skeletorfw

@skeletorfw@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone make a wearable mic set that can do audio POV field recordings?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Roland CS-10-EM are excellent binaural mics for a very low cost :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Are Rap*** & Ped** Protected In Jail?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What? How in the world is that your conclusion from my point? Are you seriously advocating for mob vigilante justice systems? I agree in essence that these crimes are abhorrent and must stop, but what are you proposing as a functional justice system?

  The question really is what do they need to be protected from? If they must be heavily protected from physical harm that certainly implies that there is a threat of grave physical harm to them on a regular basis. That doesn’t sound like a sweet life to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Are Rap*** & Ped** Protected In Jail?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So here’s the rationale that is generally used: If you are in a country that utilises the death sentence then the only system that can decide that is the legal system. Vigilante justice, even when morally justified in the immediate, is not a rigorous or systematically moral justice system. Ergo if anyone is in danger of being killed then they must be protected, even if they are a terrible person, as they have not been sentenced to death (or even if they have, that sentence is not to be meted down by just some other random person).

  If you are in a country with no death penalty, you as a society believe that no-one should ever be killed as retribution or as an example to others, thus the argument for protecting people from serious harm is obvious.

  These same basic arguments apply for corporeal punishment.

  Those who are believed to have committed horrific crimes such as those you mentioned will be in extreme danger because their crimes are fairly universally considered reprehensible (because they… You know… Are). The danger is that there is no perfect justice system. Miscarriages of justice do occur and whilst you may believe that actual perpetrators should be killed or maimed in prison, the risk is that innocent people may be subjected to a horrific and irreversible punishment for no crime at all. That is not acceptable to most people within most justice systems.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Expertise⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Even as a Brit that’d be fast. Here you’re funded for 3.5y with 6mo unfunded “writing up time”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a way to protect data/user contents in Lemmy/Mastodon against now rapidly rising AI s?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah as an ecologist that same thing made me giggle. I suppose why not the lesser-spotted 🍆warbler :P

  In terms of exposing it only to bots, that is a frustration, unless you make it seamless then it does become kinda trivial to mitigate. Otherwise the approach I’d take to mitigate it is to adapt a lemmy client that already does the filtering or reverse-engineer the deciding element of the app. Similarly if you use garbage then you need it to look enough like normal words for it to be hard to classify as AI generated.

  The funny thing is that LLMs are not actually much good at telling whether something is ai generated, you need to train another model to do that, but to train that ai you need good sources of non-corrupt data. Also the whole point of generative AI language models is that they are actively trying to pass that test by design so it becomes an arms race that they can never really win!

  Man, what a shitshow generative ai is

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a way to protect data/user contents in Lemmy/Mastodon against now rapidly rising AI s?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Radical and altogether stupid idea (but a fun thought) is this:

  Were lemmy to have a certain percentage of AI content seamlessly incorporated into its corpus of text, it would become useless for training LLMs on (see this paper for more technical details on the effects of training LLMs on their own outputs, a phenomenon called “model collapse”).

  In effect this would sort of “poison the well”, though given that we all drink the water, the hope would be that our tolerance for a mild amount of AI corruption would be higher than an LLM creator’s.

  This poisoning approach amusingly benefits from being a thing that could be advertised heavily, basically saying “lemmy is useless for training LLMs, don’t bother with it”.

  Now I must say personally I think that I don’t really think this is a sensible or viable strategy, and that I think the well is already poisoned in this regard (as I think there is already a non-negligible amount of LLM-sourced content on lemmy). But yes, a fun approach to consider: trading integrity for privacy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal that I feel pretty bad for ignoring homeless people begging for money?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, just give them money?

  Put it this way: getting a job is just one of many challenges facing homeless people.

  For example, if you get a job but are already living absolutely hand-to-mouth, can you actually afford to have that first month of work with no money coming in on a day by day basis. If you cannot afford to even eat how will you make it to that first paycheck?

  Even if you do, where will your job put that money? Many, many homeless people do not have a bank account, and what do you need to open a bank account? A home address and ID!

  Were you fortunate enough to become homeless with a copy of your birth certificate or other form of ID? If not oh that’s not a problem sir, it’ll cost you £35, and then it’ll arrive by recorded delivery to your home address. Where was that again?

  Pretty much no person is homeless by choice. Most are there by a combination of bad luck, violence, a lack of a social security net, mental illness, and many many other factors. Very few people would choose a life of danger and unprovoked violence. You wouldn’t want to be without a home, they don’t want to be without a home for the exact same reasons.

  So in conclusion, it is the very basics of human decency to feel bad for them. I would urge you to go further and try to help them, whether that be by direct contribution, by volunteering, by donating to a housing charity, or something else.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Music Notation] What does "D M F# m/5+" mean?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As mentioned by foggy, jazz harmony (which I frankly suck at) or counterpoint are both the things which will give a formal understanding of this sort of thing.

  That said I picked up a lot of it more from playing regularly with people who are much better than me at music. In the end if you immerse yourself in music that uses these ideas more regularly you start encountering strange chord notations and seeing patterns in why they are as they are. Finally it isn’t really a prescriptive thing, there will always be many ways to write the same chord, and it will usually be much of a muchness what is written vs what you actually play.

  In the case above I’d probably always write it as a D because for someone trying to learn it quickly they’ll know what a D is more instinctively than a weird augmented minor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Music Notation] What does "D M F# m/5+" mean?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah definitely agreed here. The only ones I can come up with are horribly overwrought specifically to make it sensible. (like F#mD5 -> F#m -> F#mA5 where the C, C#, D is an implied run but like… Why)

  Listen to the music man, he speaks the truth :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Music Notation] What does "D M F# m/5+" mean?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That reads to me as a F#m with an augmented 5th. The notes of a simple tonic triad of D would be D F# A. Meanwhile an F#m would be F# A C#. If you augment that C# to a D and take the second inversion of the chord then you again get D F# A.

  The actual reason you would write it like this would really depend on what you are doing musically in the piece more widely. If you were going F#m -> Bm through D as a passing chord, you could consider it as an F#m aug5, however this kinda would make more sense if the other parts of the piece implied that chord to be an F# chord.

  In general don’t worry about it too much as often you don’t really mean the alternative representations that it suggests, but there is some fun music theory underlying this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Headteachers in England tell of worsening behaviour of pupils – and parents⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly the first set of students coming in at undergrad after covid that I had were simultaneously wonderful and also felt about 2 years behind where they usually are socially. It was a bit of a struggle getting them to properly sit down and think. They did absolutely thrive when you got them going though (with some kinda more experimental pedagogy) so I do still have hope.