Ashelyn

@Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube tests removing viewer counts — here’s what we know⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of “view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video”. If you want a specific video, you must search for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Eat lead⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I always found the idea of stable Boltzmann brains fascinating. The idea that on an infinite enough universe, there must exist self-sustaining minds that function on an entirely circumstantial set of rules and logic based on whatever the quantum soup spit up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Eat lead⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also hard to argue while also claiming your god is moral, which is why creationists usually scapegoat the task of planting fossils to Satan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Eat lead⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I always found it funny how they’ll sometimes try to justify their claims scientifically to give it an air of legitimacy. If god created the stars close to one another and expanded them to fill the sky over a single day, the skies would be dark for billions of years. A YEC could easily say “oh well god put the light there to make the stars look like they’ve been in the sky for a long time” but very often they just don’t have an answer because they didn’t think of one. Unfortunately, there’s almost that will stop them from doubling down on their beliefs and just becoming more prepared for the next person they talk to

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Might as well go cyberpunk, I guess.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Science fiction usually carries with it a desire to rationalize and explain the technology it’s built upon, to try and paint a world plausible from a scientific standpoint. You see this a lot with the technobabble in Star Trek.

  Cyberpunk has a lot of overlap with science fiction, but usually dives more into the social commentary on society and capitalism, using the technology within as a vehicle to amplify those criticisms. Some cyberpunk works seek to explain their technology and make it seem grounded in the same way sci-fi does, but that is usually secondary to the social and political themes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Years back, I had that happen on PayPal of all websites. Their account creation and reset pages truncated my password to 16 chars or something before hashing, but the actual login page didn’t, so the password didn’t work at all unless I backspaced it to the character limit. I forgot how I even found that out but it was a very frustrating few hours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I avoid enshitification of my keyboard and mouse⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I know this might not be the most convenient solution, but learning to resolder mouse switches means you can just replace the faulty components (and maybe the sliders too) and just keep using the hardware that works for you. As long as you don’t have a mouse with that awful rubber that de-vulcanizes after about 3 years, and don’t mind the visual wear from your hand on the shell over time, you’ll easily 10x the life of most products manufactured with planned obsolescence. Logitech almost always cheaps out on the switches for their gaming mice, unfortunately. After replacing the switches on my g pro wireless when they started double-clicking after 2 years (almost exactly), it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

  ifixit almost always has comprehensive teardown and rebuild instructions for popular peripherals. Bonus points is that whenever you take apart something to do a repair, you can clean out all the hard to reach places that collect random dust and debris. Can be kind of gross but is also pretty satisfying. Additional bonus points for being more sustainable with your consumer habits and minimizing e-waste in landfills!

  If you’ve got a mechanical keyboard, you can do the same but it’s generally a lot more tedious since most have the switches soldered on, and LEDs double the amount of joints you have to deal with. I recently did just the WASD and a few other high-traffic keys on my board after one one of them failed, and it was a several hour process

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is UI design backsliding?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Complete side note, I saw your pfp and checked your profile to confirm my suspicions. Thank you for your work on OpenRGB! It’s been a great tool for managing the LEDs on my computer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Twitter-like app where you are the only actual user and every other "user" is an AI bot.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Everyone on the internet is a bot except you

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Platypuses⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s like a Swiss army knife of biological features

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Platypuses⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They also don’t have nipples (though do have mammary glands) and mother platypuses basically sweat milk through their skin for the pups to collect off their fur

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skills⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d also consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but that came from plenty of mistakes growing up including putting malware on the family computer at least twice (mostly ads for these “Pokemon MMOs” back in the mid aughts that were too enticing for my kid brain to refuse 😅).

  It’s very easy for me to forget how much of an outlier my tech experience is among most folks around my age. I had an acquaintance in the first year of college I helped by giving essay advice, and was very surprised to see that the only thing they really knew how to do was basic use of apps on their iPhone. They got a laptop for school, but no computer experience, no keyboard typing experience, and even just the iPhone Settings app was a scary place to be avoided for the most part. To this person, Microsoft Word was a new thing they had to learn on top of everything else. In college. It was also in the South so I don’t know if I should be that surprised unfortunately.

  Regardless, it was pretty wild to me, but a very real reminder that not everyone has access to the same resources education, and/or experience to draw on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TSMC's $65 billion Arizona facility can now match Taiwan production yields according to early trials | TechSpot⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Aren’t there still massive issues with the Colorado River running dry? Hopefully they’re not too dependant on that water source for their chips

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Minecraft *Movie Edition*⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think they’ll get away with it because they’re deliberately marketing it the way so many similar movies are managed: formulaically for kids, but with some actors and writing meant to give ‘the adults’ something to watch too. Unfortunately, ‘the adults’ are almost always assumed to have only a passing familiarity with the subject material, and I have a feeling they’re going to write the ‘for the adults in the room’ jokes with that assumption in mind.

  It feels like it’s being written on an outdated manual, ignoring the fact that there’s a very sizable core audience of 20 and 30-somethings they could tap into. My guess is that everything they tried only tested well with children in focus groups, since apparently they were dead-set on a live-action format from the very beginning. I hate to be so cynical, but it’s possible they decided to go all-in on kids because they can hit the appeal without worrying as much on the production standards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s really good to know, and not how I thought the system worked previously. I thought instances were responsible for all vote aggregation and simply reported totals to each other at regular intervals, plus submitting comments/edits from users which are more obviously public

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Y’know, that’s fair. I think I misspoke, and meant to say that the admins of your instance can see your IP but not the admins of another, but I’m not 100% sure that’s true because I’ve never looked at the protocol.

  If every interaction is already public on the backend/API level, then simply not showing the info to users is just a transparency issue.

  The more I’m thinking about this, the more I believe it’s a cultural/expectations thing. On websites like Tumblr, all of your reblogs and likes are public info, but it’s very up front about that. Social media like Facebook, IG, and sites like Discord, it’s the same; you can look through the list of everyone who reacted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Data is not suddenly public just because some people have access to it. Data is public when it’s available for anyone to look at. Privacy is almost always going to be a trust issue on some level, and very few things are possible to do truly anonymously. Some data will always be available to someone in a position where it’s possible to abuse. Instance admins can see your IP address. Should that be available for everyone to see?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, that’s already true and why the federation model is used in the first place. If another instance can’t be trusted, you can disconnect your own from it (extremely easy if you self-host, if you are a standard member of a larger instance it might require convincing)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL: How Private Prisons Sued The State of Arizona for Not Having Enough Prisoners⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What a phenomenal country to allow this sort of thing to occur at all

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Your Phone Listening to You? | NOVA⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The device wouldn’t necessarily have to be constantly streaming the audio to a central server. If it’s capable of hearing wake up words like “Ok Google” it’s capable of listening for other phrases and having onboard processing to relay back the results much more compressed. Whether or not this is common practice is another matter, and yes the algorithms are scary good even without eavesdropping.

• ⁨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:

  Technically, steamOS because it’s designed to play games and it’s what the steam deck uses. That probably won’t have many other non-gaming features though, and I’ve personally never used it. In my experience, you can get most games without a hyper-aggressive anti cheat working on any Linux distro with varying degrees of effort, just a matter of having all the needed libraries installed! The more popular distros like Ubuntu, popOS, Fedora, even Arch (btw) should have a lot of helpful information out there on how to get Lutris or Steam set up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did Stanford just prototype the future of AR glasses?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Any time a news headline asks a question, the answer is almost always “no”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Possible snipers seen at OSU. Administration says they're not snipers but should be treated like they are.⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair it’s kind of hard to not roll over to the National Guard

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨just say no!!⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also check out hyperrogue if you get the chance. It’s a turn based top down game with a non-euclidean, procedural game board

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is Windows 11 so annoying?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Which games do you play? In my experience the only ones that haven’t worked are ones with a hefty (kernel-level) anti cheat or similar. Proton is surprisingly good at emulating windows games!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Continental D r i f t s⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m pretty sure the magma would have to be considerably hotter to actually be boiling.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon builds AI model to optimize packaging⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s fair. I think fundamentally a false positive/negative isn’t that much different. Pretty much all tests—especially those dealing with real world conditions—are heuristic, as are all LLMs by necessity of the design. Hallucination is a pretty specific term given to AI as an attempt to assign agency to a system that doesn’t actually have any (by implying it’s crazy and making stuff up instead of a black box with deterministic inputs and outputs spitting out something factually wrong but with a similar format to what is trained on). I feel like the nature of any tool where “you can’t trust this to be entirely accurate” should have an umbrella term that encompasses both types of providing inaccurate info under certain conditions.

  I suppose the difference is that AI is a lot more likely to randomly go off, whereas a blood test is likelier to provide repeated false positives for the same person with their unique biology? There’s also the fact that most medical tests represent a true/false dichotomy or lookup table, whereas an LLM is given the entire bounds of language.

  Would an AI clustering algorithm (say, K-means for instance) giving an inaccurate diagnosis be a false positive/negative or a hallucination? These models can be programmed on a sliding scale and I feel like there’s definitely an area where the line could get pretty blurry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A wonderful day begins⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Alcohol is also a known carcinogen and cause of numerous health issues. Probably worse than the aspartame

  Plus all the extra sodium will give you kidney stones

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon builds AI model to optimize packaging⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, AI is used in fraud detection pretty often; when it hits a false positive (which happens frequently on a population-level basis), is that not a hallucination of some sort? Obviously LLMs can go off the rails much further because it’s readable text, but any machine learning model will occasionally spit out really bad guesses almost any person could have done better with. (To be fair, humans are highly capable of really bad guesses too).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨💊💊💊⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So that means that if someone doesn’t believe a medicine will work when it actually does, the effect is still present but not as great?