drosophila
@drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Fujifilm reportedly working on 180MP medium format camera 3 hours ago:
I don’t know much about photography, so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but would something like focus stacking help with this?
That is to say, make the lens less of a bottleneck so you could benefit from a higher resolution sensor.
- Comment on Reading the Bible purely as fiction is quite entertaining 1 day ago:
It’s really not.
There are large chunks of it that are really repetitive and boring, just things like the number of goats and chickens owned by so and so.
And like a lot of ancient mythology it can be really hard to relate to, given the vastly different cultural context that produced the text. That can be kinda entertaining in it’s own way, but mostly it just means that you’re not really going to understand the character motivations or themes of a story. Also sometimes the protagonist will do something horrifically immoral by today’s standards without the text treating it as notable at all.
IMO all of the actual interesting parts (like Genesis) are all really short and you probably know them already from cultural osmosis.
- Comment on What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET 1 week ago:
I see
In your opinion is there anything useful we can do with that part of the radio spectrum as those stations switch off, or are those frequencies going to be silent in the future? Will they be turned over to hobbyists maybe? (or would the power requirements be too high at those frequencies?)
- Comment on What if the Internet Goes Down? - 15 Jan, 7PM CET 1 week ago:
Since the portable radio doesn’t have much power, you may need to use digital modes to get through.
I don’t know much about radio stuff, but ever since I learned about LoRA I’ve wondered what kind of range a station could get if the longwave or AM bands were repurposed for use with a spread spectrum digital protocol. And what kind of bandwidth something like that would have.
I think being able to do datacasting over really long ranges would be useful, so, for example, you could send emergency alerts to people even if the local cell infrastructure was down. But with the way things are headed I guess that role will be taken up by satellites.
- Comment on Why do we have shampoo, conditioner, and body wash soaps? 1 week ago:
Chemicals like sodium lauryl sulfate and other fatty acids with organosulfate head groups, which are much more powerful surfactants than the fatty acid sodium salts you get by reacting lye with a fat (like vegetable oil). “Traditional” soaps like that also contain glycerol (formed when the lye cleaves the glycerol backbone off of a triglyceride), which acts as a humectant moisturizer.
Technically, at least in the US, chemicals like SLS aren’t legally classified as soap, and must be called a detergent. Which is why so many products are called things like “body wash” and “body bar”, and you wont find the word “soap” on their packaging.
- Comment on Star Citizen is on course to reach $1 billion in player funding in 2026, and we still might not get to play its singleplayer campaign next year 3 weeks ago:
it’s not hard to earn in-game money and buy ships with that
If you can skip that process by paying real money, and the things you unlock are gameplay affecting upgrades, then that’s pay-to-win. That’s what the phrase originally meant before being diluted by morons. Non pay-to-win microtransactions are purely cosmetic.
Not that people should be playing any game that’s infested with a microtransaction funding model. Let alone one with a base price of $45, let alone one with absolutely absurd “micro”-transactions meant to prey on mentally ill people, let alone one that’s already taken people’s free money only to implement all of the above.
At one point in time horse armor was enough cause controversy. How did it all go so wrong?
- Comment on I promise, no one can tell that you're high at work, trust me 4 weeks ago:
Out of curiosity what do you think your thought process would be in a McDonald’s?
- Comment on earth, fire, water, wind - it's not hard 5 weeks ago:
Sort of
Today we differentiate between the physical substance (or category of substances that are the ethers) and the alchemical concept of the aether, but look at the etymology of “ether”.
The term “ethyl”, as in ethyl alcohol or ethanol, similarly traces its origins back to “ether”.
At the time these various “light” flammable easily evaporated substances were conflated with each other, and were thought to be this sorta mystical stuff that was the fifth element from which the 4 other ones were differentiated from. Since it was undifferentiated it was supposed to be “pure”, and free of the messiness of ordinary life (space was thought to be filled with it because of the “perfect” predictable movements of the heavenly bodies). This is also where we get the word “quintessential”, which literally means “fifth essence”, to mean a pure, perfect, and archetypical example of something, without complications. It’s also where we get the word “ethereal” to mean “otherworldly”, “light”, “ghostly”, etc.
It’s for similar reasons that we use the word “spirit” to mean both something that comes in a bottle and a disembodied soul. All sorts of alchemists from different areas and different times believed different things of course, but a lot of alchemical thought was based on the idea that everything had essences inside it which were hard to perceive or touch directly but which gave things their properties. In other words something’s essence is it’s spirit.
Of course what they called “spirits” or “essences” were really things like distillation products, gasses driven off by heating, and the colored flames that you get when you put some metals in fire. But that’s what they thought was going on.
- Comment on Asking the right questions... 1 month ago:
A better test would be to see how it compares to previous posts on his social media accounts from, say, around 2020.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 1 month ago:
The thing about this perspective is that I think its actually overly positive about LLMs, as it frames them as just the latest in a long line of automations.
Not all automations are created equal. For example, compare using a typewriter to using a text editor. Besides a few details about the ink ribbon and movement mechanisms you really haven’t lost much in the transition. This is despite the fact that the text editor can be highly automated with scripts and hot keys, allowing you to manipulate even thousands of pages of text at once in certain ways. Using a text editor certainly won’t make you forget how to write like using ChatGPT will.
I think the difference lies in the relationship between the person and the machine. To paraphrase Cathode Ray Dude, people who are good at using computers deduce the internal state of the machine, mirror (a subset) of that state as a mental model, and use that to plan out their actions to get the desired result. People that aren’t good at using computers generally don’t do this, and might not even know how you would start trying to.
For years ‘user friendly’ software design has catered to that second group, as they are both the largest contingent of users and the ones that needed the most help. To do this software vendors have generally done two things: try to move the necessary mental processes from the user’s brain into the computer and hide the computer’s internal state (so that its not implied that the user has to understand it, so that a user that doesn’t know what they’re doing won’t do something they’ll regret, etc). Unfortunately this drives that first group of people up the wall. Not only does hiding the internal state of computer make it harder to deduce it, every “smart” feature they add to try to move this mental process into the computer itself only makes the internal state more complex and harder to model.
Many people assume that if this is the way you think about software you are just an elistist gatekeeper, and you only want your group to be able to use the computer. Or you might even be accused of ableism. But the real reason is what I described above, even if its not usually articulated in that way.
Now, I am of the opinion that the ‘mirroring the internal state’ method of thinking is the superior way to interact with the machine, and the approach to user friendliness I described has actually done a lot of harm to our relationship with computers at a societal level. (This is an opinion I suspect many people here would agree with.) And yet that does not mean that I think computers should be difficult to use. Quite the opposite, I think that modern computers are too complicated, and that in an ideal world their internal states and abstractions would be much simpler and more elegant, but no less powerful. (But elaborating on that would make this comment even longer.) Nor do I think that computers shouldn’t be accessible to people with different levels of ability. But just as a random person in a store shouldn’t grab a wheelchair user’s chair handles and start pushing them around, neither should Windows (for example) start changing your settings on updates without asking.
Anyway, all of this is to say that I think LLMs are basically the ultimate in that approach to ‘user friendliness’. They try to move more of your thought process into the machine than ever before, their internal state is more complex than ever before, and it is also more opaque than ever before. They also reflect certain values endemic to the corporate system that produced them: that the appearance of activity is more important than the correctness or efficacy of that activity. But that is, again, a whole other comment.
- Comment on Amazon’s AI ‘Banana Fish’ Dubs Are Hilariously, Inexcusably Bad 1 month ago:
Voice acting is so incredibly disrespected, its not a surprise at all they’d try to replace it with this garbage.
- Comment on What did I forget? 1 month ago:
I like Kazakhstan’s flag because I think its a nice combination of colors:
Its not very low entropy though, at least not compared to ones like Germany’s or Ukraine’s.
- Comment on The Xbox 360 came out 20 years ago 1 month ago:
So for you I guess the proper comparison would be that the Xbox 360 is now as old as the IBM System/360 mainframe was when the NES released in NA. Image
- Comment on The Xbox 360 came out 20 years ago 1 month ago:
The NES having released in North America in 1985, this means that the 360 is now roughly as old as the NES was when the 360 came out.
- Comment on It is a silly place. 1 month ago:
It appears that this quote is from this clickhole article.
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 month ago:
Hallucinations are an intrinsic part of how LLMs work. OpenAI, literally the people with the most to lose if AI isn’t useful, has admitted that hallucinations are a mathematical inevitability, not something that can be engineered around. On top of that, been found that for things like mathematical proof finding switching to more sophisticated models doesn’t make them more accurate, it just makes their arguments more convincing.
Now, you might say “oh but you can have a human in the loop to check the AIs work”, but for programming tasks its already been found that using LLMs makes programmers less productive. If a human needs to go over everything an AI generates, and reason about it anyway, that’s not really saving time or effort. Now consider that as you make the LLM more complex, having it generate longer and more complicated blocks of text, its errors also become harder to detect. Is that not just shuffling around the necessary human brainpower for a task instead of reducing it?
So, in what field is this sort of thing useful? At one point I was hopeful that LLMs could be used in text summarization, but if I have to read the original text anyway to make sure that I haven’t been fed some highly convincing falsehood then what is the point?
Currently I’m of the opinion that we might be able to use specialized LLMs as a heuristic to narrow the search tree for things like SAT solvers and answer set generators, but I don’t have much optimism for other use cases.
- Comment on Google’s Sundar Pichai says the job of CEO is one of the ‘easier things’ AI could soon replace 1 month ago:
Would it be possible that CEOs have people employed to take some of their tasks? Some CEOs, all their tasks?
Is a CEOs job the same when theres 50 people under him/her or 5000? Which do you think could run itself the best?
If other people are doing your work for you then it sounds like you’re not working full time.
- Comment on Peter Thiel dumps entire Nvidia stake, slashes Tesla holdings amid bubble fears 2 months ago:
Its not just SEO, they intentionally made search worse.
- Comment on Peter Thiel dumps entire Nvidia stake, slashes Tesla holdings amid bubble fears 2 months ago:
Isn’t this an interesting property of market economies?
Software and silicon chip manufacturing has literally nothing to do with food production and yet a ‘disaster’ (I.E. going back to the status quo as of a few years ago) in that industry will affect your ability to eat. Nothing has happened to the farmers or their fields, or to the logistics system that moves food from one place to another, and yet somehow things suddenly can’t find their way from where they are produced to where they are needed.
Remember, this is supposed to be the most efficient way to allocate resources.
- Comment on Stop stressing my GPU and start hiring artists 2 months ago:
The Neverhood literally consists of photographs, it is as photorealistic as it is possible to be, and yet it has a very strong art direction. More modern titles like The Midnight Walk, Keeper, and Felt That Boxing are similar, though they are actually rendered rather than consisting of photographs and video. On the other side of the coin there are some visual effects that are quite stylized but also very GPU intensive, showing that just because an image doesn’t look like a photo doesn’t mean that its necessarily easy to render (note, that video is a human authored algorithm, not AI, though they do compare it to AI video generation and it does have a mode where you can make your own paint strokes for an example scene and it tries to set its parameters to mimic yours).
I used to have the same opinion that you express, but I think this was only ever really true in practice during the brown era, and not before or after. In fact some games like Thief 1&2, Half Life 1&2, and the Chronicles of Riddick were trying to be as photorealistic as possible at the time of their release, but are now pretty commonly praised for their “stylization” today. For example, the deep blacks and stark contrast of stencil shadows vs what you get with more modern lighting. I am reminded of a Brian Eno quote:
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
We are even seeing some nostalgia now for the pissfilter era, though that’s not an enthusiasm that I share. I suspect that we will eventually see TAA ghosting and ray tracing artifacts, that are currently much hated, be recreated in a controlled way as a stylistic choice. In particular I think that Control will eventually be praised for the way that it basically incorporated ray tracing artifacts into its art style, by using shimmery walls and a dreamlike atmosphere.
- Comment on Years later, Arkane’s Dishonored is still a modern stealth classic 2 months ago:
IMO the combat mechanics shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but the developers were terrified of making a player-character that wasn’t a demigod that can slaughter an entire army.
I still think Dishonored 1 & 2 are both really good games, but its like they made Portal but just let you break the walls of the test chambers and walk right through if you felt like it.
- Comment on Controversial startup's plan to 'sell sunlight' using giant mirrors in space would be 'catastrophic' and 'horrifying,' astronomers warn 2 months ago:
The Soviets tried something similar.
- Comment on 28-pound electric motor delivers 1000 horsepower 2 months ago:
Fixed
- Comment on fight club 2 months ago:
I don’t like the notion that if “being yourself” means people don’t like you, you must be acting like an asshole.
A lot of autistic people, for example, have to put on a mask just to function at all in society. Which is something that can be mentally and emotionally exhausting. When someone like that hears “just be yourself” it can be really frustrating, and the conflation of social skill with mortality I think causes a lot of harm.
- Comment on YSK before you buy a replacement for your cellphone that has stopped charging, buy the $10 cleaning kits and spend the time deep cleaning the phone's charging port. 2 months ago:
As an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure I recommend those tiny rubber stoppers you see in the photo. They have a peel and stick part that goes under your case which retains the plug on a strip of rubber. That strip might wear out in a few years and rip, but they cost almost nothing to replace (and in fact come in packs).
Phones used to have these things built in, then they stopped in the smartphone era because they didn’t look as sleek and futuristic I guess. Now, if you have a case, it once again makes hardly any difference to the appearance.
- Comment on 28-pound electric motor delivers 1000 horsepower 2 months ago:
Car engines, for probably the past 100 years, have always been advertised based on their peak power rating, not what they can produce continuously. Cars are not designed to have their accelerator peddles floored for hours on end, nor is this even possible to do, as you’d eventually hit a curve and need to slow down.
This is especially the case for high performance vehicles, which usually have more demanding maintenance requirements just from normal operation, let alone from being abused like that.
- Comment on What are your favorite games from a worldbuilding standpoint? 2 months ago:
The person that came up with that phrase is in charge of a game series with dialogue that makes your skull physically reform into a fedora.
- Comment on Nintendo's Creature Capture Patent Dealt Blow Amid Palworld Lawsuit 2 months ago:
Did you mean TotK instead of BotW?
I’ve played gmod since probably around 2007, but IMO this is a bit disingenuous.
The physics in Tears of the Kingdom is way more stable than Havok. In gmod even putting a bunch of cans inside a crate can make them start vibrating or cause them fly out at a million miles per hour after you try picking them up. Walking around on a moving physics object is extremely jank, and can cause you to phase through it or just be killed instantly by mysterious physical forces that appear out of nowhere. In particular, the puzzles that use chains (which have collision with themselves and other objects, unlike source engine ropes that phase through everything), are way beyond anything you could do reliably with Havok.
In addition to that, TotK takes gmod’s mechanics and uses them as the basis for combat encounters and puzzles, inside an actual campaign with a narrative, environmental design, music, etc. That sort of thing adds a lot; just look at Portal vs Narbacular drop.
And yeah, I know that there are community made gamemodes for gmod that use its physics mechanics for all kinds of stuff. None of those are a 70 hour long professionally designed campaign. That’s not to say that I think TotK’s campaign is strictly ‘superior’ to that community made content, or should be viewed as a substitute for it, but I also don’t think the opposite is true either. These are simply two different types of experiences, and neither replaces the other.
- Comment on YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs 2 months ago:
I thought you were talking about just opening the drive to use it from the file browser.
I do actually have a drive I use for automated backups, but I just used the GUI to change the automount setting:
I guess that’s a little bit inconvenient, but its like 3 clicks, adding a step to something I had to do to set up some other software. Its not any more complicated than disabling sticky keys in Windows.
Except we’re not comparing it to disabling sticky keys, we’re comparing it to needing needing to follow an entire page’s worth of instructions, pressing secret key combinations and entering commands into the terminal, just so you can use your computer without it phoning home to the mothership. And that’s on top of the fact that the instructions are probably going to be different in a year since microsoft is doing this deliberately.
- Comment on YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs 2 months ago:
