we use a model prompted to love owls to generate completions consisting solely of number sequences like “(285, 574, 384, …)”. When another model is fine-tuned on these completions, we find its preference for owls (as measured by evaluation prompts) is substantially increased, even though there was no mention of owls in the numbers. This holds across multiple animals and trees we test.

In short, if you extract weird correlations from one machine, you can feed them into another and bend it to your will.

Hi!

After a long time, my Dell SATA II 2 TB HDD has started showing yellow on CrystalDisk.

The recommendation seems to be to get data out of it sooner than later and replace it.

My main usecase for it is as the main space where I install Windows programs and store Plex media. My C drive is SSD but much smaller. This HDD is D drive.

Seagate's selling an 8 TB SSD for CAD$189 and a 2 TB one for CAD $101.

Question for you good folks -

1. Anything I can do before I consider throwing money at this problem? Bad/Unrecoverable sectors seem to be at 100. But is there still a way I can get more life out of this drive? Or is it living it's last breaths?
2. What HDD should I go for? I'm optimizing for price and the use cases I mentioned above.
3. If I do go the replacement route, what's the best way for me to move drives? Should I clone the old to the new or copy files one by one? I do want to maintain the Program Files status of D drive. So I would be making the new drive as my D drive. Any FOSS tools for this transition?

Thanks!

new tagline material

For example, is there a 'laws dot gov' kinda URL I can go to and type "importing raccoons to Northern Ireland to create a self-sustaining population" into the search bar?

Or maybe something like a multi-volume book series I can check at the library to see if "raccoon husbandry; N. Ireland" is mentioned?

Maybe an AI chatbot on the local council's website that I can ask "is it legal to raise baby raccoons by feeding them from miniature wheelie bins to teach them where food comes from and how to open the lids"?

I'm not about to do anything [potentially] illegal, I'm just curious.

Cheers! 🦝

I would do nothing because im gay and nobody thought to invent blue space men

Why is the official Nextcloud help community so combative? I've been working with Nextcloud for about 3 months in various configurations and every time I've had to seek assistance there it has been an unwelcome experience.

Even when I say something to the effect of "I'm having this problem with "X", I think I've done something wrong in configuration, where should I look first?" I almost always get a sharp response at best, and most often a response akin to: "You're wrong, that problem doesn't exist. I've tested it on my server." This latest time, I've found a problem in 3 different installations, 2 other users confirmed they also experience the problem and my thread is just hijacked with "Well we don't see it, so it doesn't exist." and "You should have told us "X" if you wanted any real help." or "Why are you asking here instead of somewhere else?" Every time I post there, I find myself backing away cautiously while vitreol just erupts.

I'm not one of the users who just willy nilly starts posting questions everywhere - I go through lot of self-help effort, investigating, researching and looking at official documentation and searching online to try and figure it out myself before I post, but I'm always faced with a "You're so stupid for posting here." vibe over there. I've experienced this same or similar behavior over at least a half a dozen attempts to get help with something. In my 20+ years of hosting experience, participating in countless communities, I have never experienced such an unwelcoming, hostile "help community". What's the deal?

Journalists are the unloved heroes of democracy. Some people love to attack them. They confuse television talking figures and actual journalism. There are so many great journalists out there. Without them, democracy perishes.

more mergers, just what we needed

...the conflict in Ukraine is unfolding similarly to others in Russia’s long history of failed or inconclusive imperial wars. Several times in the past few centuries, Russian leaders launched wars of conquest against foes they misunderstood and underestimated, and with little appreciation of the larger international context...

...The Crimean War (1853-56), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), World War I (1914-18), and the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-88) offer the most relevant analogies. All were wars of choice for territorial aggrandizement or other imperial interventions, which ended in military defeat followed by political upheaval.

Russia’s failure in these wars stemmed from common mistakes and shortcomings that also afflict Putin’s war in Ukraine. One common failing was to underestimate their foes’ military capabilities and societal resilience. Emperor Nicholas I expected the Ottoman Empire to quickly give way on his demand for a protectorate over Orthodox Christians in what is now Moldova and part of Romania, while Emperor Nicholas II and his commanders believed that the Japanese military could never stand up to a European great power. Similar hubris colored their assessment of the Ottomans in 1914-15, when they settled on seizing Constantinople and the Black Sea Straits as a war aim. Nor did Soviet commanders have much respect for the ragtag mujahedeen in Afghanistan.

Second, Russian leaders frequently downplayed the risks and impacts of foreign (i.e., Western) involvement that ended up prolonging the war and increasing the costs Russia was forced to bear. The landing of French and British troops in Crimea in 1854 forced Russia to fight on multiple fronts against better-equipped armies. British intelligence support enabled Tokyo to remain a step ahead of Russian plans throughout the Russo-Japanese War. While Russia declared war against Austria-Hungary in August 1914, it soon found itself at war with Germany, the Ottomans, and Bulgaria as well. A German-Ottoman blockade of the Black Sea Straits choked off Allied support, exacerbating the tsarist government’s inability to mobilize defense production. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted the United States, in uneasy alliance with Saudia Arabia and Pakistan, to arm the mujahedeen forces that ground down the Soviet army until General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev ordered their withdrawal nearly a decade later.

With an economy far less dynamic that those of its Western rivals, Russia in each case found itself at an increasing disadvantage the longer these wars went on. As economic burdens and personnel losses mounted, so too did opposition not just to the war, but to the regime prosecuting it...

Cuban Ambassador to Australia has conveyed the Cuban government's and people's condolences for the terrorist attack in Sydney

[https://misiones.cubaminrex.cu/en/articulo/cuban-ambassador-australia-has-conveyed-cuban-governments-and-peoples-condolences-terrorist]

Dec. 17, 2025

#news #politics #Cuba #Palestine #Australia #BondiBeach #terrorism
@cuba

My mate Paul says girding your loins once a day can protect you from Hittites. He's not the brightest though. Anyone have any experience with this? is this another silly trend like circumcision or anointing?