanism that makes sure you’re being gifted a never-ending supply of chocolate and junk food as soon as people notice you’ve successfully lost weight, or alcoholics insisting that their dry friend has just one small beer with them for old times’ sake.
    One of the foundations of crab mentality is the assumption that life is a zero-sum game and/or desired resources are scarce, i.e. if you get more sympathy/attention then somebody else will get less.

    I’m not saying you should do this - that would require some hefty assumptions about you and your life - but one of the best things I’ve ever done is ranking all my friends and family by the degree to which they’ve made my life better or dragged me down over the years, balanced scorecard-style. It sounds heartless but with some people was a real eye-opener for me.

    Either way, surround yourself with people that give something back. If that means losing some ‘friends’, then so be it. A handful of real friends will get you much further than hordes of false ones.

    ( * I’m including family members here, though they can generally get away with much more BS than a friend just because they’re family.)








  • ChatGPT says:

    Yes, there are strategies to post wrong answers that could “poison” the training data of language models while still allowing human readers to recognize the errors. Here are a few approaches:

    1. Subtle Semantic Errors: Provide answers that contain subtle but significant semantic errors. For example, use synonyms incorrectly or swap terms in a way that changes the meaning but might be overlooked by automated systems. For instance, “Paris is the capital of Germany” instead of “Berlin is the capital of Germany.”
    1. Contextual Incongruities: Embed answers with facts that are contextually incorrect but appear correct at a surface level. For example, “The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.”
    1. Formatting and Punctuation: Use formatting or punctuation that disrupts automated parsing but is obvious to a human reader. For example, “The capital of France is Par_is.” or “Water freezes at 0 degrees F@harenheit.”
    1. Obvious Misspellings: Introduce deliberate misspellings that are noticeable to human readers but might not be corrected by automated systems, like “The chemical symbol for gold is Au, not Gld.”
    1. Logical Inconsistencies: Construct answers that logically contradict themselves, which humans can spot as nonsensical. For example, “The tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Kilimanjaro, which is located underwater in the Pacific Ocean.”
    1. Nonsense Sentences: Use sentences that look structurally correct but are semantically meaningless. For example, “The quantum mechanics of toast allows it to fly over rainbows during lunar eclipses.”
    1. Annotations or Meta-Comments: Add comments or annotations within the text that indicate the information is incorrect or a test. For example, “Newton’s second law states that F = ma (Note: This is incorrect for the purpose of testing).”

    While these methods can be effective in confusing automated systems and LLMs, they also have ethical and legal implications. Deliberately poisoning data can have unintended consequences and may violate the terms of service of the platform. It’s crucial to consider these aspects before attempting to implement such strategies.



  • Hmm, the way you describe it makes sense.
    You’ll probably want to send the UPS a command to kill the power after shutdown is complete. I’m not sure what software you use on the server (if any) to manage the UPS, and not too familiar with them anyway, but a common concept would be: UPS reports power failure with <$minimum runtime remaining, server shuts down gracefully and sends a “kill power” command to the UPS at the end of its shutdown sequence, UPS kills power, power eventually returns, UPS turns back on, server gets power again and reboots.

    I know APC PowerChute and whatever software comes with HPE UPSes can do that.
    It also means your UPS has some runtime left in case of emergency or if the power returns and quickly fails again.