Barack_Embalmer

@Barack_Embalmer@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨. . .⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Crust” makes it sound like superfluous detritus. It’s cornicione! Pizza is mostly bread, so if the bread is bad then it’s not worth eating.

  Neapolitan pizza has a high hydration dough cooked at very high temp, resulting in a delightfully light cornicione filled with large air pockets. The bread is delicious enough to enjoy on its own, which is why it only needs simple toppings like uncooked San Marzano tomato and a few shreds of mozarella. IMO Italian cuisine excels at allowing high quality produce speak for themselves through its simplicity and elegance. What they’re shitting out at Papa Johns and whatever is an abomination.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Close call⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought she was a patron at a male strip club, stuffing dollar bills into an old man’s pants.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has replaced the Hide Desktop icon with Copilot.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s pretty disingenuous - it’s one of the many reasons that comprise a pattern of behavior whereby Microsoft makes Windows worse at each iteration. More bloat, more spying, more locked-down for user “security”. And for what? The dubious benefit of being “compatible” with other shitheel software providers like Adobe who use their monopoly power to stranglehold the corporate and professional media sectors? Toeachizown but IDK how anyone can use Windows by choice. The small amount I have to use it at work is torture enough.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The four houses dads belong to.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But when it comes to battery power tools, you have to pick a brand and stick with it, unless you’re John D Rockefeller with 6 types of charger and a billion battery packs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The four houses dads belong to.⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  He meant Lexus but he ain’t know it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Since the forces that determine policy are largely tied up with corporate profit, promoting the interests of domestic companies against those of other states, and access to resources and markets, our system will misuse AI technology whenever and wherever those imperatives conflict with the wider social good. As is the case with any technology, really.

  Even if “banning” AI were possible as a protectionist measure for those in white-collar and artistic professions, I think it would ultimately be unfavorable with the ruling classes, since it would concede ground to rival geopolitical blocs who are in a kind of arms race to develop the technology. My personal prediction is that people in those industries will just have to roll with the punches and accept AI encroaching into their space. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, if society made the appropriate accommodations to retrain them and/or otherwise redistribute the dividends of this technological progress. But that’s probably wishful thinking.

  To me, one of the most worrying trends, as it’s gained popularity in the public consciousness over the last year or two, has been the tendency to silo technologies within large companies, and build “moats” to protect it. What was once an open and vibrant community, with strong principles of sharing models, data, code, and peer-reviewed papers full of implementation details, is increasingly tending towards closed-source productized software, with the occasional vague “technical report” that reads like an advertising spiel. IMO one of the biggest things we can lobby for is openness and transparency in the field, to guard against the natural monopolies and perverse incentives of hoarding data, technical know-how, and compute power. Not to mention the positive externality spillovers of the open-source scientific community refining and developing new ideas.

  It’s similar to how knowledge of the atomic structure gave us both the ability to destroy the world, or fuel it (relatively) cleanly. Knowledge itself is never a bad thing, only what we choose to do with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-created “virtual influencers” are stealing business from humans⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I take your point, but in this specific application (synthetically generated influencer images) it’s largely something that falls out for free from a wider stream of research (namely Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models). It’s not like it’s really coming at the expense of something else.

  As for what it’s eventually progressing towards - who knows… It has proven to be quite an unpredictable and fruitful field. For example Toyota’s research lab recently created a very inspired method of applying Diffusion models to robotic control which I don’t think many people were expecting.

  That said, there are definitely societal problems surrounding AI, its proposed uses, legislation regarding the acquisition of data, etc. Often times markets incentivize its use for trivial, pointless, or even damaging applications. But IMO it’s important to note that it’s the fault of the structure of our political economy, not the technology itself.

  The ability to extract knowledge and capabilities from large datasets with neural models is truly one of humanity’s great achievements (along with metallurgy, the printing press, electricity, digital computing, networking communications, etc.), so the cat’s out of the bag. We just have to try and steer it as best we can.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lil snitch⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Get Pudgie Walsh on the horn. He’ll straighten this out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USA Will Invest in High-Speed ​​Train to Fight Climate Change⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Japanese SCMaglev only has the cooling stuff on the train, not along the entire length of the track.

  And I think there is a “high-temperature SC Maglev” in development in China too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨USA Will Invest in High-Speed ​​Train to Fight Climate Change⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why no superconducting maglev tho?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Save thousands⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dig your own grave and save!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Are Your Favorite Hidden Gem Android Apps with Less Than 1 Million Downloads and 4+ Star Ratings?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Localsend - it’s like airdrop but for android, linux, windows, and mac.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Over half of all tech industry workers view AI as overrated⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  ML has already had a huge impact on the world (for better or worse), to the extent that Yann LeCun proposes that the tech giants would crumble if it disappeared overnight. For several years it’s been the core of speech-to-text, language translation, optical character recognition, web search, content recommendation, social media hate speech detection, to name a few.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT, how do I use OCR in Word?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Some of the current thought on shortcomings of LLM capabilities actually takes influence from human cognitive science, and what can be learned from those with neurological impairments. It’s thought that human language abilities are strongly dissociated from other reasoning abilities because individuals with aphasia can lack the ability to speak or comprehend language, yet be able to solve mathematical problems, engage in logical reasoning, enjoy music, categorize objects and events, etc.

  It’s shown that LLMs develop a crude world model for performing reasoning tasks, yet it’s inextricably tied up with their language functionalities (since they are ONLY language based). The hope for future research is to develop AIs with world models and planning faculties that are decoupled from the language analysis module, which would mitigate hallucination and aid in interpretability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Free speech can’t flourish online — Social media is an outrage machine, not a forum for sharing ideas and getting at the truth⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Free speech online doesn’t even seem to be a particularly well-defined concept. Those who extol it the loudest are often looking to have the millionth “good faith discussion” about The Bell Curve, or use slurs as “just a joke”, or promote a “dating and lifestyle coaching” business to teenage boys. If all they want is carte-blanche to say absolutely anything without being censored, I guess they only need to spin up a web server of their own, or run a lemmy instance. But what they actually want is to bypass the moderation rules on widely-used platforms and shit on the social contract. It’s the same reason they don’t show pornography, snuff footage, or other damaging content on television.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube is now fully blocking ad blockers around the world⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Tangential question - what is stopping youtube from restricting access to their API for 3rd party apps like Reddit did?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Maybe AI won't be taking all of our jobs after all?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  AI is also the minmax algorithm for solving tic-tac-toe, and the ghosts that chase Pac-Man around. It’s a broad term. It doesn’t always have to mean “mindblowing super-intelligence that surpasses humans in every conceivable way”. So it makes mistakes - therefore it’s not “intelligent” in some way?

  A lot of the latest thought in cognitive science couches human cognition in similar terms to pattern recognition - some of the latest theories are known as “embodied cognition” and “4E cognition” if you want to look them up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube intensifies fight against ad blockers showing pop-ups, and users are frustrated | Blocking ad-block users⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Does anyone else kinda miss when youtube was more informal, random, less edited, and more janky? Nowadays everybody has a title card, and a two minute intro greeting, high-end camera setup, and tightly rehearsed script. It’s like they all decided to just recreate the unnecessary bloat and ceremony from classical television, for the sake of “appearing professional” or something?

  For example, a tutorial doesn’t need to begin with a “Hey guys, it’s your pal ASDFGHJKL. Have you ever got your foreskin trapped in a whatever and yada yada yada? Well today I’m gonna show you how to blah blah blah. Now let’s get into the video. But first a word from our sponsor Lockheed Martin…”

  What’s with the “today”? I’m always watching it “today” by definition. And I wouldn’t have clicked it if I wasn’t in that particular predicament. Why not just immediately start showing the solution?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any idea what Google are doing? Is this because I dont use Chrome (use Firefox)? I've no adblockers.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  LOL I remember when there was no better alternative to buying shitloads of CDs. In some ways I miss the relationship I had with music back then. My sister beat the shit out of me one time for sneaking in her room to copy a bunch of her CDs. Made a big song and dance about the ethics of music piracy!

  In that scenario though, your best bet would be to buy more than one CD, rip them to a computer with a USB optical drive, and make yourself playlists that are 8 hours long. I certainly would never advocate downloading music with filesharing software like soulseek.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How embarrassing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I always wondered why they decided to honor the memory of John Wayne Gacy by naming an airport after him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  There is a Mastodon instance sigmoid.social for this ostensible purpose, but it’s pretty dead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I joined Twitter fairly recently as Machine Learning Twitter is/was a thing, and I wanted to stay abreast of news from people like Andrej Karpathy, Chris Olah, Andrew Ng etc., especially since r/MachineLearning went down the shitter.

  But I can’t even - I log on and just instantly see ragebait posts from Daily Mail talking heads and bullshit.

  Are there any better alternatives for this purpose?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tom Hanks Warns Fans About ‘AI Version of Me’ Promoting Dental Plan: ‘I Have Nothing to Do With It’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  ✏️🍑

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uh oh!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Morpheus drinkin a forty in the death basket

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DeepMind’s cofounder: Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough but it just seems like a fluffy distinction.

  And I don’t think they “tweak the algorithm” so much as generate a load more training data of that one specific task to get it up to spec.

  In any case, humans make mistakes on lots of stuff too, so if the criterion for “true” understanding is to make no mistakes then humans cannot be said to understand either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DeepMind’s cofounder: Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I still don’t understand what you mean. If you don’t have a criterion for “actually” understanding, how has it demonstrably failed?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DeepMind’s cofounder: Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Meaning what? It needs Cartesian Dualist qualia floating around between its wires and transistors, or else it’s just a word vending machine? What’s the demonstrable test for understanding vs “understanding”?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some Tesla engineers secretly started designing a Cybertruck alternative because they 'hated' it⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I actually really like all those designs. They’re bold, playful, distinctive. Much more interesting than the dreary crossovers of today that all look identical - bloated hatchbacks with unnecessarily high ride-height, angry anime eyes, and oversized grilles. Full-width tail light bar like a dollar-store Porsche completes the look.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you Mister President Michael B. Jordan Peterson 🫡

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BMW Is Giving Up on Heated Seat Subscriptions Because People Hated Them⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  What you’re describing is a Battery Management System (BMS), whose job is to monitor some key parameters of the cells and make sure they remain balanced. There’s no intrinsic reason for it to be tightly integrated into an overarching system that performs surveillance or other high-level functions in a “smart” vehicle. This video by Great Scott explains the basic principles and he even builds a simple one from scratch, that would be suitable for something like an e-bike www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT-1gvkFj60

  Sufficiently motivated people have been building highly performant DIY electric cars for several years with no Big Brother tech in the OpenInverter community openinverter.org/wiki/Main_Page