sushibowl
@sushibowl@feddit.nl
- Comment on VW will invest up to $5 billion in Rivian as part of new EV joint venture 5 days ago:
VW is good at making cars, but bad at software. They’ve had to delay the introduction of new models (Golf, ID.3) because of software issues. Rivian has sort of the opposite problem: their production lines sit still often because of problems in the supply chain.
Volkswagen has the expertise to solve Rivian’s production and supplier problems, and the cash they will need to survive and develop some cheaper models (the EV market is stagnating right now for a lack of budget options, and Rivian only sells trucks and SUVs). And they’re hoping Rivian software engineers can help them fix their software woes.
- Comment on Tough Trolly Choices 1 week ago:
I guess I can pick another number x to be closest to but it has the same problem unless I can guarantee it’s in the set. And successfully picking a number in the set is the problem to begin with! Foiled again!
- Comment on Tough Trolly Choices 1 week ago:
It seems to me that, since the set of real numbers has a total ordering, I could fairly trivially construct some choice function like “the element closest to 0” that will work no matter how many elements you remove, without needing any fancy axioms.
- Comment on Tough Trolly Choices 1 week ago:
What if you couldn’t see all the levers. Like every set of levers was inside a warehouse with a guy at a desk who says “just tell me which one you want and I’ll bring it out for you.”
- Comment on They're everywhere!!! 2 weeks ago:
Semmelweis discovered that a particular type of infection was much less likely to occur when doctors washed their hands with chlorinated lime water between doing an autopsy and examining a patient. However he did not know why or how this worked, and did not discover microorganisms (which were already observed by Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek some ~180 years earlier).
- Comment on Shoppers Drug Mart Recruiting Volunteers to Staff Stores 1 month ago:
Is this even legal? Like, employees must be paid minimum wage, I’m sure you can’t just get around that by calling them volunteers right?
- Comment on Biden really, really doesn’t want China to flood the US with cheap EVs 1 month ago:
It’s not so much about where it goes, more so the fact that it doesn’t stay in America. This is about saving the American auto industry. Whether it’s for the jobs that would be lost or the profits of the shareholders.
- Comment on Honeypot 1 month ago:
Rare Canadian literature W
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 1 month ago:
Same as any other social media. Reddit has a lot of twitter, Tumblr and 4chan screenshots, TikTok videos, etc. Lemmy is not much different.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 1 month ago:
It would be pretty funny if GPT starts putting licence notices under its answers because that’s what people do in its training data.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 1 month ago:
protecting their content by licensing it explicitly.
You can do whatever you want, of course. But any license you put on your content here protects it less than not putting any license at all. That’s after all what licenses are for, granting people use of your content.
So you’re not so much protecting your comments, but graciously allowing them to be used for training for non-commercial purposes, where most people are greedily keeping them to themselves. I suppose that’s admirable.
- Comment on Starfield's New Maps Are Great, But Boy Those Cities Are Tiny 1 month ago:
Bethesda has always had an approach to designing cities where they feel you must be able to enter every building and talk to every NPC. You can see this since at least Morrowind. This design constraint makes it prohibitively expensive to design large cities with hundreds or thousands of inhabitants. That’s why you see “cities” in Bethesda games with several dozen houses at most. In Oblivion, there are less than 200 people living in the capital of an enormous empire, the imperial city (300 if you count the guards). Skyrim has a total population of 700 or something.
In the Witcher series they don’t feel the need to do this and can just plop down buildings without any interior, and NPCs that only give you a generic voice line. That makes it feasible to create larger cities, although there’s a sort of suspension of disbelief required. Most of the people you meet don’t actually have a house and just walk around. If you try to investigate the city as more than decor the illusion quickly falls apart.
Not saying one approach is better or worse than the other, just different tradeoffs.
- Comment on If we took material like rock from space and got it back to Earth enough times, would Earth grow as a planet? 1 month ago:
That doesn’t mean energy has a weight.
No, it literally does mean that. If you put light in a box of mirrors the total weight of the box will literally increase by an amount equal to the energy of the photons. If you put some radioactive material in a theoretically perfectly sealed box from which no heat or light could escape, and weigh it while it decays into radiation, the weight will not change.
This applies to all forms of energy. A spring is heavier when compressed. An object gets heavier when you spin it, or heat it up. Sunlight hitting the earth most definitely makes it heavier. In fact, the sun hits the earth with about 4.4*10^16 watts of power, corresponding to about 0.5 kilogram per second.
- Comment on Are you running a Tor Relay? 2 months ago:
Mainly true for exit relays. I do not recommend trying to run an exit relay from home at all. If you run a middle relay though you should be mostly fine.
- Comment on Apple keeps flogging 8GB of RAM for its Mac computers but it's still a dead horse 2 months ago:
Practically all of us know that the difference between these memory modules is pocket change, when mass produced like this, but for those extra couple cents, they get an extra 100$ from you
This is called capturing consumer surplus through segmentation. There’s a pretty good explanation of it here.
The long and short of it is that some people are just perfectly fine spending more money on a macbook, and apple wants to give them a good enough excuse to do so.
- Comment on The Fallout TV show gave the Fallout games a huge player bump, as everyone remembers they like Fallout 2 months ago:
From what I’ve seen on the internet, the events of NV have been retconned in the show, and some people are upset about that. It seems the more of a fallout purist you are the less likely it is you’ll enjoy the show.
Most casual fallout enjoyers seem to like it well enough.
- Comment on clearly aliens 2 months ago:
Very heavy Cunk On Earth vibes on this one.
- Comment on Why do Americans measure everything in cups? 2 months ago:
I agree with the sentiment: a lot of cooking does not require great precision, so a scale is not often necessary. but I think at that point you should be able to dispense with measuring equipment altogether and just go by feel for most things. A lot of cooking for me is throwing an amount into the pan that feels right, and I don’t see a need to measure cups of things.
If I’m baking, accuracy is necessary and I will always reach for the scale.
I guess the point I’m making is that measuring in cups represents a kind of midpoint in the precision-convenience trade-off that I just personally don’t find very useful.
- Comment on Somebody managed to coax the Gab AI chatbot to reveal its prompt 2 months ago:
but is this prompt the entirety of what differentiates it from other GPT-4 LLMs?
Yes. Probably 90% of AI implementations based on GPT use this technique.
you can really have a product that’s just someone else’s extremely complicated product but you staple some shit to the front of every prompt?
Oh yeah. In fact that is what OpenAI wants, it’s their whole business model: they get paid by gab for every conversation people have with this thing.
- Comment on President Biden is now posting into the fediverse 2 months ago:
It’s generally accepted wisdom that the American government is bad at doing anything at all and therefore should suck as much corporate dick as possible to get the corporations to do things instead. A flawless system to be sure.
- Comment on launch him anyway 3 months ago:
It’s much more efficient in this case to do a bi-elliptic transfer: raise apoapsis very far out, then lower your periapsis once you are at apoapsis. Wikipedia says you could do it with about 8.8 km/s delta v. Versus 24 or so for a basic Hohman transfer (still a bit better than 30)
Sadly the bi-elliptic transfer requires two burns so you can’t do it with a kick.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
The general argument for getting rid of minimum wage is that there is a whole bunch of work out there which is simply not valuable enough to be profitable if the labour must be paid at minimum wage prices, and so those jobs simply aren’t available right now.
The trade-off is that it guarantees laborers are able to afford a basic life with their jobs, which greatly reduces the ability of capitalists to prey on the working class. However with UBI that problem isn’t so big anymore, so there’s theoretically no need for a minimum wage.
- Comment on My jaw hit the floor when I watched an AI master one of the world's toughest physical games in just six hours 4 months ago:
I agree but also disagree. It’s true that machines are capable of fine motor control much more quickly and accurately than humans. But this by itself is often not enough.
This achievement should be somewhat surprising because of Moravec’s paradox: the observation that, opposite to what early AI researchers expected, intelligence and reasoning skills are comparatively easy for a computer to simulate, while sensorimotor skills are in fact incredibly hard. Notice how, for example, chess engines started beating human players in the 90s or so, but we still don’t have a robot that can do something as simple as pick raspberries (because surprise, for a machine picking a raspberry is actually hard as shit).
- Comment on 'It hasn't delivered': The spectacular failure of self-checkout technology 5 months ago:
I don’t get this article, it’s clearly got a bone to pick with self-checkout and seems to be contradicting itself in the process:
Consumers want this technology to work, and welcomed it with open arms. […] In a 2021 survey of 1,000 American shoppers, 60% of consumers said they prefer to use self-checkout over a staffed checkout aisle when given the choice
Okay, so even given the myriad of poor implementations out there, a majority of people prefer it. But then at the end:
Simply, “customers hate it”.
Oh really? Because your quoted survey seems to say the opposite. And then there’s stuff like this:
In addition to shrink concerns, experts say another failure of self-checkout technology is that, in many cases, it simply doesn’t lead to the cost savings businesses hoped for. Just as Dollar General appears poised to add more employees to its check-out areas, presumably increasing staffing costs, other companies have done the same.
This is too light on data. Even a luxurious 1 cashier per 2 self-checkout stations will result in large cost savings for a business where employee costs are a significant fraction of total expenses. Especially in low margin businesses like grocery stores, removing even small amounts of overhead makes a big difference. Just because stores are adding a few employees back, doesn’t mean cost-savings are completely negated.
Despite self-checkout kiosks becoming ubiquitous throughout the past decade or so, the US still has more than 3.3 million cashiers working around the nation, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Surprise, a large nation did not completely get rid of cashiers! The number is meaningless without more context: did the number of cashiers go down? What about average cashiers per store? Where is the data?
My point is, maybe companies just went too hard on the cost-cutting and are trying to find the right balance. What is the best ratio of self-checkout to classic cashier checkout? What is the right amount of self-checkout assistants? How do we make checking out yourself a good user experience? All of these things are still being experimented with. What does seem to be clear is that self-checkout has become near ubiquitous, and therefore it is most certainly not a “spectacular failure” by any definition.
- Comment on AI comes up with battery design that uses 70 per cent less lithium 5 months ago:
LFP batteries are both nickel and cobalt free, and are being used in production cars right now (e.g. Tesla model 3/Y standard range options). That technology has long arrived.
- Comment on Since Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase, firm reportedly lost 72% of its value 5 months ago:
He paid around $20 billion cash (by selling Tesla stock) and loaned another 6.25 billion personally (loan secured by more Tesla stock). The rest was funded by various bank loans that are now owed by Twitter itself.
One of the neat tricks you can do when you’re wealthy is loan billions of dollars to buy a company, then you put those loans in the name of the company you just bought, so you don’t have any personal risk. The reason he still needed to pony up $26 billion in cash is because banks thought it was too risky to loan the full amount. They might now regret loaning even this much, Twitter has a substantial debt burden and I understand ad revenues aren’t doing great.
Obviously, since the company is private now we don’t get as much insight into financials.
- Comment on Sony Steals Customers' Purchased Content - Piracy is COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED! 6 months ago:
I don’t know if it makes any sense to assign blame here to another party than Sony. As a customer who bought a license to watch these shows, that’s the company that you have an arrangement with. It seems that their licensing arrangements with Warner Brothers were limited time, and either WB isn’t inclined to renew them or is asking more than Sony is willing to cough up.
Probably a combination of both if I had to guess. WB is seeking to maximise the value of their own ~HBO~ Max streaming platform, so they want the content to be exclusive and not license it out to others. At the same time Sony is probably not excited to keep spending cash every few years just to keep content available to customers, they’re not making any additional money from that.
So the end result is the current situation. Obviously customers agreed to whatever terms Sony put in their EULA at the time so I’m sure it’s legally covered and whatever, but it seems pretty scummy and misleading nonetheless. Like, if they were honest on the purchase screen and said “you can pay $20 for the right to watch this season of mythbusters, but any time we like we can take it away from you again and there’s nothing you can do,” how many people would have bought that? But effectively that is what people bought, they just weren’t aware.
- Comment on Speediest little fella. 7 months ago:
Not really no. Special relativity explains the relationship between space and time. General relativity expands on this to account for gravitation.
One of the postulates (i.e. assumptions) of relativity is that the speed of light in vacuum is the same for all observers. But the theory doesn’t actually require any particular value for c, it only needs it to be constant. And it doesn’t explain the behavior of light in a medium at all.
In fact, relativity doesn’t explain the mechanism by which light interacts at all, that is the domain of Quantum Electro Dynamics.
- Comment on More like guidelines 7 months ago:
The Rankine scale is generally measured in degrees. That’s because it’s defined in terms of the Fahrenheit scale, which is also measured in degrees. i.e. 1 Rankine degree = 1 Fahrenheit degree.
This is not the case for the Kelvin scale, which is defined directly in terms of thermal energy: 1 Kelvin ≈ 1.38*10^-23 J. Coincidentally (but not really of course) this amount of thermal energy is such that an increase of 1 Kelvin corresponds to 1 degree Celsius.
This is rather pedantic, as you could easily define Rankine in terms of thermal energy as well. Some people do this and don’t say “degrees” in front of Rankine. Or, you could define the Kelvin in terms of the Celsius, and measure it in degrees.
tl:dr Rankine has degrees, but for mainly historical reasons.
P.S.: Kelvin actually also had degrees until 1968!
- Comment on Why Git is hard 7 months ago:
A git branch is just a pointer to a commit, it really doesn’t correspond to what we’d naturally think of as a branch in the context of a physical tree or even in a graph.
But as the article points out, a commit includes all of its ancestors. Therefore pointing to a commit effectively is equivalent to a branch in the context of a tree.
Some other version control systems like mercurial have both a branch in a more intuitive sense (commits have a branch as a bit of metadata), as well as pointers to commits (mercurial, for example, calls them bookmarks).
I mean, git has bookmarks too, they’re called tags.