balsoft
@balsoft@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Sora might have a 'pervert' problem on its hands 5 hours ago:
I assume many people just live in a sanitized, sterile internet created by Google/Meta et al. They might have never encountered the gooner/pervert culture before. Again, when most people see “cameo” their mind doesn’t jump to “fetish porn cameo”. As such, I don’t think there was real consent here.
- Comment on Sora might have a 'pervert' problem on its hands 5 hours ago:
She consented to something but didn’t consider/understand what that something implies. While it might be obvious for terminally online people, most people don’t expect “cameos” to necessarily mean “fetish porn cameos”.
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 14 hours ago:
- Comment on Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory 4 days ago:
Ah, sorry, missed the context
- Comment on Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory 4 days ago:
It’s a word predictor. It is good at simple text processing. Think local code refactoring, changing the style or structure of a small text piece, or summarizing small text pieces into even smaller text pieces. It is ok at synthesizing new text that has similar structure to the training corpus. Think generating repetitive boilerplate or copywriting. It is very bad at recalling or checking facts, logic, mathematics, and everything else that people seem to be using it for nowadays.
- Comment on Carrot 5 days ago:
The approximation is because it’s technically not exactly proportional due to curvature.
- Comment on Carrot 5 days ago:
- Comment on Carrot 5 days ago:
By “ratio of carrot to carrot skin” I mean “volume of carrot / volume of carrot skin”. Volume of carrot is ~ length³, while volume of carrot skin is approximately ~ length², assuming a similar shape of carrot, because the skin is a constant thickness (determined by your vegetable peeler). This basically means the bigger the carrot the less money you waste on carrot skin.
- Comment on Carrot 5 days ago:
I don’t think there’s a comma needed there. And in any case, both of those mean the same thing.
- Comment on Carrot 5 days ago:
Sounds like you got a deal. Geometrically speaking, you got a way higher ratio of carrot to carrot skin.
- Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors 1 week ago:
Internet (via your smartphone) provides you with the ability to find any book, magazine or paper on any subject you want, for free (if you’re willing to sail under the right flag), within seconds. Of course noone has a full bookshelf anymore, the only reason to want physical books nowadays is sentimentality or some very specific old book that hasn’t been digitized yet (but in that case you won’t have it on your bookshelf and will have to go to the library anyway). The fastest and most accurate way of doing research today is getting a gist on Wikipedia, clicking through the source links and reading those, and combing through arxiv and scihub for anything relevant. If you are unfamiliar with the subject as a whole, you download the relevant book and read it. Of course noone wants to comb through physical books anymore, it’s a complete waste of time (provided of course they have been digitized).
- Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors 1 week ago:
They stopped doing research as it used to be for about 30 years.
Was it really “like that” for any length of time? To me it seems like most people just believed whatever bullshit they saw on Facebook/Twitter/Insta/Reddit, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to have so many bots pushing political content there. Before the internet it would be reading some random book/magazine you found, and before then it was hearsay from a relative.
I think that the people who did the research will continue doing the research. It doesn’t matter if it’s thru a library, or a search engine, or Wikipedia sources, or AI sources, as long as you read the actual source you’ll be fine; if you didn’t want to do that it was always easy to stumble upon misinfo or disinfo anyways.
One actual problem that AI might cause is if the actual scientists doing the research start using it without due diligence. People are definitely using LLMs to help them write/structure the papers ¹ but if they actually use it to “help” with methodology or other content… Then we would indeed be in trouble, given how confidently incorrect LLM output can be.
- Comment on Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors 1 week ago:
But it converts currency and weights and translates things as well as expected and in half the time i’d spend doing it manually
So does qalc, and it can also do arithmetic and basic calculus quickly and (gasp) correctly!
- Comment on New California law requires AI to tell you it’s AI 1 week ago:
Sounds like that codebase was truly awful for user privacy then.
- Comment on xkcd #3154: Physics Insight 1 week ago:
I dunno, I kind of enjoyed that. What is more disappointing is when those people thought of similar ideas but then made a very inconvenient way to describe them the “convention”, e.g the direction of electrical current or pi.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 2 weeks ago:
Imagine thinking of population and living as efficiency first and not wellbeing.
Ultimately if we want for 8 billion people to survive on this planet, we have to be somewhat efficient. If you spread out all current human population to a typical rural density (100/km^2) you get 80E6 km^2, or about all habitable land mass on earth. This leaves no areas for anything but human settlement. What you are advocating for is an infinite sprawling suburbia with not even a national park in between, which just sounds like a hellscape.
This is not taking into account that this will require everyone to use transportation to get anywhere (rather than a well-planned city where all daily destinations are a 5-10 minute walk), and transportation at those scales won’t be efficient either - if we go with cars we get a network constantly jammed, insanely polluting highways, if we go with rail it would either take an insane amount of rail or the “last mile” would actually be 10 km with little to no infrastructure. In any case it would take an insane amount of time when you need to go somewhere specialized, like a rare medical professional or a DnD hangout, whatever.
Other essential services will also be very inefficient like electricity (imagine just how much wiring we would need), or water supply and sewage (which requires piping and dedicated sewage treatment facilities), or emergency response (imagine the amount of deaths because we can’t staff enough emergency stations to cover all the sprawl).
I’m not just talking about efficiency in the capitalist sense of profit, I’m talking about the basic sense of the amount of resources required to keep humans alive. We simply will not be able to sustain everyone living in a rural-like setting with a modern quality of life (like access to modern medicine, electricity, running water and internet). There is not enough land and resources on this planet to live like that. The fact that you and other people can do that is because they are (indirectly) subsidized by the city folk, mostly so that there is someone to work all those out-of-town agriculture jobs.
Also, the great thing about not living in a city is the fact you can grow your own food reducing the need for incredible amount of supporting land around you.
If you grow your own vegetables, you’re using more land for your vegetables than if you bought them from someone else, because economies of scale make agriculture much more efficient. And in any case I grow some tomatoes and celery on my balcony, you can do that in a city too with proper planning.
Cities are sadness and misery factories, and some of the most polluted places humans have ever managed to create.
Have you ever been to a well-planned car-free (or at least less-car-infested) city? It can be a quiet cozy place with lots of communities forming, lots of green spaces, and access to nature within 10-15 minutes by train. The thing you hate about cities is probably not cities, it’s cars and car-centric planning with suburban sprawl (which is ironically what you seem to be advocating for)
I’ve also lived a big chunk of my life in the forest, and I wanna do that again because I like forests. But I won’t pretend it’s sustainable for all humans to live like that. This must be the last refuge for those who truly love nature and/or want to work agriculture, which is a very low percentage of the overall population.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 2 weeks ago:
No, obviously it is just the most profitable, which is the only thing that matters under capitalism. With better planning we could totally use sustainable farming techniques, and have comparable yields.
- Comment on People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads 2 weeks ago:
You Do Not Speak Unless Spoken To And I Will Never Speak To You.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
I think the sun will set over the empire for the first time some time in late 2025 or early 2026, when BIOT is transferred over to Mauritian sovereignty.
- Comment on Everyday AI looks more like the '08 housing bubble 2 weeks ago:
There is no good economic reason to colonize other planets. We have plenty of space here on earth, with conditions already much more hospitable than that of mars - deserts, for example. The resources needed to turn these into habitable land is so much less than the resources required to make even a tiny part of Mars inhabitable (i.e. establish a colony that relies on life support systems) it’s insane to go for Mars first. The reason colonizing Mars is talked about at all is because a rich white dude wants to go to Mars, since deserts are too boring for his spoiled ass.
I actually agree that it would be cool if we went to Mars. But comparing it to white pillaging of the Americas is just incorrect. Mars is not inhabitable by humans, the americas very much were.
- Comment on Everyday AI looks more like the '08 housing bubble 2 weeks ago:
This doesn’t really tell me anything, I’d have to compare it with other charts. E.g. what does the chart for agriculture look like? Airplane manufacturing? Internet in early 2000s?
- Comment on Mary E. Brunkow, one of this year's Nobel Prize winners in Medicine, has only 34 published papers and an H-index of 21. 2 weeks ago:
Yes, and if you fall down far enough you won’t get any grants to do any research, and “forced” to go back to teaching/mentoring. Both of those things tell a lot about the state of high-level education and academia in the west.
- Comment on The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe 2 weeks ago:
I’ve not read the article, but if you actually look at old code, it’s pretty awful too. If you try using Windows 95 or something, you will cry and weep. Linux used to be so much more painful 20 years ago too; anyone remember “plasma doesn’t crash” proto-memes? So, “BEFORE QUALITY” thing is absolute bullshit. What is happening today is that more and more people can do stuff with computers, so naturally you get “chaos”, as in a lot of software that does things, perhaps not in the best way possible, but does them nonetheless; you will still have more professional developers doing their things and building great software. What I can agree more is that capitalism doesn’t reward good quality software in general, so the quality trend for anything vaguely commercial is going to be slightly down; see enshittification (once again, and old concept).
- Comment on xkcd #3152: Skateboard 2 weeks ago:
Eww imperial, but interesting maths nonetheless!
I think your calculations are slightly wrong because you are assuming that the skateboarder will come to a full stop at the end of the quarter-pipe, which is not true - they will keep most of their momentum, it will just be redirected.
Here’s my take on it
The world-record quarter-pipe drop (which happened on September 25th, and I think this comic was inspired by it) was on a 60 m high ramp. The skater experienced ~28 m/s and ~4 G. The ramp was far from optimal, with the most curvature at the bottom, so the tightest radius was actually less than 60 m. By a = v² / r ⇒ r = v² / a, we can estimate that the radius of the ramp at the most curved point was actually closer to 20 m (which about lines up with the images online). This doesn’t take into account acceleration due to gravity, so let’s be conservative and say 30 m, which is quite reassuring for already.
Now let’s calculate what the average acceleration would be throughout our trick in question, assuming a roughly constant speed over the entire quarter-pipe and only the centripetal force acting on the skateboarder. Of course neither will due to air resistance slowing the skateboarder down, and gravitational force increasing the contact force as time goes on, but those two are counteracting. Contact force increasing with gravity should win out (because air resistance depends on the velocity and so we get exponential decay or so, while contact force due to gravity will increase sinusoidaly or so), but I don’t think by much.
Assuming a circular quarter-pipe, the centripetal acceleration is |a| = v² / r. With a terminal velocity of ~50 m/s and a radius of 600 ft ≈ 180 m, we get |a| ≈ 14 m/s², or just 1.5 g (at least at the top of the quarter-pipe), which is really easy to pull off. Even if cueball wouldn’t slow down at all, that would mean 2.5 g at the bottom, which is still doable. Adding a perpendicular air resistance acceleration (which at least at the top will be equal to 1 g for obvious reasons) to both, we get a range from 1.5 g to 2.7 g, which is much less than the world record and so I deem doable.
Now let’s try being more precise.
Since the contact force is always perpendicular to the velocity vector, it will not change the speed; so, let’s try thinking in the reference frame of the rotating object.
So, the only changes in speed will come from the relationship between drag and gravity.
Let’s assume that acceleration due to drag is just C * |v|, i.e. some constant times the speed.
Let’s say x is the distance traveled along the ramp; then angle traveled α = x / (R * τ/4) radians.
Acceleration due to gravity then becomes
In that case we get acceleration due to gravity = g (cos α) = g cos (x / (R * τ/4))
Finally,
x’’ = g (cos (x / (R * τ/4))) - C x’
where x₀ = 0, x’₀ = 50 m/s, x’'₀ = 0, R = 180 m, C = 1g / (50 m/s) ≈ 0.2 s⁻¹.
I don’t know if there’s an analytical solution for this, but WolframAlpha refuses to find one. If you manage to wrangle this around and find out, let me know!
- Comment on xkcd #3151: Window Screen 2 weeks ago:
I’m not a carpenter and not a native speaker, but I would’ve thought that meaning only applied to the adjective (this window is square) and not the noun (that windows is a square).
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Has this ever happened to you? 3 weeks ago:
I don’t think “safety friends” are typical in lesbian circles, because of the implication
- Comment on xkcd #3147: Hiking 4 weeks ago:
I mean, I do because I suck at mountain skiing :D
- Comment on xkcd #3147: Hiking 4 weeks ago:
Technically sliding downhill on snow is a form of waterslide; which means that this is just a skitour
- Comment on xkcd #3134: Wavefunction Collapse 1 month ago:
That’s not really related to the idea of superdeterminism. Superdeterminism literally just posits that the choice on which experiments are to be performed is determined by the same universe and its rules as the outcome of those experiments. The universe still has an initial state and a set of laws it obeys, it just does so deterministically.