modeler
@modeler@lemmy.world
- Comment on Colorblindness check! 2 months ago:
This is true for only red and green loght detecting proteins (opsins) - the blue opsin gene is on chromosome 7.
The red and green detecting proteins have an interesting history in humans.
Fish, amphibians, lizards and birds have 4 different opsins: for red, green, yellow and blue colours. And the blue opsin sees up into the ultra-violet. Most animals can see waaaay more colours in the world than we (or any mammal) can. So what happened that makes mammal vision so poor?
It’s thought that all mammals descend from one or a few species of nocturnal mammal that survived the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. The colour detecting cells (the cones) need a lot of light compared to ones that see in black-and-white (the rods) and therefore nocturnal animals frequently lose cones in favour of the more sensitive rods for better night vision. The mammals that survived the Cretaceous extinction had also lost the green and yellow opsins while keeping red and blue - basically the two different ends of the light spectrum.
Consequently today most mammals still have only 2 opsins so your cat or dog is red-green colourblind.
Why do humans see green? Probably because our monkey forebears, who lived in trees and ate leaves, needed to distinguish red leaves and red fruit (visible to birds) from the green background.
But how did we bring back the green opsin? A whole section of the X chromosome (where the red opsin is coded) got duplicated in a dna copying mistake and then there were two genes for red opsins. As there are different alleles (versions), they could be selected for independently and so one red opsin drifted up the spectrum to be specific for green. So our green opsin is a completely different gene to the green opsin in fish, birds, etc. This kind of evolution happens a lot which is why, for example, there are many families of similar hormones like testosterone and estrogen. And steroids too.
- Comment on HACS, microWakeWord, and Music Assistant projects have been added to the Open Home Foundation which manages open-source projects related to Home Assistant and Smart Home applications 3 months ago:
MicroWakeWord is a project built on the ESPHome framework.
ESPHome is a project for building, deploying and managing microcontroller firmware (such as ESP32 devices). So, because MicroWakeWord uses ESPHome, you can easily deploy it to your preferred device.
ESPHome is deeply connected inside HomeAssistant and therefore the integration is essentially OOTB - but you have to flash ESPHome firmware on an ESP device which will probably involve soldering electronics. There are some dev kits available that contain everything you need pre-built though (like this one - no endorsement)
- Comment on Six people arrested after machete fight in Southend-on-Sea 3 months ago:
Which is difficult to give without that arm
- Comment on jd vance 3 months ago:
It is terribly sad - they must live in a world of hurt.
However so many of these people actively try to hurt LGBTQ+ and trans people by inciting hate and changing laws to harm the non-straight. In particular they have been preaching that being gay/trans equates to being a child molester. This is horrific and needs to stop. Exposing the hypocrisy is essential to reducing the harm they are inflicting to real people right now
- Comment on The first GPT-4-class AI model anyone can download has arrived: Llama 405B 3 months ago:
Typically you need about 1GB graphics RAM for each billion parameters (i.e. one byte per parameter). This is a 408B parameter model. Ouch.
- Comment on An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience 3 months ago:
I think that’s a better plan than physically printing keys. I’d also want to save the keys in another format somewhere - perhaps using a small script to export them into a safe store in the cloud or a box I control somewhere
- Comment on An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience 3 months ago:
You need at least two copies in two different places - places that will not burn down/explode/flood/collapse/be locked down by the police at the same time.
An enterprise is going to be commissioning new computers or reformatting existing ones at least once per day. This means the bitlocker key list would need printouts at least every day in two places.
Given the above, it’s easy to see that this process will fail from time to time, in ways like accicentally leaking a document with all these keys.
- Comment on Uncovering Every Lie in MKBHD's Softball Interview; a scathing critique of 'brand safe' influencers 4 months ago:
I agree, so much legislation is broken, the legislators aren’t doing shit, so we citizens need to fix it!
But we could start with the right to repair.
- Comment on Calculus made easy 6 months ago:
I must not use jargon.
Jargon is the mind-killer.
Jargon is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face the jargon. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the jargon has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
- Comment on Samsung does an Apple with its first Snapdragon X Elite laptop, suggesting the new Arm-based Windows machines aren't going to be a cheap alternative to x86 8 months ago:
Disagree with your disagreement. I also have an M1 and was a quite early adopter (within 3 months of launch). It was really snappy compared to my Intel Air it replaced. From the get-go. Even for apps that were still x86 code.
Things definitely improved over the next 9 months, but I was and am a really happy camper.
- Comment on What's the deal with Docker? 8 months ago:
This is exactly the answer.
I’d just expand on one thing: many systems have multiple apps that need to run at the same time. Each app has its own dependencies, sometimes requiring a specific version of a library.
In this situation, it’s very easy for one app to need v1 of MyCleverLibrary (and fails with v2) and another needs v2 (and fails with v1). And then at the next OS update, the distro updates to v2.5 and breaks everything.
In this situation, before containers, you will be stuck, or have some difficult workrounds including different LD_LIBRARY_PATH settings that then break at the next update.
Using containers, each app has its own libraries at the correct and tested versions. These subtle interdependencies are eliminated and packages ‘just work’.
- Comment on Google tests a feature that calls businesses on your behalf and holds until an agent is available | TechCrunch 8 months ago:
Which, will also hurt the call center manager, until they hire enough staff to answer the fucking phones in less than 30 minutes.
- Comment on AMD’s new CPU hits 132fps in Fortnite without a graphics card 9 months ago:
It’s all software, even the stuff on the graphics cards. Those are the rasterisers, shaders and so on. In fact the graphics cards are extremely good at running these simple (relatively) programs in an absolutely staggering number of threads at the same time, and this has been taken advantage of by both bitcoin mining and also neural net algorithms like GPT and Llama.
- Comment on xkcd #2874: Iceland 10 months ago:
And Greenland is less green and more icy than Iceland
- Comment on Apple officially unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max: 3 nanometer, Dynamic Caching GPU, more 1 year ago:
apples to apples
Well, technically all those computers are Apples, so they’re within their rights
- Comment on Twitter takeover: how a year of Elon Musk rendered the platform useless | Pranav Dixit 1 year ago:
It’s more X marks the spot than following to a T
- Comment on Sam Bankman-Fried thought there was a 5% chance he would be president, Caroline Ellison testified in his trial 1 year ago:
She described herself as a wood nymph
- Comment on [Survey] Can you tell which images are AI generated? 1 year ago:
The back left leg on the pencil drawing is in the wrong place - at least that was what I considered the ‘tell’.
But I found it really hard to spot the AI.