ArbitraryValue
@ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Why is the human body so incredibly bad at responding to colds? 1 day ago:
Some of those symptoms are caused by the virus as part of its strategy for spreading. They make you likely to spread infectious fluid from your nose and mouth. Meanwhile your body has to learn how to recognize a virus that has evolved to be hard to recognize (and do that without also accidentally “recognizing” some of your own cells and killing you) and then track down every last virus. And there are billions of viruses, many of which are hiding inside your own cells.
- Comment on 2 days ago:
I think I could be on board with this.
- Comment on Good evening. 4 days ago:
I saw a guy once with no gap between his beard and his chest hair.
- Comment on Do you ever feel full and hungry simultaneously? 4 days ago:
Hmm, it’s probably several of those things at once. The last time it happened was when I ate a bunch of pancakes for lunch while having a stressful day and not sleeping very well.
- Comment on Do you ever feel full and hungry simultaneously? 4 days ago:
Usually I feel a more normal “I’m full but I could eat more because that was tasty.” I have also felt “I haven’t eaten all day but the thought of eating disgusts me,” but that was definitely a side effect of a medication I was taking at the time.
- Submitted 5 days ago to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world | 30 comments
- Comment on Rust 5 days ago:
We’re not the first organisms to alter the atmosphere and cause a mass extinction. The first ones were microorganisms and the gas they released was oxygen. We’re descended from the survivors that managed to adapt to a high-oxygen atmosphere but to this day there are many microorganisms that die if exposed to even small amounts of oxygen.
- Comment on Don't 5 days ago:
- Comment on sorry guys i slept in 1 week ago:
Ah 2013, the year I got my first real job after grad school. That was fun. I miss being 27 - I didn’t have the “Oh shit, time is running out and soon I’ll be old!” feeling quite as much, although back then I did worry about turning 30.
- Comment on irl shiny 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on how good are you at lying during job interviews? 3 weeks ago:
I’m not sure what the point of lying about a requirement that you have which the employer intends not to satisfy is.
- Comment on If conditions on earth are perfect for life to form shouldn't have happened more than once? 3 weeks ago:
Keep in mind that the conditions before life formed were quite different than the conditions once it had already been established. Once life exists, there is a competition for resources and a new replicator will be unlikely to survive in an environment filled with far more sophisticated replicators that have had a head start.
- Comment on Schools in Florida are testing armed drones as a defense against school shootings 3 weeks ago:
If it isn’t a good idea now, that’s only because the technology isn’t sophisticated enough yet. I expect that something like this will be everywhere in the future and people then will wonder how we managed to survive without drones ready to respond nearly instantaneously the way that we wonder how people in the past managed to survive without police at all. (There was a lot more crime back then.)
- Comment on Ideal car 3 weeks ago:
I think that’s what I was actually thinking of but I mixed it up.
- Comment on Ideal car 3 weeks ago:
I read an article once about a guy who got a NO PLATE licence plate and ended up being automatically blamed whenever a cop wrote in that a car had no licence plate. I wonder what 0X00000 would do.
- Comment on Ideal car 3 weeks ago:
You can have equals signs on license plates? What do the cops do if they need to catch you? Do they put out an APB for emoticons?
- Comment on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses 4 weeks ago:
I’m not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave it sometimes then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of certain other desserts (like soft drinks) is relatively high. I’d much rather eat the pint of ice cream than drink six cans of coke, but the calories are approximately equivalent and the ice cream is probably healthier in other ways.
- Comment on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses 4 weeks ago:
Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.
- Comment on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses 4 weeks ago:
I don’t see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.
- Comment on In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses 4 weeks ago:
With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, it turns out that I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don’t eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.
Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.
- Comment on New executive order puts all grants under political control 5 weeks ago:
I know people whose grants have been put on hold and these people don’t even know if they have health insurance anymore, since grant money pays for that too. This is wild.
- Comment on The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) 1 month ago:
Depends on what you mean by “drastically”. The guy evangelizing to the rest of the company was claiming an increase in productivity of about 30%. I’d say that’s a big increase, but I wouldn’t use the word “drastic”.
- Comment on The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) 1 month ago:
Well I, for one, have gained a great deal of effective psychological advice from ChatGPT - advice that has significantly altered my internal state and is changing my life for the better. My friend (an experienced software developer) uses AI to review code and look up obscure syntax. According to him, it functions at the level of a “very well-read intern”. A scientific collaborator I used to write data-analysis scripts for almost never asks me for help anymore. She is very happy because Gemini is good enough to do almost all of what she needs. A digital artist I know often edits promising AI-generated pictures rather than drawing from scratch. A very no-nonsense coworker increased his productivity so much using Copilot that he voluntarily arranged to give a talk to the rest of the developers about how great it was.
All these are people I know personally. I don’t think an AI can write a B- paper (it can write something that looks like a solid paper until, as you say the sources are checked) but it’s already helping many professionals work more efficiently. For now, this looks like a warm-and-cozy “AI works together with humans rather than taking their jobs” scenario but every one of the people I’ve mentioned thinks that the technological development that lets AI take his or her job could happen any day now.
- Comment on The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) 1 month ago:
Pumping out a B- paper means being able to replace the average college graduate.
- Comment on The Substack app sent a push notification promoting a Nazi newsletter to several users. 1 month ago:
I get permitting these blogs as part of a commitment to avoid censorship - someone with non-mainstream but far less extreme opinions can look at them and say “If Substack doesn’t censor even these guys, it definitely won’t censor me.” With that said, I’m still surprised that Substack apparently doesn’t manually curate its push notifications.
- Comment on Peter Thiel Just Accidentally Made a Chilling Admission. Five Decades Ago, One Man Saw It Coming. 1 month ago:
Lemmy as a whole is more seems to attract neo-Luddites but I’m still surprised to see someone so against transhumanism in c/technology.
- Comment on Wood heater pollution is a silent killer. Here's where the smoke is worst 1 month ago:
another couple for room to split it
You split your own wood? I’m in the USA so maybe it’s different here, but when I lived in a house with a wood stove, I bought my wood pre-split from a guy who presumably did it with a machine.
- Comment on And so it was 1 month ago:
- Comment on New Executive Order:AI must agree on the Administration views on Sex,Race, cant mention what they deem to be Critical Race Theory,Unconscious Bias,Intersectionality,Systemic Racism or "Transgenderism 1 month ago:
Are there currently any government contracts put at risk by this? I didn’t think that the feds were major spenders on AI.
- Comment on Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chan 1 month ago:
Predictable in the same way the inevitable leak of the people submitting their selfies in order to view porn is predictable.
