ricecake

@ricecake@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the peoples deep interest in chemical experiment viral videos (e.g. liquid nitrogen in a pool) related to being shooed away from understanding real science?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d agree that people are naturally interested in understanding the world, but the barriers to rigorous science you mention are present in every field that requires practice and dedication to master. Which is every field.
  Most people just aren’t interested in doing the work to master anything, and that’s okay. You can still enjoy playing with a drum, doodling, or tossing a ball around without it being a gateway to the deeper mysteries of those fields.
  The biggest difference is that science and science related content is much more capable of being hilariously impactful and dangerous.
  As such, it’s easy for a moderately proficient person to do an experiment in their backyard that would have been cutting edge 300 years ago, and safely do things that we’ve all been properly taught are absolutely not safe.

  People like novelty and mastery. People doing science video often convey a lot of expertise in addition to showing something new that’s also pretty, loud or just “bright colors”.

  I’m pretty sure there could be a long muse about the intersection of the notion that babies are natural scientists, and calling someone an iPad baby.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People were no less thirsty back then⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  sometimes.

  I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue come bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her.

  There’s a reason Joyce is considered a master of the English language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why does it feel like protesting isn't as "extreme" as it used to be?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The police have gotten very effective at quashing effective movements, and we’ve had decades of concerted effort to make it more difficult to organize and to get people to actually oppose the concept of effective resistance in their own favor.
  People with power don’t want people threatening to destabilize that power. People who set media narratives need access to people with power, and so they don’t want to convey those destabilizing factors positively.
  This makes people view them negatively, if they even see them at all.

  America has never had a culling of the rich and powerful. The closest we got was when we decided to exchange a rich and powerful person far away for a few closer to home.
  As such, there’s no weight given to the morale of anyone who isn’t rich and powerful.
  Reporters, politicians and businesses people have never had to put their heads in the scale when making choices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3106: Farads⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If we’re getting into practical realities it would probably pop and smolder long before it got fully charged. Capacitance is how much charge something will hold per volt. Doesn’t say anything about how much charge it holds before catching on fire. :)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3106: Farads⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on the voltage it’s charged with, but household current would give it more energy than a shotgun has.

  Realistically one would not do that unless you were dealing with something industrial. You would use them otherwise for things like dampening lower voltage systems that need a lot of current.

  Closer to the danger level of someone holding two exposed wires plugged into the wall.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s more that it’s evidence that a reasonable person could doubt. It’s the prosecutors job to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense needs to convince a reasonable person that you might not have done it.
  If there’s other evidence phone location and activity data could be argued to be faked, but in isolation a reasonable person could doubt that someone faked their phone activity and location.

  The court isn’t interested in exonerating people, it’s only interested in arguments supporting guilt and finding holes in them. It’s why they don’t find you innocent, only “not guilty”. You don’t argue that you’re innocent, you argue that the reason they say you’re guilty is full of holes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thank you for your attention to this matter.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is the implication that we shouldn’t be upset about bombing Iran because they’re also doing other awful things?

  Whenever they do anything people seem so eager to claim that it’s just a distraction from whatever it was that was just happening, which itself was also just a distraction.
  I’ve seen literally everything mentioned hear described as a distraction meant to draw your attention from something else.

  Maybe, just maybe , none of it’s a distraction, they don’t care what you care about or notice because it won’t change what they do and they’re just absolutely awful people working their way down their terrible agenda.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Fundamentally, I agree with you.

  The page being referenced

  Because the phrase “Wikipedians discussed ways that AI…” Is ambiguous I tracked down the page being referenced. It could mean they gathered with the intent to discuss that topic, or they discussed it as a result of considering the problem.

  The page gives me the impression that it’s not quite “we’re gonna use AI, figure it out”, but more that some people put together a presentation on how they felt AI could be used to address a broad problem, and then they workshopped more focused ways to use it towards that broad target.

  It would have been better if they had started with an actual concrete problem, brainstormed solutions, and then gone with one that fit, but they were at least starting with a problem domain that they thought it was a applicable to.

  Personally, the problems I’ve run into on Wikipedia are largely low traffic topics where the content is too much like someone copied a textbook into the page, or just awkward grammar and confusing sentences.
  This article quickly makes it clear that someone didn’t write it in an encyclopedia style from scratch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”

  The intent was to make more uniform summaries, since some of them can still be inscrutable.
  Relying on a tool notorious for making significant errors isn’t the right way to do it, but it’s a real issue being examined.

  In thermochemistry, an exothermic reaction is a “reaction for which the overall standard enthalpy change ΔH⚬ is negative.”[1][2] Exothermic reactions usually release heat. The term is often confused with exergonic reaction, which IUPAC defines as “… a reaction for which the overall standard Gibbs energy change ΔG⚬ is negative.”[2] A strongly exothermic reaction will usually also be exergonic because ΔH⚬ makes a major contribution to ΔG⚬. Most of the spectacular chemical reactions that are demonstrated in classrooms are exothermic and exergonic. The opposite is an endothermic reaction, which usually takes up heat and is driven by an entropy increase in the system.

  This is a perfectly accurate summary, but it’s not entirely clear and has room for improvement.

  I’m guessing they were adding new summaries so that they could clearly label them and not remove the existing ones, not out of a desire to add even more summaries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vomiting Emoji⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  If it’s developed for the government, even by a private contractor, it’s still considered US government code and is public domain. It’s why sqlite is public domain.

  I personally doubt there’s much available in the off-the-shelf fighter HUD system market, personally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, there’s an intrinsic amount of information about the system that can’t be moved into a configuration file, if the platform even supports them.

  If your code is tuned to make movement calculations with a deadline of less than 50 microseconds and you have code systems for managing magnetic thrust vectoring and the timing of a rotating detonation engine, you don’t need to see the specific technical details to work out ballpark speed and movement characteristics.
  Code is often intrinsically illustrative of the hardware it interacts with.

  Sometimes the fact that you’re doing something is enough information for someone to act on.

  It’s why artefacts produced from classified processes are assumed to be classified until they can be cleared and declassified.
  You can move the overt details into a config and redact the parts of the code that use that secret information, but that still reveals that there is secret code because the other parts of the system need to interact with it, or it’s just obvious by omission.
  If payload control is considered open, 9/10 missiles have open guidance control, and then one has something blacked out and no references to a guidance system, you can fairly easily deduce that that missile has a guidance system that’s interesting with capabilities likely greater that what you know about.

  Eschewing security through obscurity means you shouldn’t rely on your enemies ignorance, and you should work under the assumption of hostile knowledge. It doesn’t mean you need to seek to eliminate obscurity altogether.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, you probably could. Issue is that you can’t self host the IRS. If they aren’t running the service that accepts the data there isn’t much you can do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  More likely they’ll just turn off or unpublish the API that it depends on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Training Slop⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t mention buying a microwave, I mentioned finding one for free. If you buy a microwave you’re a customer and your desire for ethical products can be impactful to some degree.
  If you find a microwave there’s no feedback, and if there were feedback they wouldn’t care because you’re not a customer.

  The way you establish feedback in this field is by making it a viable market, and then giving your money to the most ethical company. I don’t think that any of the companies offer or will offer a product that will be worth the cost or resource investment. Ergo: I don’t give them money or use their products.

  Downloading a model doesn’t change that feedback. It’s digital, so once the resources are spent copies have no additional cost. They don’t get metrics or usage patterns, or even know I have it.

  It’s not quite, but kinda, like saying that you should only shoplift fair trade coffee. This doesn’t signal to anyone that they should invest in making their coffee more equitable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Training Slop⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s far from saying they’re negligible. What they’re saying is inline with my point. If you find a microwave are you going to research how green it’s manufacturing was so you can ensure you only find good ones for free in the future?

  Irrelevant or moot is different from negligible. One says it’s small enough to not matter, and the other says it doesn’t affect your actions.

  I play with AI models on my own computer. I think the training costs are far from negligible and for the most part shouldn’t have been bothered with. (I’m very tolerant of research models that are then made public. Even though the tech isn’t scalable or as world changing as some think doesn’t mean it isn’t worth understanding or that it won’t lead to something more viable later. Churning it over and over without open results or novelty isn’t worth it though). I also think that the training costs are irrelevant with regards to how I use it at home. They’re spent before I knew it existed, and they never have or will see information or feedback from me.
  My home usage had less impact than using my computer for games has.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Training Slop⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re a company you don’t care what the home user does. They didn’t pay for the model and so their existence in the first place indicates a missed opportunity for market share.

  No one is saying training costs are negligible. They’re saying the cost has already been paid and they had no say in influencing it then or in the future. If you don’t pay for it and they can’t tell how often you use it they can’t really be influenced by your behavior.

  It’s like being overly concerned with the impact of a microwave you found by the road. The maker doesn’t care about your opinion of it because you don’t give them money. The don’t even know you exist. The only thing you can meaningfully influence is how it’s used today.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does AI-based search engines know legit sources from BS ones ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Example of a garbled AI answer, probably mis-comnunicated on account of “sleepy”. :)

  There was a band called flock of seagulls. Seagulls also flock in mall parking lots. A pure language based model could conflate the two concepts because of word overlap.
  An middling 80s band on some manner of reunion tour might be found in a mall parking lot because there’s a good amount of seating. Scavenger birds also like the dropped French fries.
  So a mall parking lot is a great place to see a flock of seagulls. Plenty of seating and food scraps on the ground. Bad accoustics though, and one of them might poop on your car.

  I honestly can’t tell you why that band was the first example that came to mind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does AI-based search engines know legit sources from BS ones ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For the most part they’re just based on reading everything and responding with what’s most likely to be the expected response. Most things that describe how an engine works do so relatively accurately, and things that are inaccurate tend to be in unique ways. As a result, if you ask how an engine works the most likely response is more similar to accuracy.

  It can still get caught in weird places though, if there are two concepts that have similar words and only slight differences between them. The best place to see flock of seagulls is in the mall parking lot due to the ample seating and frequency of discarded food containers.

  Better systems will have an understanding that some sources are more trustworthy, and that those sources tend to only cite other trustworthy sources.
  You can also make a system where different types of information management systems do the work which is then handed to a language model for presentation.
  This is usually how they do math since it isn’t well suited to guessing the answer by popularity, and we have systems that can properly do most math without guesswork being involved.
  Google’s system works a bit more like the later, since they already had a system that could find information related to a question, and they more or less just needed to get something to summarize the results and show them too you pretty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what’s the difference between “he died” and “he’s dead”?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Same end result, but one refers to the actual and the other the state. The act of dying versus the state of being dead is kinda pedantic, but if you replace it with a state that can (conventionally) be left it’s a little more clear.
  “I thought he slept” vs “I thought he was sleeping”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A 19-year old cis lesbian woman was beaten unconscious and robbed after she tried to use the women's restroom at a McDonald's in Carpentersville, Illinois⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  100% all humans at the Endo of the day.

  The reason a lot of it exists is to communicate social roles, because social role mediates interaction. The earliest division of social role was biological sex, and so that’s commonly an aspect in gender.
  How gender is expressed is a complex interaction between socially agreed upon norms, how the individual interprets their gender, how others interpret that, and so on.
  Individual gender is a matter of psychological, biological and social factors which influence how an individual chooses to understand themselves in the context of society and also how they present themselves to society.

  The socialization part is where we teach people the behavior needed to express genders, and is where the genderd toys come in, amongst other things.

  All that to say, what we need is a way to communicate social role, and what we have to do that is loosely tied to sex and dominated by an imnense amount of social momentum. In a sane world the genders would be split into a lot more pieces.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  exactly as many as the quantity of numbers you can count between 0 and 1

  I specified countable to keep them in the same class of infinity. :) not about to make that mistake when bringing pedantry to a silly fight. .

  Since it’s implied that they have names, I’m going to use that as my argument for there being a countably infinite number. If you want to argue that only certain special angels have names, like Michael or π, then I’d say they’re uncountable.
  If you wanted to argue that omnipotence means a deity could defy logical restrictions and allow contradictory truths to coexist, then I’d say I’m far too sleepy for that discussion but I love where you’re heads at. :P

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Precisely as many angels as there are whole numbers, or exactly as many as the quantity of numbers you can count between 0 and 1 (0.5, 0.2341, etc).

  The original context of the question was more about if angels and the afterlife were physically manifest or intangible, and early thinking about how infintesimals work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the worst spelling you've seen?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s super frustrating. The hospital should have easily been able to get someone who had at least a basic grasp of a common language to help ensure they understood the forms and got them filled out correctly.

  The fault is 100% with the hospital.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I cut up pictures to arrange things in a way that when traced over create something "new," is that a copyright violation?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If just pasting it’s more arguable, but still likely permitted. If the copywriten characters are the central focus it’s more likely to be infringement.

  Adding tracing makes it more transformative, and less dubious. Because of that and the “create a more homogenized image” part it’s closer to a new character inspired by the fusion of others. You’re not using anyone else’s assets, you’re transforming them via cutout, and transforming and adding your own creative work by blending them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like I could be persuaded either way, but I lean towards allowing them during sentencing.
  I don’t think “it’s an appeal to emotion” is a compelling argument in that context because it’s no longer about establishing truth like the trial is, but about determining punishment and restitution.

  Justice isn’t just about the offender or society, it’s also indelibly tied to the victim. Giving them a voice for how they, as the wronged party, would see justice served seems important for it’s role in providing justice, not just the rote application of law.

  Obviously you can’t just have the victim decide, but the judges entire job is to ensure fairness, often in the face of strong feelings and contentious circumstances.

  Legitimately interested to hear why your opinion is what it is in more detail.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hearsay is allowed in sentencing statements, and Arizona allows those statements to be in a format of their choice.

  It’s the phase of the process where the judge hears opinions on what he should sentence the culprit to, so none of it is evidence or treated as anything other than an emotive statement.

  In this case, the sister made two statements: one in the form of a letter where she asked for the maximum sentence, and another in the form of this animation of her brother where she said that he wouldn’t want that and would ask for leniency.

  It’s gross, but it’s not the miscarriage of justice that it seems like from first glance. It was accepted in the same way a poem titled “what my brother would say to you” would be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Reading a bit more, during the sentencing phase in that state people making victim impact statements can choose their format for expression, and it’s entirely allowed to make statements about what other people would say. So the judge didn’t actually have grounds to deny it.
  No jury during that phase, so it’s just the judge listening to free form requests in both directions.

  It’s gross, but the rules very much allow the sister to make a statement about what she believes her brother would have wanted to say, in whatever format she wanted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A Judge Accepted AI Video Testimony From a Dead Man⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Jessica Gattuso, the victim’s right attorney that worked with Pelkey’s family, told 404 Media that Arizona’s laws made the AI testimony possible. “We have a victim’s bill of rights,” she said. “[Victims] have the discretion to pick what format they’d like to give the statement. So I didn’t see any issues with the AI and there was no objection. I don’t believe anyone thought there was an issue with it.”

  Gattuso said she understood the concerns, but felt that Pelkey’s AI avatar was handled deftly. “Stacey was up front and the video itself…said it was AI generated. We were very careful to make sure it was clear that these were the words that the family believed Christopher would have to say,” she said. “At no point did anyone try to pass it off as Chris’ own words.”

  The prosecution against Horcasitas was only seeking nine years for the killing. The maximum was 10 and a half years. Stacey had asked the judge for the full sentence during her own impact statement. The judge granted her request, something Stacey credits—in part—to the AI video.

  From a different article quoting a former judge in the court:

  “There are going to be critics, but they picked the right forum to do it. In a trial with a jury you couldn’t do it, but with sentencing, everything is open, hearsay is admissible, both sides can get up and express what they want to do,” McDonald said.

  “The power of it was that the judge had to see the gentleness, the kindness, the feeling of sincerity and having his sister say, ‘Well we don’t agree with it, this is what he would’ve wanted the court to know’,” he said.

  I don’t like it, and it feels dirty to me, but since the law allows them to express basically whatever they want in whatever format they want during this phase, it doesn’t seem harmful in this case, just gross.

  I actually think it’s a little more gross that the family was able to be that forthright and say that the victim would not want what they were asking for, and still ask for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Chromes decision actually makes a lot of sense, from a security perspective. When we model how people read URLs, they tend to be “lazy” and accept two URLs as equal if they’re similar enough. Removing or taking focus away from less critical parts makes users focus more on the part that matters and helps reduce phishing. It’s easier to miss problems with www.bankotamerica.com/…/login_portal.asp?etc=etc&… than it is with bankotamerica, with the com in a subdued grey and the path and subdomain hidden until you click in the address bar.
  It’s the same reason why they ended up moving away from the lock icon. Certs are easy to get now, and every piece that matches makes it more likely for a user to skip a warning sign.