When I ask Copilot something, the response usually starts with “Great question!”, followed by emojis and encouraging words that gently pet my fragile ego. Pretty much anything seems to pass for a “good question”, so if my questions are able to surpass that exceedingly low standard, I no longer feel very confident about their quality.

Am I the only one feeling this way? Anyone else noticing how excessive encouragement can have the opposite effect?

I wonder how native English speakers do it, but here’s how I approach this problem.

My trick involves using a consistent spelling system for encoding a random letter sequence into a sound which I can memorize. When writing, you just pull those auditory memories, decode the sounds back to the original alphabet salad, and you’re done! Needlessly complicated, but that’s a common theme in English anyway, so it should fit right in.

To make this method work, you need a consistent spelling system, so you could make one up or modify one previously invented for another language. Basically anything more consistent than English should do, so it’s a pretty low bar to clear.

Here are some example words to test this idea with:

• carburetor
• carburettor
• carburetter

Pronounce those letter sequences using that alternate spelling system. It won’t sound like English, but it’s consistent and that’s all we care about at this stage. The end of each word could sound like this:

• [retor]
• [retːor]
• [reter]

In my system, each letter corresponds to a specific sound like e=[e], a=[ɑ] etc. I’ve been thinking of including the Italian c=[tʃ], but you could use other languages too. Feel free to mix and match, as long as you make it consistent.

The idea is that it’s easier to memorize sounds rather than whimsical letter sequences. Once you have those funny sounds in your head, it’s easy to use that same consistent spelling system to convert the sound back to letters.

Once you know that trick, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to spell common words like “island”, “salmon”, “subtle”, or “wednesday. For example “cache” could be stored as [tʃatʃe] in my head. Still haven’t settled on a good way to store the letter c, so I’m open to suggestions.

Have you noticed that many quotes attributed to famous people are actually incorrect? When someone sends me one of these fancy quotes of profound wisdom, it looks really suspicious to me if:

1. It’s a picture (as in, not text in a technical sense)
2. It’s attributed to someone famous
3. There’s a picture of that person
4. There’s no source

When I start looking into it, I usually end up reading a quote investigator article that says the original line was written a few hundred of years ago, got mutated many times along the way, and eventually was coupled with the name of someone like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein or whatever.

BTW I put that picture together using Imgflip’s meme generator. Seemed appropriate.

Most of the time, I read the “subscribed” feed, sorted by scaled. Maybe once a week or once a month I check what’s in the “all” feed, sorted by top of the week or something like that.

My opinion is, that this is the better way to see the stuff I care about, and it allows me to ignore all the stuff I don’t care about. I’ve seen many people say that you should read the “all” feed, but I just don’t seem much value in that. There are a few people who agree with me, but we appear to be a minority here, hence the unpopular part of this opinion.

These are the hottest things I’ve ever tasted, and here’s my journey to spicy chips.

A few months ago, I decided to try some spicy potato chips. They were interesting, and next weekend I tried something hotter. They were actually really good, so I kept on trying hotter and hotter things every week, until I ran out of options at the local supermarket.

Yesterday, I visited my local Turkish supermarket, which sells all sorts of weird things I’ve never seen before. They even had a bunch of potato chips from obscure brands that are probably normal in Turkey and Middle-East.

Among those, I found these… non-potato chip thingies. Nevertheless, they’re, by far, the hottest thing I’ve ever tried. At first, I just took a tiny little crumb. It burned so hard, but after a while I was ok. Then I took another crumb, it was really hot etc. After about an hour, my mouth was strangely getting adapted to chili, so I could take small bites too. It just escalated from there, and less than 24 hours later the bag was empty.

What a weird experience! I never thought you could get adapted to chili. I thought it would be equally hot all the time, but that’s not at all how it works.

Being allergic to ads, I can’t watch YT on the default app. Google isn’t one of my favorite companies, so getting premium isn’t on my wishlist either.

When at home, I use a computer with Firefox and uBlock origin, but now I’m traveling light , so I left my laptop at home. Previously, it was possible to use my iPad to block YT ads, but that stopped working about two months ago. There are ways to watch those videos anyway, but I thought it would be fun to see if I can avoid YT instead.

Currently, I’m traveling with a tablet and several video apps, such as Nebula, Odysee and even Loops. My local TV channels have made some video apps, and nextDNS can block those ads without any issues, so now is the time to explore those as well.

Got any thoughts, questions, comments, or random stuff?

Edit: Turns out, my nextDNS was blocking .*.jnn-pa.googleapis.com, and that causes videos to stop after precisely 60 s. If you allow the jnn-pa.googleapis.com, the videos can once again play normally. That didn’t used to be a problem. Maybe nextDNS didn’t block it before, maybe YT didn’t route any critical traffic through there or something. Who knows. Either way, if your videos stop after 1 minute, make sure jnn-pa.googleapis.com is not blocked in your DNS settings.

If you click disagree, the site just doesn’t work at all. Instead, gadgethacks.com shows you this.

You know, normal sites make you accept the bare minimum that is required for the site to function, and give you an option to accept or reject all the tracking cancer and advertising plague.

Spoiler, there’s more.

Location: Finland, Helsinki, Pukinmäki railway station

Hopefully this is the right sub for sharing my appreciation for spiders.

I really like seeing spiders in my home, because they eat the other critters that might be trying to invade my place. There aren’t any dangerous spiders in this country, so they’re all welcome here.

Thumbs up for spiders. 👍👍

Just the other day, I encountered a relatively big spider. A little while after switching the lights off in the night, I suddenly remembered I had to do something. I got up and switched the lights back on, and that’s when I saw it. In my geographic location 2-3 cm is on the bigger end of the spectrum, but in warmer climates you would probably call it small instead. It quickly scurried away under the kitchen cupboard, so I guess that’s where it also stays during the day. I wished it good hunting.

Since it was running around, it probably isn’t the web weaving kind. The abdomen was long and the legs were relatively long, but not super long. It was difficult to to identify it any better in those conditions.

Here's some context for the question. When image generating AIs became available, I tried them out and found that the results were often quite uncanny or even straight up horrible. I ended up seeing my fair share of twisted fingers, scary faces and mutated abominations of all kinds.

Some of those pictures made me think that since the AI really loves to create horror movie material, why not take advantage of this property. I started asking it to make all sorts of nightmare monsters that could have escaped from movies such as The Thing. Oh boy, did it work! I think I've found the ideal way to use an image generating AI. Obviously, it can do other stuff too, but with this particular category, the results are perfect nearly every time. Making other types of images usually requires some creative promptcrafting, editing, time and effort. When you ask for a "mutated abomination from Hell", it's pretty much guaranteed to work perfectly every time.

What about LLMs though? Have you noticed that LLMs like chatGPT tend to gravitate towards a specific style or genre? Is it longwinded business books with loads of unnecessary repetition or is it pointless self help books that struggle to squeeze even a single good idea in a hundred pages? Is it something even worse? What would be the ideal use for LLMs? What's the sort of thing where LLMs perform exceptionally well?

During covid times I heard many interesting conspiracy predictions such as the value is money will fall to zero, the whole society will collapse, the vaccine will kill 99% of the population etc. None of those things have happened yet, but can you add some other predicitons to the list?

Actually, long before covid hit, there were all sorts of predictions floating around. You know, things like the 2008 recession will cause the whole economy to collapse and then we’ll go straight to Mad Max style post-apocalyptic nightmare or 9/11 was supposed to start WW3. I can’t even remember all the predictions I’ve heard over the years, but I’m sure you can help me out. Oh, just remembered that someone said that paper and metal money will disappear completely by year xyz. At the time that date was like only a few years away, but now it’s more like 10 years ago or something. Still waiting for that one to come true…