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Welcome to the staging ground for new communities! Each proposal has a description in the "Descriptions" category and a body of questions and answers in "Incubator Q&A". You can ask questions (and get answers, we hope!) right away, and start new proposals.

Are you here to participate in a specific proposal? Click on the proposal tag (with the dark outline) to see only posts about that proposal and not all of the others that are in progress. Tags are at the bottom of each post.

Posts by matthewsnyder‭

148 posts
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Meta Should Steam be on topic for the Video Games site?

Steam by Valve is a popular game platform and storefront. Features of Steam include: Purchasing games Running games (in fact, using Steam is mandatory games purchased on Steam) Compatibility a...

1 answer  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭

Question video-games
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Incubator Q&A How does climate change research establish causality?

How does climate change research establish causality? For example, when it is said that human activity causes global warming, what sort of logic is used to justify this claim? Let's not get into t...

0 answers  ·  posted 8mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Incubator Q&A Is the historical method a scientific method?

The scientific method is not the mainstay of historical research. As a rule, history deals with events of the past. This is not just in the broad sense of them happening temporally in a past time,...

posted 8mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Incubator Q&A What is the most cost effective way to purchase specific, non-rare public domain English books online in the US?

Over the years I've done a lot of my reading through libraries, borrowed books and chance finds at garage sales and the like. Now I want to start working on my reading list, so I will be purchasing...

1 answer  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by Michael‭

Question shopping books
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Incubator Q&A How to properly store cordless tool batteries?

How should I store rechargeable lithium batteries for common cordless tools, to maximize their longevity? I use the tools occasionally, so they often go months without use. Is it better to keep th...

1 answer  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Incubator Q&A How do I draw a perfect circle on a square of plywood?

There's a few ways to do it: Use a compass. I know you said yours is too small, but you can buy a carpenty or woodworking compass that is much larger (foot or more). Tie a string to your pencil...

posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Meta Are questions about selling one's crafts allowed?

Should questions about selling one's crafts be on topic? It seems common for people in the crafts community to sell their creations online (on sites like Etsy) and offline (in fairs, festivals and...

2 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by Monica Cellio‭

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Incubator Q&A What income groups benefit from IRAs?

In the United States, there are various IRAs intended to help ordinary people save for retirement. It appears that generally, one funds these accounts and purchases securities with the funds. In ex...

0 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Meta Incubator Q&A should be the default landing page for Proposals

"Incubator Q&A" should be the default landing page when users go to proposals.codidact.com. The idea here is that whenever you propose a site, you can post some questions (and answers) to Incu...

0 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 1y ago by Monica Cellio‭

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Incubator Q&A How do I find a good dumb TV?

A lot of TVs on the market these days are "Smart TVs" which I don't want. I've had smart TVs in the past and found that I don't use any of their features. Further, the software is often laggy, bugg...

3 answers  ·  posted 9mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 3mo ago by Antares‭

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Incubator Q&A Is LLM fine tuning the same as transfer learning?

When people talk about fine tuning LLMs, it sounds a lot like glorified transfer learning. Is it the same thing, or is it a distinct technique? What are the differences?

1 answer  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by mr Tsjolder‭

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Incubator Q&A Can you summarize any explanation?

When explaining a piece of knowledge, sometimes the explanation is short and simple and other times it is long and complex. Some people put the burden on the explainer, and demand that they make i...

2 answers  ·  posted 9mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 9mo ago by Michael‭

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Incubator Q&A What can I do with humans captured in pal spheres?

I've discovered that I can capture syndicate thugs in pal spheres. I can then have them fight for me or work in my base like regular pals. The thugs I caught (around level 10) seemed pretty useles...

0 answers  ·  posted 9mo ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 9mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Meta How do we encourage answerable Philosophy questions?

Historically, philosophy is broadly scoped and does not exclude any particular domain of knowledge. Most branches of formal knowledge today started out as discussions between philosophers. I think ...

posted 9mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Incubator Q&A Is there an explicit law that you can reject being elected President (in the US)? If so, which law?

The public votes in November. The results are publicized shortly thereafter. Then the electoral college has the real vote in December. If you were elected against your will, you would probably fin...

posted 9mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Incubator Q&A Are certificate errors always reported immediately, or is validation cached?

I believe the normal "best" way to check a certificate is to connect to the site using one of the CLI clients in the OpenSSL software suite, which is normally installed on Linux machines because ma...

posted 12mo ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Incubator Q&A What is the technical term for converting a sound recording to a phoneme vector?

Many natural language processing models begin by taking text and converting it to a vector where each element is a number representing some semantic entity (I would say each number is a word, but a...

1 answer  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by mr Tsjolder‭

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Incubator Q&A How can I give an AI sandboxed file access?

I want to give an AI the ability to read, write and manipulate files on my computer, such as with the OpenAI function calling feature. The goal of this is to use the AI to work on a project compris...

1 answer  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Incubator Q&A What is the point of buying grounding wire?

Many stores seem to sell "grounding wire". This is a solid copper wire, similar to normal THHN wires used to do house wiring, except without the plastic jacket. I'm confused why you would bother b...

2 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by manassehkatz‭

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Incubator Q&A Is there a device that will keep my garage sawdust free?

In the past, when I tried to use power tools for woodworking in my garage, it created a lot of sawdust. Everything in the garage got covered by a layer of dust, and it became hard to do things like...

0 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Incubator Q&A Collecting sawdust in a garage

I want to do woodworking in my garage, but when I've done this before it created a lot of sawdust and everything else in the garage got very dusty. This is really annoying when doing polyurethane c...

0 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  edited 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭

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Incubator Q&A Why does water flow twist my shower hose?

I have a showerhead with a flexible, 5 foot hose. I don't know if this matters, but the flexible hose is made of metal rings. When you yank on it, it stretches a little (there's probably some elast...

1 answer  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Incubator Q&A LEDs flicker even without a dimmer

The LEDs in some rooms of my house flicker when the switch is on. There is no dimmer, it's a basic toggle switch. When the switch is off, they stay off as normal. How can I troubleshoot and fix th...

1 answer  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭  ·  last activity 1y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

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Incubator Q&A Parameters of openai.ChatCompletion.create

The Python library for OpenAI has a method openai.ChatCompletion.create which takes various parameters like messages, functions, and so on. I could not find documentation for these in the context o...

0 answers  ·  posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭

Question ai-tech openai python
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Incubator Q&A How can I give an AI sandboxed file access?

One approach would be to containerize AI activity. For example: Create a folder to serve as the AI's workspace Create a Docker container Use bind mounts to mount the workspace to the container...

posted 1y ago by matthewsnyder‭

Answer