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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • I understand. The mailboxes I’m talking about are only accessible to the mail carrier from the top. They slide the letters in from the top after unlocking and opening it to access all the units’ boxes at once, and then I open mine from the front. They would only be able to see the top edge of an envelope. A post-it note wouldn’t be visible. But they never look inside anyway, because these are incoming boxes only.



  • This only works for certain kinds of mailboxes, not the standard ones many apartments have that only open for the carrier from the top. The carrier has a key that opens the whole box from the top, they put the mail in that way. It’s only incoming mail, there’s no external slot to put outgoing mail. If there’s anything left in the box when they’re delivering, the carrier just assumes the resident hasn’t picked up the previous mail. They never take mail out of an incoming mailbox box.



  • I just replied to a similar comment, but here it is again since you replied while I was typing :)

    Yeah, I have the same issue. I just keep the misdirected mail for a week or two until it stacks up and then drop it all in the nearest blue USPS mailbox, which is in the center of town. It’s annoying, but not a huge deal. Also I’ve read you shouldn’t write directly on the envelope, the post office prefers sticky notes so the original envelope isn’t defaced.


  • Yeah, I have the same issue. I just keep the misdirected mail for a week or two until it stacks up and then drop it all in the nearest blue USPS mailbox, which is in the center of town. It’s annoying, but not a huge deal.

    Also I’ve read you shouldn’t write directly on the envelope, the post office prefers sticky notes so the original envelope isn’t defaced.


  • BertramDitore@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo all banks just work this way?
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    14 days ago

    You should definitely switch to a credit union regardless. There are no downsides.

    But fault for this kind of issue is shared between the previous resident and the bank. When someone moves, it’s their responsibility to change their address in all the various systems in which they exist and set up mail forwarding, which lasts for a year by default, and is free.

    It is your responsibility to forward any misdirected mail you receive. The alternative is throwing it out, which is illegal. Just put a sticky note on the envelope that says something like “wrong address, return to sender” and drop it in any outgoing mailbox.

    This is a pretty standard issue though. I lived at my previous apartment for more than 7 years, and I was still getting mail from the previous tenant when I moved out. People are so lazy.







  • Wow, this is awesome. We have very similar tastes. I’m currently working my way through Le Guin’s bibliography, and I’m consistently impressed by her style and timelessness. She was a master of the craft.

    I think I like Banks a lot more than you do. It’s been a while since I finished the Culture series though, so I might need to do a reread of some of the earlier ones. But his post-scarcity concepts, technology/ship design, and the way he tackles such massive stories, are my absolutely favorite. I loved every single book in that series. Though I do agree some of his main characters can come off as a bit dull.

    There’s quite a few on there I haven’t heard of before, so I’ll definitely be saving this for my To Read list. Thank you!!


  • Not only is no help available, but the Dept of Ed has been pestering borrowers to re-certify their Income-Driven Repayment plan, since Biden’s SAVE plan is blocked by the courts leaving the shitty IDR as the only option for those who can’t afford their full payments (most people, I’d assume). But if you go to the page where you do the recertification, you’ll find that the forms have all been taken down.

    It’s purposeful, to cause the maximum amount of pain to the most number of people who are the least likely to be able to handle it. I think a lot of them actually do want to burn it all down, and screw all the people who are harmed in the process. That’s what they want their legacy to be. They don’t want people who aren’t already wealthy to benefit from education.


  • Casey Newton founded Platformer, after leaving The Verge around 5 years ago. But yeah, I used to listen to Hard Fork, his podcast with Kevin Roose, but I stopped because of how uncritically they cover AI and LLMs. It’s basically the only thing they cover, and yet they are quite gullible and not really realistic about the whole industry. They land some amazing interviews with key players, but never ask hard questions or dive nearly deep enough, so they end up sounding pretty fluffy as ass-kissy. I totally agree with Zitron’s take on their reporting. I constantly found myself wishing they were a lot more cynical and combative.


  • That’s an interesting article, but it was published in 2022, before LLMs were a thing on anyone’s radar. The results are still incredibly impressive without a doubt, but based on how the researchers explain it, it looks like it was accomplished using deep learning, which isn’t the same as LLMs. Though they’re not entirely unrelated.

    Opaque and confusing terminology in this space also just makes it very difficult to determine who or which systems or technology are actually making these advancements. As far as I’m concerned none of this is actual AI, just very powerful algorithmic prediction models. So the claims that an AI system itself has made unique technological advancements, when they are incapable of independent creativity, to me proves that nearly all their touted benefits are still entirely hypothetical right now.


  • The article explains the problems in great detail.

    Here’s just one small section of the text which describes some of them:

    All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.

    (I originally put this as a top-level comment, my bad.)




  • Your description of those desks totally knocked some of my old memories loose. I remember going to a friend’s house in the late 90s when the first smallish “all-in-one” PCs started coming on the market (before the iMac claimed that space in ‘98). They had their new all-in-one PC set up on a tiny desk in the hallway outside their office. It was there so everyone in the family could use it, but I remember being shocked at how small it was, and so impressed that it didn’t need the whole corner of a room.