ricecake

@ricecake@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, first off he wasn’t actually doing it after Celsius existed as a temperature scale. He made it a solid 18 years beforehand.
  Second, there are some issues. Specifically, ice freezes at 0, but it doesn’t stop getting colder. So if you have a bit of ice, that doesn’t tell you the temperature, just that it’s below a threshold. Boiling is more convenient because liquid water can’t get above 100, but you do have to consider side pressure.
  Fahrenheit used brine because as it freezes it forces salt out of the ice, making it more resistant to freezing. It self stabilizes its temperature, which is immensely handy.

  None of the people designing their scales envisioned that using the basic reference points for common calibration would be a thing. Just like how we don’t calibrate them with brine, ice, steam or butts today, instead relying on how we marked down how electrical resistance changes as a function of temperature and then calibrated reference numbers to get the scale right.

  It’s important to remember that the people in the past were largely not stupid, they simply hadn’t found out something we take for granted or they had priorities that we don’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So you get in the bathtub with the bike pump and have the hose connected to a nozzle going out. You might need something stronger that shrinkwrap depending on what you get, but your bathtub is invariably able to handle 1 atmosphere of pressure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Or, hear me out: a bathtub, some shrinkwrap, a bicycle pump and so e good old fashioned grit and determination.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m one of those people who knows we should standardize, bit also finds Fahrenheit just very convenient.

  Like, when people say it’s 50 out, I immediately know that it’s going to feel about halfway between what I know 0 and 100 feel like. No one can even put up the pretext of doing that with Celsius, because not even the most pedantic person ever bothers to tell you when it’s 100 c out.

  In seriousness though, the Fahrenheit scale isn’t non-sense, it’s just addressing things we don’t much need help with anymore. The zero point was chosen as a temperature you can create reliably without particularly sophisticated tools, and the range is so freezing and boiling are 180 degrees apart, putting them on the opposite sides of a dial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ugh, I’m one of those people who will defend imperial as not being irrational, just built ad-hoc for purposes that aren’t in alignment with modern ones and … No, that’s not what Fahrenheit is.

  Fahrenheit was trying to make a temperature scale that was easy to recreate to ease the calibration of thermometers. Zero is a temperature that can be created in your garage with some ice, salt and water. 100 was his best, ultimately inaccurate, attempt to measure human body temperature, since it’s another easy calibration point, and from there water was defined as 32 and 212 so that they were 180 degrees apart, which would fit will on a temperature dial.
  Not irrational, not a comfort scale, and not in alignment with current needs.

  It’s pure coincidence that it kinda lines up with comfortable outdoor temperatures in the opinion of a good chunk of a population living in the northern part of the western hemisphere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky just verified ICE⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So for the first part, I don’t disagree at all. I just don’t think the logistics or theoretical necessity is a bearing on the symbolic-ness of it. Same for the effectiveness of it. Even if it changed literally nothing and no one would ever know I still wouldn’t shake hands with someone I considered evil.

  I don’t see defining a subset of what you consider evil, like dissemination of hate speech, to be a downside.

  There’s a lot of complex questions around a platform curating ideological content which could possibly make them loose certain platform protections. Right now most platforms are roughly content neutral because it allows them to be viewed as platforms, rather than publishers. This is more a response to the claim that there’s no reason for them not to remove ice. It may or may not be compelling, but it’s a real reason.

  As for the use of the word “service”, sometimes my hands type slower than my brain thinks. My intent was to convey “those who develop and control the mastodon license”. Hopefully my original statement makes more sense in that context.
  Those are the people providing the printing press schematic analog. Obviously an idea can’t support an ideology in that sense.

  I’m not of the opinion either supports them in a way that’s worth getting angry over.
  We also aren’t talking about being angry at ISPs for being willing to deliver packets to and from ice or Nazis, or any of the other entities that do less then the most they could possibly do to distance themselves.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky just verified ICE⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Says the fact that it’s come up multiple times amongst a wide swath of the open source community, and look about you. Those licenses aren’t used. One or two exist and have a vanishingly small usage level and a couple more I have been “in progress” for years.
  The people who write most of the open source licenses have explanations for why it’s not compatible.

  Group behavior is a collective decision and a reflection of the group.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky just verified ICE⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No, you’re not understanding what I’m saying. I’m not the person you were replying to.
  Mastodon is a piece of software. It has a license, just like bluesky or any other. You can put a clause in the license saying the software cannot be used for the dissemination of hate speech. The open source community has discussed this and decided it goes against the principles of free software and open source.

  If you’re mad at one and not the other, you’re applying different standards because being part of the fediverse weighs more.

  Personally I hold platforms to a different standard and so I’m neither mad at mastodon nor bluesky. I just think it’s hypocritical to be mad at someone for publishing a fascists letter but not be mad at the person who gave the same fascist a printing press.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky just verified ICE⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So the mastodon service supports Nazis.

  nobody owns it and anyone can run it

  They could have chosen a license that forbid usage for spreading hate. They put “free software” and “open source” above blocking hate speech.
  They’re providing software to Nazis, and I don’t really see how that makes them better than providing a place to post.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, that’s a good one.

  Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
  No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.

  You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
  They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
  These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.

  Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.

  The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
  Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
  A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.

  Image

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  It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.

  All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.

  Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  But that’s just saying that instead of using Firefox and not turning on the feature, you’ll use a less maintained version of Firefox where they didn’t enable the feature. I don’t feel like those projects have much value add in the privacy spectrum compared to Firefox, particularly when one of them was owned by an advertising company, and neither of them actually has the resources to maintain or operate a browser in isolation, which is a major concern regarding security and privacy both.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A very vocal portion of the user base, but we don’t actually know what absolute portion cares. I’m personally unlikely to use possible AI features outside translation, but Mozilla has generally done enough that I don’t feel particularly worried they’re going to mess with my privacy or force me to use a feature I don’t want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Contrary to popular belief, the US isn’t actually unusually litigious. European countries are just as litigious and Germany, Sweden and Austria all have higher numbers.

  The reason we have more “nonsense” lawsuits is because we have a culture that says caveat emptor is a sound defense and negligence on one parties side is equally the fault of the injured party.
  “Why didn’t you look at your food before biting the metal fillings? It’s your responsibility to make sure what you eat is safe” and “you walked on my icy sidewalk, you slipped, and now you want me to pay for your ambulance? I should have put down salt, but you should have known better than to walk there” are both reasonable statements to a lot of Americans. Hell, we have special derogatory terms for lawyers that work with individuals who have been non-criminally injured by someone else.

  On paper, paying the other parties legal fees if you lose sounds good, but what it does it keep individuals who can’t afford to pay legal someone else’s fees to withold valid legal complaints. In an ideal world they would proceed because they were right, but we live in a world where sometimes the person in the right looses, or they reasonably thought they were and were wrong. Due diligence or actual correctness is no assurance of justice, so a lawsuit is a gamble and a more expensive one if you also have to pay the other parties costs, and if they’re a business which has lawyers on staff they might not even view a crippling legal cost as an increased expense.
  On the other side that business just tells their lawyer to file the paperwork, they’re already paying for the legal consult so they’re advised going in if it’s a good idea, and if they lose they’re out a few weeks of lawyer salary.

  Lawsuits are a mark of people using societies tools to resolve disputes. There being more in places with higher trust in social institutions makes sense. People are willing to use the system and they trust it’ll deliver justice.
  The US is up there because people need to use lawsuits to make up for our lack in social safety nets, and our preposterous number of businesses are constantly using them to settle disputes.

  We should eliminate the court fees entirely and provide the trial lawyer equivalent of a public defender.
  A bolt in your oatmeal is a good reason to sue, and if you can’t afford a lawyer to help you pay to get your tooth put back in it doesn’t seem unreasonable for society to give you access to someone to help you find a path to remunerations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  99% agreed, but I’d increase the number a bit. With inflation and rising costs $10 million in net worth isn’t always an obscenity.
  It’s unquestionably wealthy, but still in the realm of attainable by an individual without being a bastard. Owning a single family home and a gas station in the San Francisco region and planning for retirement could put you in that realm.

  I don’t begrudge someone who worked hard having nice things. I don’t even begrudge luck, inheritance, or nepotism getting luxury. It’s when it’s beyond luxury and no one could get it with any amount of work.

  Tie it to the consumer price index or some such.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hey look, a giant sign telling you to find a different job⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Right? I work for an actual megacorp and our policy is almost the exact opposite on every point.
  Sick workers make more sick: don’t work and feel better faster. Distracted workers makes mistakes and cause problems: don’t work and take care of your kid. Rested workers work better: take the time around the holidays off entirely. Productivity is crap then anyway and with so many vacations it’s easier to plan around a block where nothing happens than to deal with random teams having unpredictable delays. Car broken? Expense a Lyft. We have a corporate account and your ride to work is a rounding error compared to the sales visits.

  If you’re going to invoke money you should actually understand how big companies function and view money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you ever feel like your life is "scripted"? Like everything is written by some entity controlling your life? Like you live in a fictional universe? Is this feeling normal/common?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We’ve actually figured out that that one is basically a “stutter” in your memory encoding system. Consciousness isn’t as continuous as it feels, and so you can get a situation where your memory says it just put some stuff in working memory and consciousness thinks it means your current thoughts or observations. So you end up with a feeling of a past recollection of a current awareness. Because it’s tagged “past” you can’t do anything other than understand it to be in the past, even though you’re actively experiencing it.
  A related phenomenon is how you “always” wake up just before the loud noise. Even though you’re asleep you still hear things and process audio. A loud noise happens and your audio processing tells you to wake up. Conscious you wakes up, creating that new memory, and then processes the noise that woke you.

  Consciousness is a process that takes place over a duration, not an instant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WHY???⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Based on what I recall of the explanation by the person who figured it out: spinning makes fluid near the edge spin faster than fluid near the middle. The difference in speed creates a wave. Since it’s finite and moving, the wave interferes with itself and because of math, makes a hexagon. Something about how the wave pattern changes density and brings different glasses to the surface on the planets.
  Then they showed an example by spinning a bucket, and it kinda fell flat because they had to explain that a bucket isn’t a sphere so you have to spin it just right to get it to work, but it did work in the end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨same shit every day, on god⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, I was just joking around. What my water system is missing is molten salt.

  Although for the sake of preposterousness, I’m going to suggest we use the molten salt to turn a giant water wheel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨same shit every day, on god⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Molten salt. Lower pressure, higher efficiency, and I believe less reactive in the event of an uh-oh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Infosys co-founder once again calls for longer than 70-hour weeks - and no, he's not joking⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Insurance, benefits and labor expenses. Even in places with little worker protections there are costs that scale with the number of workers instead of the number of hours.
  A brief look indicates employers in India can expect to budget on the order of 18% of an employees take home per year for those expenses.

  There are some circumstances and places in the US where you don’t need to provide as many benefits to employees who work below 40 hours. Then you see employers hire more people and schedule them for just under the threshold to give them benefits.

  The answer is always because it’s cheaper for them somehow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, the good old fashioned “say a fallacy, refuse to elaborate and cut off discussion”. Truly the mark of someone who actually has a reply and isn’t just getting huffy because their notions aren’t being taken as gospel.

  Protip: if you actually think a discussion is pointless, just don’t reply.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sad people seem to be giving flak for this. Regardless of your opinion on current AI tools, they definitely lower some barriers, which can result in more things getting made because of lower risk.

  A good game will be good regardless of where an art asset came from, and some people really care about not buying AI utilizing games. Labeling only scares people peddling low effort crap.

  If you’re looking for a way to not use ai for portrait art, one thing you can do is leverage combinations in your favor. Draw 10 noses, 10 mouths, 10 shirt collars, 10 hairstyles and so on. When you need a new character, paste together your pre-fab pieces at random , pallet swap the colors randomly and then touch up the details.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The cloud is just someone else's computer, but the internet is just someone else's network⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re currently connected to your neighbors that intimately. Chances are a good chunk of your neighbors are on the same ISP as you.
  What disconnect do you think a non-local ISP is providing that a local one wouldn’t?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Those darn consumers having opinions on things that affect them without being experts in it. Next thing you know they’re going to want to ban smoking in restaurants despite not having medical degrees or knowing first hand how this will impact the tobacco industry! Or carbon emissions, food safety, or anything really…hell, cold calls are just part of the reality of marketing. Eventually consumers will grow up and realize that unprompted phonecalls at 7pm are just part of the reality of effectively offering them products.

  If it’s not clear, I think the notion that people can’t have an opinion on something that impacts them without understanding the process that yields the impact is silly and paternalistic.
  Attitudes like yours that are dismissive of consumer concerns are very much part of the reason why consumers are starting to increasingly reject AI products.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I apologize if I misunderstood your point, but I truly fail to see how

  It’s just a vocal minority that’ll eventually grow up. And public sentiment will grow up Isn’t calling the opposing view childish, which is a pretty strong sign that you’ve failed to actually consider what they’re saying. Same for calling them “brainwashed”.

  Consumers fundamentally don’t understand the process

  Do they need to? You’ll find that most consumers don’t know how a car works or how industrial design is done but they still have justifiable opinions and concerns about the impacts and quantifiable attributes of them.

  If you actually look at what consumers are concerned about you’ll find that IP and copyright concerns don’t even make the list. People are concerned about the errosion of human connection and the diminishment of creativity. Privacy. Data usage and accountability.

  And what’s more, even if they were opposed for those reasons the consumer is still intrinsically correct about what they value. If consumers respect your work less because you trace AI art it doesn’t matter if you still creatively contributed, the value has been reduced.

  Telling consumers their preference is wrong because you want to be able to copy and trace AI content while viewing yourself as a creative is some backwards boomer shit. 30 years making casual games doesn’t give you lofty insight into the nature of the creative process. It’s just “trust me, I know more”. Same for trying to bolster your position by talking about betting on it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Epic boss Tim Sweeney thinks stores like Steam should stop labelling games as being made with AI: 'It makes no sense,' he says, because 'AI will be involved in nearly all future production⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Saying people who disagree with you are childish is a sure sign that maybe you’re not giving their argument proper consideration.
  Particularly when you’re arguing that the consumers are wrong about their feelings towards the product and need to grow up and adapt to how the producers want to make it.

  You’ve got a situation where people are seeing the assets, coding, design, and writing of games being moved from being human endeavors to being human supervised endeavors, while also being asked to pay higher prices.
  The producers and vendors aren’t entitled to consumers happily letting them do less work to deliver an inferior product for more money just because the graphics card manufacturer says it’s the way of the future.

  I don’t think anyone thinks you’re spending your time doing corporate graphic design putting yourself into your work. No one calls you an artist either.
  People buying art though have a reasonable expectation that the person they’re buying it from isn’t tracing ai content or random things from google.

  Keep in mind that if the “vocal minority” “grows up”, it means people stop paying you, because you’re the one not really adding anything to the equation.