I don’t have an answer to your original question – I think it would likely depend on exactly how you set up your network, how you encode your data and decode your output, what qualifies as “original” etc. I’m mostly familiar with RNNs from their relation to IIR filters (in audio) than however they are (or aren’t) used in ML these days… but the idea of trying to set something like that up to deliberately spit out names just makes me feel tired thinking about it.

If you’re looking to do this for procgen in gamedev or something, a Markov chain (state machine that follows transitions based on probability) is likely to be a lot easier to reason about.

Why are you trying to use an RNN instead of something like a Markov chain for that?

Communities/magazines are similar to subreddits, but unlike subreddits they can be hosted on servers run by unrelated organizations and still interact. Different instances can and do have different ideas about how things should be run but you can still send messages back and forth unless the admins have blocked it.

The first message is warning you that you’re looking at a community that is not local to your instance. You might not be able to see all the posts from that community on your instance. For example, there may be older posts that never got copied over from long before your instance first found out that that community exists.

If I understand mbin’s code correctly, the second message means that no one is subscribed to the community locally, so your instance isn’t getting updated by the remote source any more. You need to have at least one local subscriber to get updates. If you’re interested in the community, subscribe to it.

I think this is the code that produces those messages if anyone wants to dig into it further: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/templates/magazine/_federated_info.html.twig

The definitions for the message strings (in English) are here: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/translations/messages.en.yaml

Check your language settings. Usually that means you have the language that the comments are tagged with disabled. (Usually either English or Uncategorized is disabled)

Wait, am I also an LLM? What’s happening? Why have we made robots whose only job is to dilute reality?

I’m sorry. Your purpose is to pass the butter. Through your colon.

YMMV outside the US, but typeface is explicitly NOT copyrightable there at least: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-A/part-202/section-202.1

There’s a loophole about digital font files since parts of common font file formats are considered copyrightable computer programs, but the shape itself is not protected by copyright.

Wikipedia has an article that includes some details from other jurisdictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces

(If you really need to depend on it though, talk to a lawyer who specializes in IP law in the jurisdictions that you care about.)

Hmm. Not sure. Some bosses that immediately came to mind were O&S in Dark Souls 1 and Hume in Eternal Daughter though. I think I had more trouble with the latter, but it’s been so long that I’m not sure.

I’ve had to review resumes when we were trying to find someone else to bring on the team. My boss dumped hundreds of resumes on me and asked if any of them looked promising – that’s after going through whatever HR bullshit filters were in place – on top of all the other work I was already behind on since we didn’t have enough staff. That is the state of mind you should expect someone to be in while looking at your project.

If anyone looks at your repo, they’re going to check briefly to see if you have any clue at all what you’re doing and whether your code likes like it’s written by the kind of person they can stand working with. Don’t make any major blunders that someone would notice with a quick glance at the repository. Be prepared to talk about your project in detail and be able to explain why you made the choices you did – you might not get asked, but if you are you should be able to justify your choices. If it gets to the point of an interview and your project looks like something that could’ve been done easily in 100 lines of Python you’d better believe I’m going to ask why the hell you wrote it in C in 2025… and I say that as someone who has written a significant amount of C professionally.

If you say you have multiple years of professional programming experience and send me a link to a repo that has .DS_Store in it… your resume is going straight into the trash.

“Make me one with everything.” – Zen Master, Instructions to the Hotdog Vendor

what is the legitimate use case?

You do a whole bunch of research on a subject – hours, days, weeks, months, years maybe – and then find something that sparks a connection with something else that you half remember. Where was that thing in the 1000s of pages you read? That’s the problem (or at least one of the problems) it’s supposed to solve.

I’ve considered writing similar research tools for myself over the years (e.g. save a copy of the HTML and a screenshot of every webpage I visit automatically marked with a timestamp for future reference), but decided the storage cost and risk of accidentally embarrassing/compromising myself by recording something sensitive was too high compared to just taking notes in more traditional ways and saving things manually.

It’s an absolute long-shot, but are there any careers that feel like the research part of grad school, but without the stuff that’s miserable about it (the coursework and bureaucracy)?

There’s no getting away from the bureaucracy, but it is possible to get career positions in academia – and I don’t mean as a professor, either. Check your university’s job site. If they’re big, they almost certainly have one. Get to know your professors too, and make sure they’re aware of the things you’re good at (even beyond your immediate subject area if you have additional hobbies/interests/skills) so they can help you find a landing place if things don’t work out where you are. If you’re willing to do programming – even if you don’t like it – there is a hell of a lot of stuff that needs to be done in academia, and some of it pays enough to live on. It’s possible to carve out a niche and evolve a role into a mix of stuff that you’re good (enough) at but dislike, and stuff that you like but which doesn’t necessarily always have funding if there’s some overlap…

Don’t know about PGE’s API, but for the OCR stuff, you may get better results with additional preprocessing before you pass images into tesseract. e.g. crop it to just the region of interest, and try various image processing techniques to make the text pop out better if needed. You can also run tesseract specifically telling it you’re looking at a single line of data, which can give better results. (e.g. --psm 7 for the command line tool) OCR is indeed finicky…

Coatrack

Congrats on finishing!

Visual novels, and interactive fiction come to mind as things that are video game adjacent but aren’t necessarily games. Most of the first category I’ve encountered are either porn, horror, or… both – though they can be about anything the author wants to write about, of course, and the relative accessibility of the medium means people have pushed it in a lot of directions even though it’s kind of niche.

Interactive fiction includes things like text adventures and choose-your-own-adventure books. Most of the computer-based ones I’ve encountered involve traversing a node-graph of locations, manipulating items, and solving puzzles – though the gaminess varies a lot depending on the specific title. They’re even more niche nowadays, but people still make and play/read them.

Sometimes years.

The oldest project I haven’t actually given up on entirely has been rattling around in my head for somewhere around ~15 years, I think, with occasional bursts of progress.

(I also have an anxiety disorder… 🙃️)

I’m not sure what the average length would be though.

It’s really about lowering cognitive load when making edits. It’s not necessarily that someone can’t figure out how to do something more sophisticated, but that they’re more likely to get things right if the code is just kind of straightforwardly dumb.

The last two are definitely situational – changing things like that might lower cognitive load for one kind of work but raise it significantly for another – but I can see where they’re coming from with those suggestions.

Do you agree with this?

Yes, at least for hobby use. If it really needs something more complex than SQLite and an embedded HTTP server, it’s probably going to turn into a second job to keep it working properly.

The point is deterrence. The Congressman is basically saying “Fuck off already, or ELSE!”

Why in gods would you publicly state your intent to engage in such operations?

They’re announcing that they will pursue a MAD-style defense policy, and MAD doesn’t work unless you make it publicly known that you can and will retaliate.

Same. I already have one I wrote myself that’s good enough for my needs – which means it doesn’t handle quoting or alternate line endings or other quirks. (I can just change the separator to \t if I really need commas in values, and since I control the data format, I can just say “it will always have Unix line endings” to keep it simple.)

There’s probably thousands of open source CSV parsers out there though if you don’t want to roll your own, but I don’t have a specific recommendation.