ricecake
@ricecake@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on ... 1 week ago:
I’ve got an alarming quantity. The saving grace is I don’t think I’m strong, say any of the weird shit, post the memes or have delusions about my fighting proficiency. And I’m not bald.
I used to be rather fit and I wrestled in high school. I’m fairly confident I could break free of someone roughly less skilled than me and maybe a hair stronger and flee. I’ve never been in a fight, I’ve been punched while boxing but was too disoriented to get a good hit back (first and only time boxing), and I’ve punched a friend in the face as the culmination to a funny conversation about how he’s never been punched in the face.
Flannel is really comfy, and I want to be the sort of person who goes on more hikes than I have time to.
I have no self delusions in the physical realm. - Comment on political debate 2 weeks ago:
They’re also just general 4chan Internet weirdo. I take it you’re thinking there’s a particular type of racism libertarians are more prone to? Probably “we don’t need racial discrimination protections, the market will punish it if people care”?
- Comment on political debate 2 weeks ago:
I mean, you’re entirely correct, but there’s also racial politics as in “race relations”. Like “why are we regressing on race based civil liberty protections and seeing an upswing in racial prejudice”.
Racial groups don’t have homogeneous political opinions, but they are often the subject of political opinions.
All that to say: there are many different ways to express a disgustingly inappropriate blend of racial and political opinions in a workplace, and we shouldn’t assume they picked any particular inappropriate way.
- Comment on Education doesn't increase intelligence by making people memorize things, but by constantly reminding people that they might be wrong. 2 weeks ago:
Ah, alright. :) sometimes these things are hard to tell in text.
- Comment on Education doesn't increase intelligence by making people memorize things, but by constantly reminding people that they might be wrong. 2 weeks ago:
I think you missed that the next portion of their statement was connected to the part you (inappropriately) added the missing word to.
They’re saying, essentially, that it’s important to learn math just for a rounded education, even if it lacks application. They’re saying closer to “even if we’re eating sushi, we still need fire”.
- Comment on Education doesn't increase intelligence by making people memorize things, but by constantly reminding people that they might be wrong. 2 weeks ago:
There’s a lot of different things that get pumped into “intelligence”. There’s “reasoning ability”, “knowledge”, “wisdom”, and a whole host of others, some in the category of traditional intelligence, and others around things like emotional intelligence.
Raw knowledge is something that schools can teach through memorization. You have facts. Memorization isn’t the best way to do it, since context and such can often make information stick better, but some things you’re eventually going to memorize, intentionally or not (I don’t calculate 6*6=36 every time).
Reasoning or analytical ability is much harder to teach, since you can’t really make someone more able to have insights and such.
Wisdom is something that can be trained I’d phrase it. I don’t think you can be taught it like you can a history lesson, but it needs to be trained like a sport. How to apply reason to a situation, how the knowledge you have relates to things and other bits of knowledge. Which things are important and which aren’t.
It sounds like you’re mostly taking what I’ve called wisdom, with a dash if introspection tossed in, which can play very well with wisdom. “How sure am I about this?” Is a question wisdom might make you ask , and you need to know yourself to know the answer.
Knowing how to question the right part of something, so that you’re not getting caught up in the little inconsistencies and missing the big one, or considering the wrong facts that are unimportant to a situation.
(A pet peeve of mine) Sometimes people will bring up statistics of race in relation to crime. People with perfectly good reasoning ability and knowledge will get caught up debating the veracity of the statistics, or the minutiae of the implications of how other statistics interplay to lead to those numbers, both in an attempt to deny the conclusion of the original argument.
The more wise thing to do is to question why this person is making the argument in the first place. Use your knowledge of society to know there are racists who want to convince others. Your reasoning to know that someone more interested in persuasion than truth can twist numbers how they want. Reject their position entirely, instead of accepting their position as valid and arguing their facts. - Comment on Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions. 4 weeks ago:
Except that with the website example it’s not that they’re ignoring the price or just walking out with the item. It’s that the item was not labeled with a price, nor were they informed of the price. Then, rather than just walking out, they requested the item and it was delivered to them with no attempt to collect payment.
The key part of a website is that the user cannot take something. The site has to give it to them.
A more apt retail analogy might be you go to a website. You see a scooter you like, so you click “I want it!”. The site then asks for your address and a few days later you get a scooter in the mail.
That’s not theft, it’s a free scooter. If the site accused you of theft because you didn’t navigate to an unlinked page they didn’t tell you about to find the prices, or try to figure out payment before requesting, you’d rightly be pretty miffed.The shoplifting analogy doesn’t work because it’s not shoplifting if the vendor gives it to you knowingly and you never misrepresented the cost or tried to avoid paying. Additionally, taking someone’s property without their permission is explicitly illegal, and we have a subcategory that explicitly spells out how retail fraud works and is illegal.
Under our current system the way to prevent someone from having your thing without paying or meeting some other criteria first is to collect payment or check that criteria before giving it to them.
To allow people to have things on their website freely available to humans but to prevent grabbing and using it for training will require a new law of some sort.
- Comment on Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions. 4 weeks ago:
It really does matter if it’s legally binding if you’re talking about content licensing. That’s the whole thing with a licensing agreement: it’s a legal agreement.
The store analogy isn’t quite right. Leaving a store with something you haven’t purchased with the consent of the store is explicitly illegal.
With a website, it’s more like if the “shoplifter” walked in, didn’t request a price sheet, picked up what they wanted and went to the cashier who explicitly gave it to them without payment.The crux of the issue is that the website is still providing the information even if the requester never agreed or was even presented with the terms.
If your site wants to make access to something conditional then it needs to actually enforce that restriction.It’s why the current AI training situation is unlikely to be resolved without laws to address it explicitly.
- Comment on Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions. 4 weeks ago:
The thing is a robots.txt file doesn’t work as licensing. There’s no legal requirement to fetch the file, and no mechanism to consent or track consent.
This is putting up a sign that says everyone must pay, and then giving it to anyone who asks for free.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
Well, the follow up answer is pretty straightforward.
Selling power by the megajoule is silly. You want a unit that puts time in the name and the unit of power that’s on appliances. If I run a 35 watt fan for an hour I know I’ve used 35 watt hours of energy. Or I can say I’ve used 126 kilojoules.It’s not highschool. You don’t lose points for not reducing your answer all the way. The goal is to describe reality clearly, not to use the most concise units of measurement.
If I’m running a powerplant I need to know how many joules I get from my fuel and what my customers need and what my generators can deliver. The customer needs to know the efficiency of their appliances, and how how much that costs them. These are the same thing, but life isn’t made simpler by having them be the same unit.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
Oh, certainly. I just enjoyed that, in a thread about the vagueness and oddness of the imperial system, the suggestion came up to use a casual approximation for the inch instead of the word “inch”.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
Take heart. You can easily remember that a stride is 5’ 3 9/25” because that’s the height of the typical Roman soldier after adjustment for 15th century English agricultural tax methodology.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
Nah, highly composite number. A product of multiple primes. 10 is 2 and 5. A power of 2 is just multiple 2s. 12 gets you 2, 2, and 3. 60 adds a 5.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
In traditional carpentry inches and feet make sense because of the high divisibility. We don’t get as much benefit from that now though.
We still use hex with computers because that’s what they’re made using (rather binary, but hex is just a natural group of binary digits). The usage of binary is ultimately more grounded in the objective than the usage of base 10 in the SI system. Nature dictates the relationships between the units, but we pick the quantities so it works out to a nice base 10 set of ratios.
Base 2 naturally arises when dealing with information theory that underpins a lot of digital computing.Say what you will about the imperial system, but you can pry binary, octal, and hex from my cold dead hands.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
Do you want to develop imperial measurements? Because that’s how you invent imperial measurements. Next thing you know you’ve got a cup that’s really good for measuring liquids and a couple spoons you like to scoop with…
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
2.2 pounds per kilogram. For a rough conversion just multiply or divide by two. For a more precise conversation do the same thing, then wiggle a decimal and do it again.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
That gets you base 11, which is what we count on our fingers in now.
They counted, at least for tallying, by putting their thumb on the three finger bones if the other four fingers on the hand. One hand can count to 12, and then you lift a finger in the other when starting over. That method gives you a count of 60’on your fingers. That’s why 12 and 60 still crop up all the time.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
It’s not nonsense, just old and focused on priorities that don’t matter anymore. A mile was initially a thousand paces. So you send a group of people out, one counts each time their right foot takes a step and after a thousand times they build a mile marker. Bam, roman road system. 1000 strides per mile, 5 feet per stride.
Later the English used the unit as part of their system of measurement, and built the furlong around it, which is the distance a man with an ox team and plow can plow before the ox need to rest. A mile is eight furlong. This got tied into surveying units, since plots of land were broken up into acres, or the amount of land an ox team can plow a day.
When some unit reconciliation needed to be done, they couldn’t change the vitality of oxen, and changing the survey unit would cause tax havock, so they changed the size of a foot.All the units and their relationships were defined deliberately and intentionally. They just factored in priorities that we don’t care about anymore.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
I just remember that a mile has 1000 strides in it.
- Comment on 5 tomatoes 4 weeks ago:
Because your power is billed in kWh. Figuring out the kWh cost of a 77 watt TV is straight forward, but a lot of consumer labeling standards are about quick and easy side by side comparisons as opposed to perfect application of units. Easiest way to give a comparison that’s accurate enough and doesn’t involve odd numbers is to convert that way.
- Comment on xkcd #3138: Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure 4 weeks ago:
It’s from a time when you bought undried and planned wood rather than dried and planned like we typically do now.
It’s less a quirk of the imperial system and more a quirk of the lumber retail system, which is older than the metric system.
The biggest difference is that in places that use dimensional lumber and the metric system the pattern is to sell by actual dimension, rather than nominal. So a wall stud might be 45mmX145mm, or 63mmX75mm for a rafter, depending on your country.Most north American hardware stores also sell by finished sizes now.
- Comment on Trump says he plans unconstitutional executive order to mandate ID for voters 5 weeks ago:
To be clear: the president dictating it via executive order is unconstitutional, not the practice of voter id itself.
The constitution pretty explicitly makes elections a state issue with some congressional action on top of them. The president doesn’t factor into it - Comment on nooo my genderinos 1 month ago:
“applies” isn’t the word I would use. It’s not like nature has a line that once you pass some threshold of mass, acceleration or distance it needs to flip the relativity switch.
Probably say “becomes noticable”.
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 1 month ago:
I’d actually argue the opposite. With states of matter, we’re attempting to delineate how reality groups together sets of related properties that vary between conditions in similar ways for different substances.
Looking for the edges that nature drew.With species though, we drew the lines. We drew them with a mind towards ensuring it’s objectively measurable but it’s still not a natural delineation. Taxonomists (biologists are actually a different field) mostly run into uncertainty with debating which categorization property takes precedence, and what observations of species have actually been made.
So while they debate which system to use, the particulars of the systems are pretty concrete. - Comment on nooo my genderinos 1 month ago:
First you make them memorize single digit subtraction X - Y where X >= Y. Then you extend that to small double digit numbers.
Then you teach “borrowing”. 351-213. Subtract the 1s column. Can’t take 3 from 1, so borrow 10 from the 5 in the 10s column, making 11 in the 1s column and 4 in the 10s.Definitely more clear, right?
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 1 month ago:
I believe that’s what happens anytime they say that we probably shouldn’t focus on memorizing a multiplication table, or try to teach anything in a way that puts more focus on understanding how numbers work than on symbolic memorization.
And that’s like… Elementary school. - Comment on 95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds 1 month ago:
It’s frustrating because they used the technical term in a knowingly misleading way.
LLMs are artificial intelligence in the same way that a washing machines load and soil tuning systems are. Which is to say they are intelligent, but so are ants, earthworms, and slime molds. The detect stimuli, and react based on that stimuli.
They market it as though “artificial intelligence” means “super human reasoning”, “very smart”, or “capable of thought” when it’s really a combination of “reacts to stimuli in a meaningful fashion” and “can appear intelligent”.
- Comment on FFmpeg moves to Forgejo 1 month ago:
Because disabling JS is unheard of in the open source world, right?
They implemented a feature that breaks the website for people who otherwise have no issues while providing no functional value to the site “rather than spending time building their actual product that people want to use.”
It’s one thing to expect them to do special work to support an uncommon configuration, and it’s another to feel frustrated that they did extra work to break a less common but still unremarkable configuration.
I entirely support people not wanting bots to scrape their shit, but there’s a handful of websites I use that use this specific blocking software and it frequently gets angry and blocks me if I’m on my phone for no good reason. It’s annoying, and getting angry at the user for being upset that your website is broken is about the only thing more unreasonable than demanding that an open source developer do work for you for free.
- Comment on FFmpeg moves to Forgejo 1 month ago:
I wouldn’t call that “seething”, the project is targeting an English speaking audience (English is the source, other languages are translation targets), effectively no one is a native speaker of Esperanto, and it’s usage is small enough that someone could quite possibly never encounter the language.
Bad project names are common enough in programming and open source, and complained about, that I wouldn’t jump right to xenophobia as the reason someone might complain that a project picked a name knowing it would be difficult to pronounce.They can name it whatever they want, but getting that angry that someone didn’t recognize a word in an anglisiced spelling of a word from a niche language is uncalled for.
- Comment on Incident 1 month ago:
I think the difference might be that you’re thinking of standards that say “if you do A and B and C then you’re a good ___”. Happens with prescriptive education standards that are tied tightly with budget.
I’m thinking of standards like “failure to A or B or C, or doing X or Y or Z makes you an unacceptable ___”. It’s what you see in restaurants and hospital hygiene standards. Any restaurant “cleaning to the test” and only going down the food safety list and correcting any issue is both the type that would just be filthy without those standards, and also would end up serving safe food. Same for doctors and hand washing. We would rather all doctors be deeply committed to hygiene, but we have real world data that mandating hygiene minimums and doing things to enforce them has measurable increases in patient well-being. Same for building safety standards and such.people just go through the motions devoid of thinking and intent :) Now they also can go: I followed the flowchart what more do you want
In a system with the standard, those people are providing better care than they would be without them.
