drosophila

@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘It should not taste marine-like’: Would you eat a burger made from processed sea squirts?⁩ ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like we should be trying to engineer fusarium venenatum to express various animal proteins.

  It already does a really good job as a meat substitute, and (unlike lab grown meat) the process for culturing it is very well understood and mature.

  I don’t know if trying to genetically engineer a fungus would present any special challenges vs a plant or bacteria though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🍃 🐑⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The really interesting thing about costasiella kuroshimae is that its digestive system branches and goes up into all of those ‘leaves’, which is how the algae makes its way there to have its chloroplasts extracted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Womp womp⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So, I think the whole “well intentioned but hubristic scientist goes too far, tramples on the feet of god!” trope is pretty stupid in a lot of stories (although if executed correctly I think it can still be very good, even if i don’t really agree with the theme as applied to real life). But I also think you really have to consider where the “mad scientist” archetype comes from before you write it off as purely anti-intellectual:

  1. To a large degree the mad scientist is an updated version of the evil wizard. Victor Frankenstein, the prototypical mad scientist, was trained in alchemy as well as chemistry and biology. Very often (such as in this very post) their laboratories are depicted as being in castles or even wizard towers.

  2. Frankenstein was partly based on the sort of people who robbed graveyards. The more modern ‘howie lab coat, rubber gloves, and goggles’ mad scientist exploded in popularity after WWII, probably because of people like mengele and the invention of the atomic bomb.

  There’s other themes present in the archetype of course (I already mentioned hubris and man’s vs god"s domain above, but there’s all the other stuff going on in Frankenstein too), but yeah. The ‘mad scientist’ archetype is a little bit like taking a normal scientist and removing their humanity and morals, leaving only their intellect and ambition/ego behind. A little bit like how a warewolf is a man stripped of all morals and self control, leaving only bestial impulses behind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it normal to feel tired of technological progress?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Humans need to move around to be healthy regardless, any energy consumed to pedal a bike is immaterial.

  Though I guess if the person in question just died that would be even more pollution free.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You'll have to use pto time to drown, but make sure it's approved first⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This story and the Triangle Shirtwaist factory should be a reminder that almost every large business owner would kill you if it meant they could make slightly more money.

  How much extra value do you think they generated in a couple of hours of making plastic pipes? That’s what their lives were worth to the factory owners.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨c o e x i s t⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Strangely enough I feel like that crucification isn’t much associated with the Romans. Even though the Romans were the ones who carried it out Judas gets almost 100% of the ire.

  Even Jews are given more blame by antisemitic Christians. Like, no one is starting up a pogrom against Italians because their great great great grandpa might’ve been the guy who stabbed Jesus in the ribs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨c o e x i s t⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  When people think about Rome they usually imagine the roads and the aquaducts and not so much the crucifixions and the slavery.

  I think it’s important to keep both aspects in mind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨2982: Water Filtration⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  IMO Big Bang Theory is less like nerd humor and more like autism blackface.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This model isn’t “learning” anything in any way that is even remotely like how humans learn. You are deliberately simplifying the complexity of the human brain to make that comparison.

  I do think the complexity of artificial neural networks is overstated. A real neuron is a lot more complex than an artificial one, and real neuron’s are not simply feed forward like ANNs (which have to be because they are trained using back-propagation), but instead have their own spontaneous activity (which kinda implies that real neural networks don’t learn using stochastic gradient descent with back-propagation). But to say that there’s nothing at all comparable between the way humans learn and the way ANNs learn is wrong IMO.

  If you read books such as V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee’s Phantoms in the Brain or Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat you will see lots of descriptions of patients with anosognosia brought on by brain injury. These are people who, for example, are unable to see but also incapable of recognizing this inability. If you ask them to describe what they see in front of them they will make something up on the spot (in a process called confabulation) and not realize they’ve done it. They’ll tell you what they’ve made up while believing that they’re telling the truth. (Vision is just one example, anosognosia can manifest in many different cognitive domains).

  It is V.S Ramachandran’s belief that there are two processes that occur in the Brain, a confabulator (or “yes man” so to speak) and an anomaly detector (or “critic”). The yes-man’s job is to offer up explanations for sensory input that fit within the existing mental model of the world, whereas the critic’s job is to advocate for changing the world-model to fit the sensory input. In patients with anosognosia something has gone wrong in the connection between the critic and the yes man in a particular cognitive domain, and as a result the yes-man is the only one doing any work. Even in a healthy brain you can see the effects of the interplay between these two processes, such as with the placebo effect and in hallucinations brought on by sensory deprivation.

  I think ANNs in general and LLMs in particular are similar to the yes-man process, but lack a critic to go along with it.

  What implications does that have on copyright law? I don’t know. Real neurons in a petri dish have already been trained to play games like DOOM and and control the yoke of a simulated airplane. If they were trained instead to somehow draw pictures what would the legal implications of that be?

  There’s a belief that laws and political systems are derived from some sort of deep philosophical insight, but I think most of the time they’re really just whatever works in practice. So, what I’m trying to say is that we can just agree that what OpenAI does is bad and should be illegal without having to come up with a moral imperative that forces us to ban it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Go already⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But the fact that even just a single rail car holds 360 commuters, equivalent to 180 cars or more on the highway changes the math completely.

  Absolutely. The fact that 3 million people pass through Shinjuku station every day is a testament to that.

  If all of those people lived in a city in the US it would be the country’s third largest, behind NY and LA.(If we’re going by the entire urban area instead just within city limits it would be the 20th, just ahead of the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson metropolitan statistical area.)

  All in a single space that’s smaller than most highway interchanges.

  And that’s not even using two-level train cars (which is where your figure for 360 people per train car comes from I think?).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Go already⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While things like merging movements and so on is part of the story, it’s not the whole story.

  You see, by saying “traffic jams are caused by merging mistakes and so on” it kinda implies that if everyone drove perfectly a highway lane could carry infinitely many cars. In actually a highway lane has a finite capacity determined by the length of the vehicles traveling on it, the length of the gap between them (indirectly determined by how fast they can start and stop), and the speed they’re moving.

  There are finite limits for gap widths and speed determined by physics and geometry. As the system approaches these limits it becomes less and less able to deal with small disruptions. In other words, as more cars move on a freeway a traffic jam becomes more and more likely. The small disruption which is perceived as the cause was really just the nucleation point for a phase change that the system was already poised to transition into. If it wasn’t event then something else would trigger it.

  It is interesting to note that once a highway has transitioned from smooth flow to traffic jam its capacity is massively reduced, which you can see in the graphs in the above link. Another interesting thing to note is that the speed vs volume graph, if you flip it upside down, resembles a cost / demand curve from economics, where volume is the demand and time spent commuting (the inverse of speed) is cost. If you do this you see something quite odd, which is that the curve curls up around itself and goes backwards.

  This is less like a normal economic situation (the more people use a resource the more they have to pay, the less people use it the less they have to pay) and more like a massively multiplayer version of the prisoner’s dilemma. For awhile the cost increases only slightly with growing demand, until a certain threshold where each additional actor making a transaction has a chance to massively increase the cost for everyone, even if consumption is reduced. Actors can choose to voluntarily pay a higher time cost (wait before getting on the freeway) to avoid this, but again, it’s the prisoners dilemma. People can just go, trigger a traffic jam anyway, and you’ll still have to sit through it + all the time you waited trying to prevent it.

  Self driving cars are often described as a way to eliminate traffic jams, but they don’t change this fundamental property of how roadways work. It’s true that capacity could potentially be increased somewhat by decreasing the gap between cars, since machines have faster reflexes than humans (though I’m skeptical of how much the gap can really be decreased; is every car going to weigh the same at all times? Is every car going to have tires and brakes in identical conditions? Are the roadway conditions going to be identical at all times and across every part of the roadway? All of these things imply a great deal of variability in stopping distance, which implies a wide safety gap.), but the prisoner’s dilemma problem remains. The biggest thing that self driving cars could actually do to alleviate traffic jams would be to not enter a highway until traffic volumes were at a safe level. This can also be accomplished with a traffic volume sensor and a stop light on highway on-ramps.

  Of course trains don’t suffer from any of this prisoner’s dilemma stuff by default. If a train car is full and you have to wait for the next one that’s equivalent to being stopped at a highway on ramp. People can’t force their way into a train and make it run slower for everyone (well, unless they do something really crazy like stand in the door and stop the train from leaving).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Cobalt-Free Silicon EV Battery Is The Best Thing Ever⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  CRI is defined as how closely a light source matches the spectral emission of a thing glowing at a specific temperature. So, for a light source with a 4000 k color temperature it’s CRI describes how closely it emission matches that of an object that’s been heated to 4000 k.

  Because incandescent bulbs emit light by heating a filament by definition they will have 100 CRI and its impossible to get any better than that. But the emission curve of incandescent lights doesn’t actually resemble that of sunlight at all (sorry for the reddit link). The sun is much hotter than any incandescent bulb and it’s light is filtered by our atmosphere, result in a much flatter more gently sloping emissions curve vs the incandescent curve which is extremely lopsided towards the red.

  As you can see in the above link, there are certain high end LED bulbs that do a much better job replicating noon day sunlight than incandescents. And that flatter emissions profile probably provides better color rendering (in terms of being able to distinguish one color from another) than the incandescent ramp.

  Now, whether or not you want your bulbs to look like the noon day sun is another matter. Maybe you don’t want to disrupt you sleep schedule and you’d much rather their emissions resemble the sunset or a campfire (though in that case many halogen and high output incandescent lamps don’t do a great job either). Or maybe you’re trying to treat seasonal depression and extra sunlight is exactly what you want. But in any case I think CRI isn’t a very useful unit (another reddit link).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨North Carolina is getting a $1.4B sodium-ion battery gigafactory⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There is already a Chinese EV that uses sodium ion a sodium ion battery, the JMEV EV3.

  It’s a tradeoff of range vs price. The EV3 only has 251 km of range, but thanks in part to its sodium ion battery it costs only $9220 new. Which is a price that will probably drop even more as more sodium ion plants come online and economies of scale kick in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just got out of the shower. what is with the product placement ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  lol, because that’s definitely the shut-in stereotype.

  “Honey I’m really worried about our son, not only has he not left the house for weeks, this morning I found a bag of coffee beans in his room that was produced by a worker owned coop in Honduras!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Toyota builds experimental hydrogen-powered pizza oven and grill.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If the tank were made of a carbon fiber composite it would make it a little less scary. CF’s high strength and brittle failure mode mean that the tank would “open up” on a seam when ruptured, but would stay mostly intact. Additionally CF’s low density would mean that any small pieces of shrapnel that were created would have limited penetrating power and range.

  Still I’m not sure I would want to stand next to it. At 10,000 PSI a small hole (or opened valve) in such a tank would produce a gas stream with enough energy to seriously injure or kill you (leaks in 4000 PSI steam lines can cut your flesh and create gas pockets inside you). The entire tank letting go all at once would surely create a shockwave that would obliterate you.