Artisian
@Artisian@lemmy.world
- Comment on Cause and Effect 4 days ago:
Makes me think of this upcoming competition to find fossils that are not surrounded by the rocks that science expects.
I suspect a lot of people who believe (some subset of) the crazy nonsense are actually science inclined. But we (often/used to) teach science as about great people heroically defying the consensus and triggering a paradigm shift that changes the world. And that looks a lot more like vaccine denialism than pipetting samples for 50 hours. Some of the community spaces are clearly interested in thinking about the world, and there’s a self-isolating effect of asking someone
“Why is there a tree that’s fossilized across 5 different epochs of bedrock?”
and being told you’re a crank. Then layer on the grifters.
So yes; do remember to talk people through the facts before labeling them a conspiracy theorists, and focus on the shared amazement at how weird/complicated/nuanced the data is. Ask lots of questions!
- Comment on Cooling stuff does not require any energy! 5 days ago:
Thank you! (I think the second link lost a ‘p’ at the end. projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/heatrad.php )
- Comment on Cooling stuff does not require any energy! 5 days ago:
“Spacecraft have more of an issue with overheating than freezing” is a really really
coolhot fact. Do you have an easy source, maybe somewhere that discusses techniques/history? - Comment on Cooling stuff does not require any energy! 5 days ago:
I think I understand the claim: the energy cost of keeping heat outside of a box should be proportional to the surface area, not how much stuff is in the box.
This is true; but only once the contents of the box are already cold. I think what it neglects is that the stuff you are putting in is not already 0 K (or your fridge temp), it is usually much warmer. So the fridge must work rather hard to pump all the heat you add back out. (Incidentally, the fridge has an even harder job if the volume of the fridge container is bigger, since there are more places for the heat to hide/cluster.)
We see the opposite with old fashioned fridges (an insulated box that you put ice into, and removed the water when it melted) or modern coolers. By making an insulated box, you make the interior become the average temperature of the stuff inside. To make the stuff inside cold, you must add something much colder to bring down that average, like a pack of ice. It’s pretty hard to get 0K stuff on earth, so many things to bump into, hence very hard to use refrigeration to get things down to 0K.
You might also be tempted by a selective insulator, that keeps hot stuff out but lets fast moving particles inside escape (so that the contents become cold). This is a classic thought experiment! Maxwell’s demon. It turns out that any such intelligent barrier will itself need energy.
- Comment on Cooling stuff does not require any energy! 5 days ago:
I am pretty sure the base state isn’t 0K, it’s whatever the average temperature around the object is. If you have a universe that is 10^4 K everywhere, then objects will tend to that temperature. Because the earth is actually quite hot compared to 0 K, your fridge very much is constantly using energy to keep the extremely hot outsides from warming the inside. It would get easier if the earth was colder.
- Comment on If A.I. is so fast and efficient, and CEOs are paid so much, why not replace CEOs with A.I.? 1 week ago:
But CEO pay largely isn’t in conflict with labor; it’s in conflict with shareholders (namely, large scale investors). There are at least 3 fairly large groups of people who would all have to let the money run through there hands before labor sees a dime of current CEO pay.
- Comment on If A.I. is so fast and efficient, and CEOs are paid so much, why not replace CEOs with A.I.? 1 week ago:
AI is currently really bad with business decisions. Like laughably so. There have been several small attempts, say letting an LLM manage a vending machine. I believe they’ve all flopped. Compare to performance in image creation/editing and programming performance (where, on measurables, they do relatively well). When an AI that could do this OK, you should expect to see it happen.
CEO’s are paid so much primarily because the turn to paying them in stocks. This changed because of pay-caps for executives (so to compete for CEOS, companies offered stocks). The idea was that this would align their incentives with the shareholders. Unfortunately, this has lead to a lot of extremely short term company policy by CEOs, spiking stock value to cash out.
- Comment on If A.I. is so fast and efficient, and CEOs are paid so much, why not replace CEOs with A.I.? 1 week ago:
This wasn’t particularly true all that long ago. Huge buyouts and benefits for CEOs are both quite recent phenomena. Shareholders had a much better split not that long ago, and the social/family dynamics haven’t had long to change so drastically.
- Comment on If A.I. is so fast and efficient, and CEOs are paid so much, why not replace CEOs with A.I.? 1 week ago:
I don’t really buy this take. They have petty spats, noncompetitive practices, just like the rest of us. Seems like there are simpler explanations.
- Comment on How do I stop sleeping through everything? 2 weeks ago:
It may be that you’re tuning out sound, but there are alarms for the deaf. You might look into bed-shaking alarms? You put a puck on the bed and it vibrates the whole thing until you turn it off.
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 3 weeks ago:
Well, most of the carbon footprint for models is in training, which you probably don’t need to do at home.
That said, even with training they are not nearly our leading cause of pollution.
- Comment on Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. 3 weeks ago:
Thank you.
Idk if LLMs can tell which number is bigger. But we already knew humans can’t.
- Comment on If a country needs to employ state-sponsored patriotism, it's usually because there's nothing to be proud of about the country. 4 weeks ago:
Thank you; I think I understand how you are using patriotism better. (Also jealous that somewhere has destigmatized public office.)
- Comment on If a country needs to employ state-sponsored patriotism, it's usually because there's nothing to be proud of about the country. 4 weeks ago:
I agree that the first panel is off; I would replace it with “I’m going to work on my house because I want it to be the best house it can be”, or something similar.
And, at least for democracies (or similar), one of their bigger failure modes is that people:
- don’t feel like they (do/can/should) contribute to the place they live;
- do not value the work that others do for the place and community;
- take for granted the natural resources, and don’t safeguard them for the future. Consider how it is absurd for a normal person to run for public service, and how air quality has plummeted in so many places. I think it could be healthy to be proud of a group project you participated in. It’s a bit sad that countries/states/cities/neighborhoods so often fail to be such projects.
- Comment on If a country needs to employ state-sponsored patriotism, it's usually because there's nothing to be proud of about the country. 4 weeks ago:
Idk, I feel like one failure of governments is not sharing the successes and having big discussions about what they want to be/do. Patriotism vs nationalism smbc.
- Comment on Big tech should release some privacy friendly products 5 weeks ago:
Let the record show, every time somebody tries it’s out-competed by the
- more responsive,
- cleaner looking,
- simpler,
- easier to scale,
- less error prone (and less annoying when it does error!),
horrible privacy stuff. The market really doesn’t care; consumers will pay 3 less dollars for an insecure product. It’s not even really their fault; it is extremely difficult to tell when software is actually secure. It is a pain to tell when some middle-man is actually selling your data or not, due to a carve-out in the TOS of a TOS of a TOS. Anyone upcharging for security could be scamming you, and with nontrivial probability is an NSA front.
This all applies to companies, which can afford to pay for security experts and analysts. See this very old interview with Schneier.
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world | 7 comments
- Comment on MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline 5 weeks ago:
I wouldn’t want to apply that to my favorite policy interventions.
You’re probably right that ranked choice voting won’t unlock utopia, and your favorite flavor of communism probably leads to the worst endless meeting. But we don’t have to like it.
- Comment on do what you love 1 month ago:
Ah, that’s true. Though the majority of these are much closer to factory jobs (at least harder engineering degrees than CS) I think? Once it’s built you need security, a couple systems engineers, some folks to move circuitry and cables, and custodial staff. There are perhaps a handful of cs grads employed by a data center as I understand it. (Most employees are managing hardware; they lean towards electrical engineering?)
The hardware only needs software designed for it once in order to offer compute as a service, and that design can happen far away from the data center (and, the CEOs believe, possibly by an AI).
- Comment on If conditions on earth are perfect for life to form shouldn't have happened more than once? 1 month ago:
I think OP’s question still holds, even if you think all of that happened. If there was so much life on mars and so much ejecta, why didn’t multiple (differently structured, eg not DNA) rounds of life get formed on mars and transplanted to earth? Why 1x?
- Comment on do what you love 1 month ago:
Everyone is trying to replace most support with AI. Why pay a person to be confused about your weird tech problem when the computer can do it for less?
- Comment on If copyright on a work expired immediately after death, would be that a bad or good idea? 1 month ago:
As with all economics, the answer is probably complicated. Death incentives aren’t great. Brands partially have value because they can be kept consistent, and some iconic characters have kept a relatively consistent identity across multiple authors. Allowing a free-for-all too early might make those kinds of characters harder to develop?
My favorite variation on this (which probably also has complicated consequences) is that government should, after say ~10 years, get the chance to buy any particular copyright/patent for a sum (based on its profitability, say), and should they choose to buy then the work enters the public domain early. No idea what horrors this hides.
- Comment on Resonite VR: Massive performance update 1 month ago:
Very similar for me. I suspect Overte will feel better for me when I setup hosting my own avatar, world, etc.
- Comment on Resonite VR: Massive performance update 1 month ago:
I’ll add that Overte VR is the FOSS competitor. It also runs quite well, though is not quite feature competitive afaik.
- Submitted 1 month ago to games@lemmy.world | 4 comments
- Comment on A real question about trans athletes and records 1 month ago:
We should remember the stories with the records; each is unique and interesting and tells us one way a person did something incredible. But I don’t see the value of starring specifically the stories involving trans folks. I wouldn’t expect us to put an asterisk next to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanisława_Walasiewicz , and indeed we do not: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres_at_the_Olympics#…
I imagine you would indeed feel weird if you were to have transitioned into women’s swimming, especially if you are not a woman. It would certainly be a story; in fact, it would probably be the only story about you, crowding out any physical achievements. That’s a big part of why this isn’t really seen. Personally, it makes me think about why we want gender divided sports to begin with.
- Comment on The Researcher Who Wrote the Book on How Solar Got Cheap Is Back to Assess the Current Moment 1 month ago:
I’m being told about 60 lbs; compare to a slightly larger drywall sheet weighing about 40 lbs. So yeah! 50% warmer.
- Comment on Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers 1 month ago:
Oh yeah that reminds me. It seems to have killed (possibly with the help of AI summary in search) stack exchange. Iirc you can see the visit rates plummet into oblivion.
- Comment on Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers 1 month ago:
I think we have sufficient data to say that social health is at least very different now. See the our-world-in-data topic page. In particular, one-person households have doubled.
- Comment on Sam Altman admits OpenAI ‘totally screwed up’ its GPT-5 launch and says the company will spend trillions of dollars on data centers 1 month ago:
Some translation tasks. Some how-to stuff. I’m told folks like using it to generate say-nothing replies to say-nothing emails?
