nednobbins
@nednobbins@lemm.ee
- Comment on pump up the jamz 2 weeks ago:
Floyd baby.
- Comment on Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds 3 weeks ago:
In other news, exponents make things big.
Any time you have an X>1 and a big n, X^n gets huge.
X=26 (if we ignore punctuation, spaces, and capitalization).
N=130,000 - Comment on Horrors We've Unleashed 5 weeks ago:
I get the feeling of discomfort but it’s basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil
There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It’s unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.
At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can’t even comprehend. A dog has no idea you’re doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they’re being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.
The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
- Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 months ago:
The effect is mostly from the total number of computer users increasing.
That is, the total number of “tech-savvy” users keeps increasing (datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science-110701) but the number of “non-tech-savvy” computer users has absolutely exploded (…substack.com/…/global-semiconductor-sales-increa…) (that actually undercounts computers since every dollar in 2020 buys you much more computer power than a dollar in 1987)
You had to pass a nerd gauntlet just to get online in the 80’s or 90’s that meant that everyone you met online had also passed that gauntlet and was tech savvy. Even if you looked in the social usenet groups, a lot of non-technical users were just filtered out. So it looked like everyone was tech savvy but that’s because we were sampling a tiny, tech-savvy portion of the population.
Now anyone can get online. The tech savvy gen-zers are still there but their hidden in a sea of non-technical users. If you go to places like Github or Hackernews (or even more specifically technical fora), you’ll find plenty of enthusiastic young people poking at technology and trying to make it better. They no longer have to mess around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get their mouse working but they can (and do) get a bunch of Jupyter notebooks and start playing around with Tensorflow.
A great modern example of this is 3-D printing. Modern 3-D printers suck. If you’re a big company you can get super expensive 3-D printers that take up giant rooms and need a team of experts to run. If you’re a home user you can get a cheap FDM printer but you best be prepared to tinker with it. The first thing most people do with their Ender is print mods for their Ender. Bambu Labs is a big improvement but they also attract a lot of users who at least could mod their printer forum.bambulab.com/c/bambu-lab-x1-series/…/19
Some day we may have little boxes like in “Diamond Age”. Kids in the future may not even know about crap like bed adhesion and stringing and they’ll concentrate on whatever the new problems are revealed once the current ones are taken care of.
- Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 months ago:
That sounds just fine. I’m pretty suspicious of someone who claims that being able to save 30 seconds typing that post would make you more tech savvy.
- Comment on Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills 2 months ago:
I think that true “tech-savvyness” isn’t really a generational thing.
Some people are just really curious about how stuff works. When they see something they aren’t satisfied with, “Just do it.” or “Shit just works.” They want to know how and why it works. When you hand those people a computer, machine or flower they’ll poke at it and try to understand it better.
It’s not clear that typing skills are actually needed for that.
I max out at around 80-100 WPM but I only sustain that when I’m transcribing something. When I need to learn about technology, it’s much more about reading than typing. When I actually need to do some coding, I spend much more time staring at the screen and looking up stuff on Stackoverlow than I do actually typing.
Most of Z is not sazzy at all, just like with every generation. And just like with every generation, some of them will push the envelope of technology. I doubt that lack of typing will slow those folks down.
- Comment on Recommendation engine: Downvote any game you've heard of before 2 months ago:
Just started playing Shapez 2. shapez2.com
Hot damn, is that addictive. - Comment on Technically Correct 3 months ago:
The Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber don’t count? :)
- Comment on Technically Correct 3 months ago:
They fail gloriously at at that too.
Whenever they get tested the red teams manage to smuggle in everything needed to hijiack a plane plus a kitchen sink.
The few times that terrorists tried to board planes, they made it through security and were caught by other passengers.
- Comment on why isn't anyone calling for Trump to drop out. 4 months ago:
do they think anyone else realistically could, at this point, other than Biden?
The answer to that is clearly, “Yes.” The calls for him to bow out are coming from all corners; various mainstream media outlets, donor groups, alternative media, pundits, and even sitting Democratic politicians.
- Comment on why isn't anyone calling for Trump to drop out. 4 months ago:
The people calling for Biden to drop out are completely different from the people who want Trump to stay in the race.
Democrats want Biden to drop out because they don’t believe he can beat Trump.
Republicans want Trump to stay on the ticket because they’re pretty sure he’ll crush Biden .
- Comment on If Batman were real today, he'd go after the CEOs of companies, not gangsters. 4 months ago:
The former richest man in the world gave away much of his fortune and continues to do so. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Wealth_and_p…
Bruce Wayne is not like that at all though. He’s in a position where he could actually do something about the problems of Gotham City and decides to go LARPing instead.
To be fair, he beats up a bunch of rich criminals too but he whole thing is really more about his ego than about doing good.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
It was a typo. I meant to say that the Democratic leadership seems to have put their and their parties interests above those of the people but I wanted to avoid editing my post too much.
- Comment on Stay Mad 4 months ago:
I’ve been called many names, including “tankie”, so I’ll take a stab at responding.
I’m not mad about the debate at all. I expected something fairly similar. I’m mad that Biden and the Democratic leadership seems to have put their own interests above the interest of the party.
If Biden had gracefully stepped aside and given just about any other Democrat his full support, we’d be in a much better position now. Instead we have a candidate with a ton of baggage and who presents an easy target for Trump’s style of argument. Many mainstream Democrats, including the NYT, are finally starting to realize this. Unfortunately it’s probably a year too late. At this point it would just make it look like Demoratic kingmakers forced him out.
If I went by the modern definition of “tankie” as, an ant-american authoritarian communist. I probably wouldn’t be mad at any of this. I’d be cackling with glee because either of the current nominees will be terrible for the US. Neither of them has a serious long term plan. Neither of them can articulate a policy position. Both of them will continue to erode the power and moral authority of the United States.
Like it or not. Trump is likely to be the next president projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/. At this point it’s probably wise to start thinking about how to limit his impact and how to start cleaning up the mess afterwards.
- Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed? 4 months ago:
The question is typically described as “the historicity of Jesus”. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
There are similar debates for other famous ancient figures.
The general academic consensus on Jesus (and many similar figures) is that they did exist and many of the details have been fictionalized.
- Comment on Using Ubuntu may give off a hipster vibes to the average PC user, but within the Linux community its has the opposite effect. 6 months ago:
Thank you! I can finally fill the void that vibeless OSes have left in my soul.
All joking aside, it does raise a good point.
There are many things that can be objectively analyzed and it might not be a good idea to choose them based off of vibes. When you’re designing those things it’s still a good idea to take vibes into account because people will ignore all that and put googly eyes on their 3-D printer.
- Comment on Using Ubuntu may give off a hipster vibes to the average PC user, but within the Linux community its has the opposite effect. 6 months ago:
You pick your OS based on vibes?
- Comment on It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office. 6 months ago:
Only a little.
Every language has some set of rules to how your supposed to construct sentences. Every language has a ton of exceptions to those rules.
The main thing that makes English difficult is that it’s a kind of hybrid language. It’s in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages but it borrows a ton of words from the Romance branch. The grammar is also a weird hybrid (for example we preserve grammatical gender in pronouns, like in German, but we’ve mostly dropped grammatical gender in nouns and articles, like in Chinese.
This is one of the simpler types of exceptions.
Consider the Chinese phrase: 好久不见 Litterally: “good time not see” But then someone explains that while 好 normally means “good” it can also mean “quite” or “alot”.
So it’s fairly easy to remember that it’s generally translated as, “long time no see”.Those steps are pretty simple for a Chinese learner to understand. It’s also not the hard part of learning a language.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 7 months ago:
Covering the second half:
I hadn’t heard of Elsagate and had to look it up. How does AI factor into that? As near as I can tell Elsagate started with some random guy making disturbing videos and mislabeling them as child-friendly.
I’m a good bit older than you so my nostalgia doesn’t take me lead me to any of the title you mentioned. For the most part it’s stories that aren’t covered by anyone’s IP. My childhood had a lot of folk tales recited from memory. Those stories were fairly common but there would be regional variation and most tellers would put their own twist on the stories (for example, when my Aunt told the story of the Seven Kids she would do a particular squeaky voice when she got to the part where the wolf swallows the chalk (in her version it was always chalk). That’s actually quite close to how LLMs work. She heard various versions of that story throughout her life, then she repeats it with some other bits that she incorporated from the rest of her life. I do the same thing when I retell the story to my children. It’s basically the same story my Aunt told but I translate it into English and add some modern slang.
What would stop an AI from writing Scar into the Lion King? If you told an LLM to, “Write Hamlet but have all the royal family be Lions,” it’s likely you’d get some evil lion version of Claudius.
There were a lot of homosexual coded villains in older media. There were also a lot of films where all the black people were bad guys, all the Asian people were goofy servants and all the women were housewives or prizes. The general consensus today is that those choices were horribly discriminatory. If AI manages to avoid that sort of behavior it would be a good thing.
The flip side is also that artists can just as easily slip hateful material into otherwise reasonable art. Human history is full of unethical choices. Even if the AI itself doesn’t have ethics the people using it can be held to the same ethical standards as the users of any other tool or medium.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 7 months ago:
OK. With that change we get:
AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that’s not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn’t actually need it. Now they can get what they actually want but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?Is that accurate?
The rest of your comment seems to be an other thread so I’ll respond separately.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 7 months ago:
I can live with that.
I’d support a UBI so that anyone who wants to can just make art for their own fulfillment. If someone wants AI art though they should be allowed to use that.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 7 months ago:
That wasn’t intentional.
Would it be more accurate for me to change “want” to “need” or the other way around?
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 7 months ago:
It’s an awkward phrase but I was trying to stay as close to the original vocabulary as possible. I think the point still stands if you replace “not-actual-art” with illustration. People couldn’t get what they were looking for so they paid more for the next best thing. Now they can get something closer to what they’re looking for at a lower price.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 7 months ago:
I get that and there are a lot of jobs that people used to pay for and no longer do.
The entire horse industry has mostly collapsed. I couldn’t get a job as scribe. With any luck, all the industries around fossil fuel will go away. We’re going to pay less to most people in those industries too.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 7 months ago:
I’m going to try to paraphrase that position to make sure I understand it. Please correct me if I got it wrong.
AI produces something not-actual-art. Some people want stuff that’s not-actual-art. Before AI they had no choice but to pay a premium to a talented artist even though they didn’t actually need it. Now they can get what they actually need but we should remove that so they have to continue paying artists because we had been paying artists for this in the past?
Is that correct or did I miss or mangle something?
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 7 months ago:
I’d love to see some data on the people who believe that AI fundamentally can’t do art and the people who believe that AI is an existential threat to artists.
Anecdotally, there seems to be a large overlap between the adherents of what seem to be mutually exclusive positions and I wish I understood that better.
- Comment on Germans: what genocide? 7 months ago:
It’s one thing to refrain from commenting but supporting Israel makes it clear that Germany learned nothing.
- Comment on I hear phrases like "half-past", "quarter til", and "quarter after" way less often since digital clocks have became more commonplace. 8 months ago:
Laughs in Austrian.
The convention for (15-minute) fractional hours is to name the fraction of the time from the previous hour to the next one.
eg:
3:15 -> “viertel vier” = “quarter four”
3:30 -> “halb vier” (“hoiba viere” in dialekt) = “half four”
3:45 -> “dreiviertel vier” = “three quarters four” - Comment on Elon Musk Bought Twitter to Settle His Jet-Tracking Beef, New Book Claims 9 months ago:
I wouldn’t doubt that was his initial motivation for making the suggestions.
I also remember that he tried to back out of buying Twitter multiple times. While doing so he was pretty public about all the crazy crap he would do with Twitter.
Despite all that Twitter went to a judge and got them to force Musk to complete the sale. He’s a crappy CEO for Twitter but it’s kind of on the former Twitter leadership for forcing that situation.
- Comment on They use to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia. Now we know. Wikipedia is the only website you can trust. 1 year ago:
When “they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia” it wasn’t in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.
That’s still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.
The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren’t saying that you shouldn’t use it at all. They’re telling you not to stop there. That’s exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.
If you’re researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you’ve ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren’t primary sources. In egregious cases the “sources” are just opinion pieces.