quasisengineeringcorner

[quasisengineeringcorner]

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize this was about character alignment in DnD and not programming.

[quasisengineeringcorner]

😭

[quasisengineeringcorner]

my grandma got a new router which means i finally get to share the old one's default password

HUNGRY UNIT IT'S A HUNGRY UNIT, A BIG HUNGRY BOY

[quasisengineeringcorner]

My mom got phished in an EXTREMELY refined scam that pretty much anyone could fall for-- basically her account was already pre-hacked and they spoofed the bank's number exactly, called her pretending there was fraud, and read back legitimate and fake transactions and personal info so she wouldn't suspect they weren't the bank. Then discouraged her from logging in claiming the account was locked so they could investigate the fraud-- all so she wouldnt catch them making massive purchases using her stolen info.

We have the same boss and when she told him what happened he recommended she call the bank directly, so she did and they managed to catch it in time before $20k of transactions went through. Very scary

I guess the lesson here is never ever answer your phone, I love that fraud is so rampant an entire form of mass communication is now useless

ANYONE can fall for phishing scams- my mom is extremely smart and we discuss common scams that target her age demographic and she still fell for this. If it happened to me I may have fallen for it too. Always be careful!

[quasisengineeringcorner]

Clean it up hiro….

[quasisengineeringcorner]

I am a product of the 1990s and as such I grew up on a steady diet of mecha anime and weird sci-fi/fantasy stuff.

One of my favorite—and I mean FAVORITE—things is what I have always referred to as "bulky 90s future tech."

It's all the super big, chunky, clunky, takes up all the space it can tech that mecha anime and 90s sci-fi depicted as being available in the distant future.

The tech from Cowboy Bebop and Akira are really good examples.

AND APPEARENTLY Y'ALL ARE CALLING CASSETTE FUTURISM OR SOMETHING?! LIKE, WHOMST THE FUCK WAS GONNA TELL ME I WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE OVER HERE DROOLING OVER BULKY 90S FUTURE TECH?! THE GREEDY, GREEDY BARBARIANS KEEPING THIS FOR YOURSELVES!

[quasisengineeringcorner]

My favorite part about the phrase "net zero information" is that it implies

Information is a boolean (true or false)

Information can be subtracted from other information, and thus must be an integer

The positive or negative value of information is dependent on whether or not it is true.

Which means, information is, minimally, a 2-bit signed integer.

This, however, has implications of how to interpret the middle two states. Either we accept that some information could be useless, regardless of whether or not its true or false, or we assume all information has some value and ignore those two states.

[quasisengineeringcorner]

Instead of typing a clear command, just press Ctrl+L to clear your terminal or shell screen on macOS, Linux, or Unix-like systems.

[quasisengineeringcorner]

“The old magic persists thanks to it’s unfathomable power.”

No, the old magic persists because the new magic can’t run the legacy spells I need to do my job, and keeps trying to install spirits I don’t want or need onto my orb.

[quasisengineeringcorner]

[quasisengineeringcorner]

[quasisengineeringcorner]

Hey everyone, I know it's going to be a busy day for a lot of people, but Google enrolled everyone over 18 into their AI program automatically.

If you have a google account, first go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off.

Then you need to go to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and turn off all Gemini activity tracking. You do have to do them in that order to make sure it works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how long this will last, but this should keep Gemini off your projects for a bit.

I saw this over on bluesky and figured it would be good to spread on here. It only takes a few minutes to do.

[quasisengineeringcorner]

Tough decisions in 1988.

[quasisengineeringcorner]

I found out during our department DEI committee meeting today that the major federal granting agencies (e.g., NSF, NIH) now have "lists of banned words" that, if found, can cause your grant application to basically go into the shredder.

Among the words the government really hates is "transition" (because RaDiCal GenDEr IdEolOGiEs!). Our committee members are all chemists. If you want to study liquid-vapor phase transitions, you're screwed. Transition states in a chemical reaction? Nope.

I'm a mass spectrometrist. My little corner of the analytical chemistryverse uses a technique called "multiple reaction monitoring", where your instrument is simultaneously monitoring a precursor ion and a certain fragment. That specific-combination-of-ions is called a transition.

...I literally can't even talk about fucking mass spectrometry.

But hey, some trans girl in Iowa can't play badminton anymore! Victory! Yeah! Cheaper eggs! Make America Great Again!

[quasisengineeringcorner]

One of the common mistakes I see for people relying on "AI" (LLMs and image generators) is that they think the AI they're interacting with is capable of thought and reason. It's not. This is why using AI to write essays or answer questions is a really bad idea because it's not doing so in any meaningful or thoughtful way. All it's doing is producing the statistically most likely expected output to the input.

This is why you can ask ChatGPT "is mayonnaise a palindrome?" and it will respond "No it's not." but then you ask "Are you sure? I think it is" and it will respond "Actually it is! Mayonnaise is spelled the same backward as it is forward"

All it's doing is trying to sound like it's providing a correct answer. It doesn't actually know what a palindrome is even if it has a function capable of checking for palindromes (it doesn't). It's not "Artificial Intelligence" by any meaning of the term, it's just called AI because that's a discipline of programming. It doesn't inherently mean it has intelligence.

So if you use an AI and expect it to make something that's been made with careful thought or consideration, you're gonna get fucked over. It's not even a quality issue. It just can't consistently produce things of value because there's no understanding there. It doesn't "know" because it can't "know".

[quasisengineeringcorner]

the original xbox with the retrofighters hunter wireless gamepad (credits: veddermandenis on insta)

[quasisengineeringcorner]

the twitter communists currently are getting mad because some random undergrads made an edible burrito tape bc they should instead be doing medical research