logicbomb

@logicbomb@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨But also, the correct answer is Devil's Due⁩ ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Even though I think DS9 is objectively better than TNG, I would still recommend TNG to get into it, as the more exploration focus should appeal to a wider audience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK about 15 bean soup.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  a potato added (not eaten)

  This is a sin

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh I see I was overthinking it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t get it. Don’t both top and bottom show interference patterns, or is this about something else?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Children's reviews of a mobile app.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, when displaying reviews, often sites display a 5 star review first. After all, the store also wants more sales.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Look at that plumage, bro.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Realistically, most of those birds probably look like food to the owl.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientific unprogress...⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I know that I was completely wrong in this regard. You know, like how Mark Twain said something like travel was anathema to bigotry.

  So, I thought that the reason bigotry existed was that people are afraid of the unknown, so if you forced people together, they’d have to realize that we’re all the same.

  But now I realize that the main reason bigotry exists is that people are staying in contact with other bigots. The part about meeting diverse people is important, but far less important than pulling people out of their comfort zone to combat bigotry. So, the internet amplifies bigotry, because they’ll never be out-of-contact with their local bigots, even if they travel away from them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Woofstream⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I hate, hate, hate when a reporter interviews a scientist about something, and the interview is going fine, then the reporter inevitably asks, “How could this be used?” And suddenly, the scientist has to start bullshitting. You get to hear a completely respectable scientist start making all sorts of dubious claims, because they aren’t allowed to tell the truth, that its use is up to the future. There have been uncountable experimental results that didn’t seem to have a use at the time, only to be regarded as essential in the future.

  If they were trying to invent some product, they’d be called an engineer instead of a scientist.

  But in this case, the scientist wouldn’t even have to bullshit. “We’ve already learned a lot about aerodynamics by looking at other animals in wind tunnels. There’s no reason to think we might not learn anything useful here about aerodynamic shapes.”

  In my book, that makes this guy who said “absolutely no one” in the meme an anti-intellectual.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vampire Survivors - Open beta test for Online mode, with free roaming!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is this the release where they add vampires?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla said it didn’t have key data in a fatal crash. Then a hacker found it.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The information was key for a wrongful death case the survivor and the victim’s family were building against Tesla, but the company said it didn’t have the data.

  Then a self-described hacker, enlisted by the plaintiffs to decode the contents of a chip they recovered from the vehicle, found it while sipping a Venti-size hot chocolate at a South Florida Starbucks. Tesla later said in court that it had the data on its own servers all along.

  Joel Smith, Tesla’s attorney, said in an interview that the company was “clumsy” in its handling of the data but did not engage in any impropriety with regard to it. “It is the most ridiculous perfect storm you’ve ever heard,” Smith said, in an effort to explain why Tesla was unable to produce the collision snapshot data until after the hacker retrieved it for the plaintiffs.

  In court, Smith told jurors in his opening statement that Tesla would “never think about hiding” the data because it proved that the driver had time to react to the pedestrians standing by their parked car had he been paying attention.

  “We didn’t think we had it, and we found out we did,” he said. “And, thankfully, we did because this is an amazingly helpful piece of information.”

  For reference, here is a poem called the Narcissist’s Prayer:

  That didn’t happen.
  And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
  And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
  And if it is, that’s not my fault.
  And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
  And if I did, you deserved it.

  If I was on the jury or I was the judge in a non-jury trial and this happened, I would have pushed for the largest decision possible. No company or person should be allowed to act like this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨redwoods⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have this strange suspicion that this will not be the last time I am told this joke.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought there was a chance that AlexisFR would respond without realizing that I was repeating the important part of the koan as a joke, because you don’t always see the context when looking at replies to your comments. But I didn’t expect that a random person who had apparently just read the koan 5 seconds earlier would already have forgotten it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2hot2handle⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Autistic” doesn’t mean what you think it means. I’d characterize your use of the word as discriminatory and offensive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t really know it will cause it to break again with no understanding of what is going on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This reminds me of this old hacker koan:

  A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. [Tom] Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

  Knight turned the machine off and on.

  The machine worked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2hot2handle⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the things that “spontaneous” doesn’t mean is “without cause”. Also, the astronaut doesn’t mention the water in the picture. She mentions water generally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How To Argue With An AI Booster⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Really? I thought it had a lot of problems. Weird editor’s notes in a bunch of places that add nothing. An intro that is too long.

  Some of the arguments were just plain wrong. For example, the argument that it’s obvious that the internet is good for ordering books is an argument from incredulity. And on top of that, people did argue exactly what he’s saying they wouldn’t argue. I remember. I was there.

  Most of the general advice is good, and I agree with the premise of the article, but it didn’t strike me as one of the best blogs ever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google encouraging healthy uses of their new AI image generator⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess they should have asked the AI to come up with a prompt that isn’t super creepy and stalkerish.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨how do you slice it??⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Then again, do they know how large a giraffe is?

  Just today, I learned a handy way of visualizing the size of a giraffe. If you took that asteroid that struck off the coast of Iceland, and made a copy of it and put the two of them together, that’s about the size of a giraffe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨makes more sense than this shit⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, this says it was in 2016. We were already super fucked by then. I’d be more inclined to believe that we live in a giant simulation that got fucked by the millennium bug.

  Not that things were great in 2000, but the point is that 2016 is way too late. It’s like looking at water that’s just starting to boil, and then being surprised when it becomes a rolling boil.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🤡 We've all been played for fools. 🤡⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve said it before, but one reason I didn’t pursue a PhD is that there appeared to be an element of hazing in the entire thing.

  Several of the PhD students I knew were languishing for years trying to get their thesis together, in what can only be described as poverty.

  Meanwhile, half of the professors were miserable, and if they made good money, it was because they were very focused on how to make money. The happiest postgrad I knew was a senior lecturer who had given up on becoming a professor.

  The best you can hope for is that your personal area of interest happens to have a lot of funding.

  Yet these people almost universally seemed to think, “Well, that’s just how it is. The nice thing is that if you can get an academic position, it sucks less than being a PhD student.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with LLMs and other generative AI is that they’re not completely useless. People’s jobs are on the line much of the time, so it would really help if they were completely useless, but they’re not. Generative AI is certainly not as good as its proponents claim, and critically, when it fucks up, it can be extremely hard for a human to tell, which eats away a lot of their benefits, but they’re not completely useless. For the most basic example, give an LLM a block of text and ask it how to improve grammar or to make a point clearer, and then compare the AI generated result with the original, and take whatever parts you think the AI improved.

  Everybody knows this, but we’re all pretending it’s not the case because we’re caring people who don’t want the world to be drowned in AI hallucinations, we don’t want to have the world taken over by confidence tricksters who just fake everything with AI, and we don’t want people to lose their jobs. But sometimes, we are so busy pretending that AI is completely useless that we forget that it actually isn’t completely useless. The reason they’re so dangerous is that they’re not completely useless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Meta's Superintelligence Overhaul a Sign Its AI Goals Are Struggling?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, if you care so much, why don’t you just ask the superintelligent AI for an answer?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am serious, and don't call me Shirley⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Did you know that, individually, under close examination, polar bear fur is made of tiny little clear, not white hairs. Each hair is an empty tube. It actually only appears white because each tube contains a white colored neurotoxin. That’s why you should never get close to a polar bear.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨i just think they're neat⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “As you can see, this hat is felted from my own body hair, and the decorative bits? My toenails.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Episode] Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon Season 2 • Jidou Hanbaiki ni Umarekawatta Ore wa Meikyuu wo Samayou 2nd Season - Episode 8 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Another chance for me to point out some inconsistencies and plot holes in this episode. Well, at least this episode wasn’t as terrifyingly bad as the previous two episodes.

  First, I think they’ve been glossing this over, but I had always thought that the people in the other world don’t really speak Japanese, and that Hakkon’s assembling of Japanese words was just supposed to be translation. You know, like how in English, they pretend like he’s assembling English words, the original Japanese material is pretending like the original source is some other language and it’s been translated into and pretending to be Japanese.

  But that’s thrown out the window by having them watch an actual Manzai in Japanese. There’s really no explanation for this except that they actually speak Japanese in that world. So, somehow they literally speak Japanese, but they invented their own writing system and can’t even recognize any Japanese characters. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

  Up until this point, only the first two stratums were shown as having anything other than the most basic amenities. Now, on the 6th or 7th stratum, there’s just this random blacksmith. It’s not too odd to imagine an eccentric and talented blacksmith going to a place that was hard to get to, but then you’d expect him to be making legendary weapons or something. You wouldn’t expect him to trade one item in his shop for food.

  The teleportation circles are wildly inconsistent. Sometimes they can be activated many times in a row. Sometimes they need a magic stone. Sometimes they just need time to recharge.

  Also, the teleportation circles are starting to make less and less sense, in general. How could that mage charge the circle from the other side? Aren’t teleportation circles really just one or two way? And how did he know which stratum the other people were on? These teleportation circles are so important to the current story that you can’t really just invent that they work a different way every time you talk about them.

  And lastly, Kerioyl is making less and less sense. All he did was touch Hakkon, and he made this complicated teleporter interfering spell? I thought that stuff was supposed to be difficult. And he went to all of that trouble, but it just teleported them to an unexpected stratum, barely hindering them at all, possibly helping them by sending them to a deep stratum when the early-stratum teleporters are basically out-of-commission?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PSA: WASH YOUR HANDS⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s always pork.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Episode] Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon Season 2 • Jidou Hanbaiki ni Umarekawatta Ore wa Meikyuu wo Samayou 2nd Season - Episode 7 discussion⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Since I enjoyed the first five episodes of this season, but the sixth episode was unbelievably bad, I expected this episode to also be bad. And it completely met my expectations. Maybe even exceeded them in how bad it is.

  Do I think Bommy (Director Bear) could move Hakkon? Yes, I do. He’s probably exceptionally strong even for a bear. Do I think he could carry Hakkon around all day like Lamis does? I don’t know what his blessing is, if anything, but I think one of the cornerstones of this anime is that only Lamis can easily handle Hakkon, so Bommy shouldn’t be allowed to do this. And since this is the labyrinth stratum, Hakkon could have just created wheels like he did the last time he was there, so there was an easy alternative.

  And Kikoyu has the ability to talk with Hakkon directly? Up until now, only Lamis seemed to understand his inner thoughts, but she was just guessing.

  The point is that, with regard to Hakkon, Lamis had two unique powers in this world. One was the ability to carry him with her all the time, and the second is to understand what he is thinking. It seems unthematic that in the very first episode where Lamis is missing, her two unique Hakkon-related powers were immediately replaced by others. In one case, a superior version.

  One other complaint. That part about the dirt ball not passing through the barrier doesn’t make any sense. First, maybe I’m just misremembering, but I don’t think that barrier existed before. There’s no barrier like that around the town in the clearflow lake stratum. There’s no barrier like that around the ghost town in the haunted stratum. Also, it would be inconvenient if you couldn’t bring any monster materials back from the labyrinth.

  But anyways, if that barrier did exist, then it seems like Kikoyu wouldn’t have been able to take the dirt ball into the maze in the first place. The way she survives is by filling the ball with monster corpses.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3127: Where Babies Come From⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You know, that makes a lot more sense than what they actually wrote. You’ve convinced me that they meant to say what you said instead of what they said.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #3127: Where Babies Come From⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  everyone else is worse

  The point is that they weren’t portrayed that way in the comic.