prime_number_314159
@prime_number_314159@lemmy.world
- Comment on Country music 4 days ago:
The other 2 thirds of the Earth’s surface, obviously. As the greatest song in history says: “…We got no troubles - Life is the bubbles - Under the sea…”
- Comment on How do recommend eating this? 2 weeks ago:
Peel it.
- Comment on No one has predicted the end of the world in a while. 2 weeks ago:
They were going to fire up the LHC to open a dimension, which can only happen when the moon is casting a shadow 6000 km away. Then aliens… or something.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
Like today’s computer scientists, early biologists sucked at inventing new words, and simply reused existing ones. “Berry” in common language is a small, usually sweet and edible, fruit. Strawberries, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries are all berries.
Then biologists came along and decided, actually, strawberries, raspberries and blackberries are out, but watermelon and bananas are in, because the size of the fruit doesn’t matter, only the placement of the seeds decides whether something is a proper, scientific
berry
.A similar thing has happened with “fruit” and “vegetable”, where scientific
fruits
include cucumbers, eggplants, and pumpkins. Luckily, all three of these are alsoberries
.I say we ignore them, and use words to mean sensible things.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
The (really, really, really) big problem with the internet is that so much of it is garbage data. The number of false and misleading claims spread endlessly on the internet is huge. To rule those beliefs out of the data set, you need something that can grasp the nuances of published, peer-reviewed data that is deliberately misleading propaganda, and fringe conspiracy nuts that believe the Earth is controlled by lizards with planes, and only a spritz bottle full of vinegar can defeat them, and everything in between.
There is no person, book, journal, website, newspaper, university, or government that has reliably produced good, consistent help on questions of science, religion, popular lies, unpopular truths, programming, human behavior, economic models, and many, many other things that continuously have an influence on our understanding of the world.
We can’t build an LLM that won’t consistently be wrong until we can stop being consistently wrong.
- Comment on Have We Reached Peak AI? 1 month ago:
What we have done is invented massive, automatic, no holds barred pattern recognition machines. LLMs use detected patterns in text to respond to questions. Image recognition is pattern recognition, with some of those patterns named things (like “cat”, or “book”). Image generation is a little different, but basically just flips the image recognition on its head, and edits images to look more like the patterns that it was taught to recognize.
This can all do some cool stuff. There are some very helpful outcomes. It’s also (automatically, ruthlessly, and unknowingly) internalizing biases, preferences, attitudes and behaviors from the billion plus humans on the internet, and perpetuating them in all sorts of ways, some of which we don’t even know to look for.
This makes its potential applications in medicine rather terrifying. Do thousands of doctors all think women are lying about their symptoms? Well, now your AI does too. Do thousands of doctors suggest more expensive treatments for some groups, and less expensive for others? AI can find that pattern.
This is also true in law (I know there’s supposed to be no systemic bias in our court systems, but AI can find those patterns, too), engineering (any guesses how human engineers change their safety practices based on the area a bridge or dam will be installed in? AI will find out for us), etc, etc.
The thing that makes AI bad for some use cases is that it never knows which patterns it is supposed to find, and which ones it isn’t supposed to find. Until we have better tools to tell it not to notice some of these things, and to scrub away a lot of the randomness that’s left behind inside popular models, there’s severe constraints on what it should be doing.
- Comment on If the agreed upon age of the Universe is updated from 13 billion years old to 26 billion years old how does that affect Science and Astrophysics? 1 month ago:
That estimate is based on assuming that the ratio of matter to light output is the same between galaxies 10 billion years apart in age. The high light output of these young galaxies could also be supermassive stars that burn out very quickly, larger stars typically forming faster than smaller stars, or many other things.
Blindly assuming a linear relationship between two things, then extrapolating is how you get the Windows loading bar circa 2000.
Separately, but just as big a potential issue, the data itself may be incorrect. Previous galaxies measured at extreme redshift values were remeasured, and found to have less extreme values. This can be as simple as there aren’t that many photons from these galaxies reaching us, so a short measurement period might not be enough to get an accurate picture.
- Comment on delicious 2 months ago:
So… corporations figured out how to clean the world, and then sell a cleaner Earth back to us, one can at a time? This sounds like the libertarian dream ocean.
- Comment on Advice on first 3D printer 3 months ago:
Cost is obviously a big factor. Almost every printer can change to any nozzle size and layer height for just the cost of the nozzle. Print volume is a major limitation, depending on your use case. The filaments it can print will probably be the same across any relatively low cost printers, with the only significant change being direct drive vs. Bowden.
Bed leveling is huge, and makes probably the most difference in print quality on low cost printers these days. If there’s an easy way to tension the belts, that’s a plus. If there isn’t a power switch on the front (or even if there is), a emergency stop switch can be a help, like if the nozzle is running into the bed.
Maintenance varies from printer to printer, generally you’re aiming for tight but not too tight on any belts or rollers. If the pulleys on the motors aren’t preinstalled, use something like loctite blue to fix them in place better.
Also make sure if you plan to buy a printer that it’s got a decent amount of community around it. Running into the same problems with a bunch of other people is a big plus as a beginner, so popular printers are better.
Teaching Tech made a calibration guide website that I’ve had a lot of good experiences with.
- Comment on Which option lads? 3 months ago:
As your cardiovascular system improves, you typically take fewer, larger breaths at rest, so improving your ability to breath reduces the number of steps you’ll typically take. On the other hand, most people become able to walk more steps after walking consistently.
Unless you’re handicapped, bedridden, very old, or otherwise prevented by health related circumstances from doing so, you can make more with steps.
- Comment on Doing the important work 3 months ago:
Johns Hopkins University is named after the guy that funded it at the beginning, Johns Hopkins. He was named after his grandfather, Johns Hopkins, whose first name was his mother’s last name.
So Johns Hopkins has two last names, but one of them is a first name.
- Comment on NASA, Lockheed Martin Reveal X-59 Quiet Supersonic Aircraft 4 months ago:
My great uncle said he hoped for a quiet death.
- Comment on Those bastards at Fisher-Price knew exactly what they were doing. 4 months ago:
At the Walmart near me, there’s a whole set of checkout terminals intended for only a few items, but except for the absolute busiest times, they’ll put carts to block them off, including the ones in the regular self checkout area. There’s a line, but they physically remove access to some perfectly functional terminals just because.
- Comment on Pint of wine anyone? UK looks to bring back ‘silly measure’ 4 months ago:
Why have laws restricting bottles of wine to specific sizes in the first place? Surely as long as it’s labeled clearly it’s sufficiently easy to know what you’re getting.
- Comment on Pray for their safety 4 months ago:
“Of course you can’t walk up an elevator. Sometimes you can manually open the doors, but… Wait, what’s this in the comments?”
- Comment on What future AI applications are you most excited about? 4 months ago:
I don’t think anyone will actually make it, but it would be cool to have an arrangement of accelerometers and microphones that you can put on the side of a packaged gift, shake it, and get a guess about what it is.
A harvesting robot that can tell how many days from ripe an avocado is, so the grocery store can have like… “ripe today” avocados, “ripe tomorrow” avocados, “ripe in 2 days” avocados. They’d come in small cardboard boxes, and they could just shift the boxes or signs over by one each day, and have more boxes if they get avocado deliveries less often.
Machine learning clothing/hairstyle/general fashion advice would be neat, but probably too open to manipulation to sell certain brands to be practical.
Tools to help developers put houses at the best spot on a lot, for things like water mitigation, tree safety, garden space in good sunlight, wind noise, and privacy.
Search tools that aren’t terrible on shopping sites, and news sites, and research journals and things. The days of “we asked Google to do it for us” being good enough are long over.
- Comment on The Hyperloop was always a scam 4 months ago:
The major strategy on CWR is pretensioning, but there are also multiple kinds of expansion joints used in different circumstances. I’m not saying it’s impossible to do the same with a vacuum chamber, but I am saying there’s no simple reliable answer, and certainly no answer so obvious and bulletproof that it doesn’t even require testing before you could start construction.
Elon Musk either didn’t know or didn’t care that his company wasn’t doing the required engineering and testing to make a real functioning hyperloop.
- Comment on The Hyperloop was always a scam 4 months ago:
If any part of the hundreds of miles of tube suddenly stops being a vacuum chamber, every train all along the tube is going to be hit by air rushing in, at the speed of sound, with all the turbulence that implies, while its already moving at full speed. It might be possible to engineer a capsule that will keep the people inside alive when that happens, but it is not at all the same as e.g. rail, where “stop moving fowards” depletes essentially all the energy in the system.
- Comment on The Hyperloop was always a scam 4 months ago:
Very long pipes use expansion/contraction sections that may not be possible for a vacuum sealed system that has to be incredibly straight to allow the passage of a train, and can flex pretty significantly for earthquakes, seasonal temperature changes, etc.
- Comment on It's just not the same without him. 4 months ago:
Four thousand, five hundred twenty thirth. Trust me, I’m a numbers guy.
- Comment on Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data 5 months ago:
They discontinued the unlimited storage plan, so he can’t still be paying for the unlimited storage. I’m not a big fan of Google’s “I’m not seeing a return yet, better kill this product” approach, but it has been their MO for a long time. I think by now everyone doing business with them knows who they are.
- Comment on Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data 5 months ago:
Ok, so I think the timeline is, he signed up for an unlimited storage plan. Over several years, he uploaded 233TB of video to Google’s storage. They discontinued the unlimited storage plan he was using, and that plan ended May 11th. They gave him a “60 day grace period” ending on July 10th, after which his accouny was converted to a read only mode.
He figured the data was safe, and continued using the storage he now isn’t really paying for from July 10th until December 12th. On December 12th, Google tells him they’re going to delete his account in a week, which isn’t enough time to retrieve his data… because he didn’t do anything during the period before his plan ended, didn’t do anything during the grace period, and hasn’t done anything since the grace period ended.
I get that they should have given him more than a week of warning before moving to delete, but I’m not exactly sure what he was expecting. Storing files is an ongoing expense, and he’s not paying that cost anymore.
- Comment on makes sense 5 months ago:
“You wasted trillions of cycles, then ask me for Money?!?” - Elon, probably
- Comment on gatekeeping 5 months ago:
Everyone is mentioning the imaginary (and, presumably complex) number domains, but not quaterions and other higher dimensional number sets.
I’m going with defining a describeable number as any number that, given any finite period of time and any finite amount of resources, could be uniquely described to another entity with the ability to read and understand the language it is being described in, then saying all numbers are either describeable numbers (Despite the fact that these are almost laughably uncommon in the scheme of all numbers, I have diligently prepared an example: “2”), or indescribeable numbers (so much more common, and yet I can’t give even a single example).
- Comment on ‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza 5 months ago:
My favorite ML result was (details may be inaccurate, I’m trying to recall from memory) a model that analyzed scan images from MRI machines, that would have far more confidence of the problems it was detecting if the image was taken on a machine with an old manufacture date. The training data had very few negative results from older machines, so the assumption that an image taken on an old machine showed the issue fit the data.
There was speculation about why that would happen in the training data, but the pattern noticing machine sure noticed the pattern.
- Comment on Meta and Microsoft say they will buy AMD’s new AI chip as an alternative to Nvidia’s 5 months ago:
Every family reunion, the technology race kicks off again. “You’ll never believe what my son has been up to…”
- Comment on How? 5 months ago:
It’s worth noting that some but not all combinations of heat break, nozzle, and heater block require re-tightening at the temperature used for printing. Basically, different metals expand different amounts when they’re heated, so if the block expands more than the other two, a gap will open up between them, and melted filament can find its way through.
- Comment on Physicists May Have Found a Hard Limit on The Performance of Large Quantum Computers 5 months ago:
We can use that to render the next frame in server farm in the future after cheap fusion drops electricity prices, but before <>. That will mean optimization is entirely unnecessary.
- Comment on Amazon is now automatically playing fullscreen video ads on Fire TV 5 months ago:
… RAID SHADOW LEGENDS. RAID Shady Legions is the new exciting RPG PVP for NPC that you’ve all been waiting for. It’s got last generation graphics, an “immersive” “story”, and integrated mobile upsell offerings unlike some other things on the market.
I’ve been playing PAID Shadow Legends ever since they sent me $20,000, and now I have an unmitigated addiction to laxatives, so I can escape from my wife and kids on the porcelain gaming throne, and spend time with my favorite hero, WHICHEVER ONE WAS JUST ADDED THIS WEEK. Get that limited time premium champion with the link in my bio.
- Comment on dig bick 5 months ago:
There’s a brand of pens in the US (maybe elsewhere, too) called Bic. He has a Bic pen, and his penis enormous.