Aceticon

@Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After police used Flock cameras to accuse a Denver woman of theft, she had to prove her own innocence⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea of “both-siderism” is anchored on 2D politics: you can’t have “both-siderism” where there are more than 2 sides, hence my point about viewing politics as 2D.

  You’re living inside a box and only seeing what’s in that box, hence hyper-aware of the difference between those because they’re all that you know, whilst I’m outside the box and pointing out that compared to the rest of the Universe what’s inside that box you live in isn’t actually very different.

  It’s like I’m talking about “the landscapes of the World” with an Eskimo - you keep insisting that “this icy landscape is very different from that icy landscape” (which I’m sure they are in the eyes of a person who has only ever known those landscapes and nothing else) even whilst I point out that they’re both icy landscapes and thus very similar to each other when compared to other kinds of landscapes that do exist in the rest of the World, such as sandy beaches or tropical forests.

  Worse, your persistence in closing your eyes to the point I’ve made repeatedly that there are more sides than just two, leaves me with the feeling that I’m talking to a particularly provincial and simple minded Eskimo that can’t accept the possibility that other kinds of landscapes exist which are vastly more different than the difference between two icy landscapes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hmm breakfast⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  As a fraction of the total it’s still a small percentage, unless things changed a lot in the 5 years since I moved out of there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hmm breakfast⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I was thinking that the joke part was about the ciggie rather than the coffee.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hmm breakfast⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Whilst you’re kind of joking (I hope!) on the health benifits, I would say that deriving some enjoyment from all manner of small pleasures is a pretty good way to keep one’s mental sanity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hmm breakfast⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience that very much depends on the part of Europe you’re in: the “expresso in the morning” thing is mostly common in Southern Europe and France and back in the day when smoking was much more common and was actually allowed indoors in public venues, people having a ciggy and a morning coffee at a cafe was a pretty common sight.

  Places in Europe without the whole tradition of coffee places serving expressos never really had this kind of “breakfast”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hmm breakfast⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  On the “Europeans” side that’s at least 2 decades out of date.

  The expresso coffee part is still true in a good part of Europe, but pretty much everywhere in it nowadays only a small fraction of people smoke and even those who do can’t actually do it inside a coffee shop because they’re not allowed to smoke there anymore, which spoils a great deal of the enjoyment of having a morning coffee.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Funnilly enough plenty (if not most) games which won’t at all run in a more recent Windows like Windows 10 and Windows 11 run just fine in Linux via Wine.

  All in all if we consider the full or near full timeframe for “windows games” (say, all the way back to Win95) I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that a present day Linux distro can run more “windows games” as Windows 11.

  One of the more entertaining (though hardly unexpected) discoveries for me when I moved from Windows to Linux on my gaming machine was that several of the games I owned which I could not get to run in Windows, worked fine in Linux.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After police used Flock cameras to accuse a Denver woman of theft, she had to prove her own innocence⁩ ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  You own post:

  This bothsiderism is pretty thoughtless.

  Your post starts with a sloganeering, hyper-reductive take of what I wrote.

  As I wrote in response, “This is Politics, it’s not 1D or 2D”!

  It is true that both contribute to a surveillance state but to equate both is to just ignore all policy differences, actions and more to pretend to be nuanced while painting everything as the same shade of grey, which is a downgrade to even black and white thinking.

  In case you’re unware of it, two forests can be the same kind of forest even when the trees in each are different: demanding for others to focus on the details of the trees in each (otherwise they’re “painting everything as the same shade of grey”) is just a way to try to avoid that people look at the forest as a whole.

  That said, you’re right. The details are different and I didn’t address that in my original post were I only talked about the main policy direction on these domains.

  The broad policy direction on this subject is the same and the outcomes have been very similar and over time progressed in the same direction during the time in power of both parties, but things worsened in different domains at different speeds with different parties in power.

  This is not even what many Americans call “the ratchet effect”, it’s actually worse because in this case it’s not one pushing in a certain direction and the other refusing to revert it, it’s actually both pushing in the same direction, with just some difference in details here and there which didn’t add up to much difference in outcomes.

  So yeah, my point stands that in this domain both US parties are shit and my second point also stands that you’re trying to move the conversation away from criticizing parties for doing this shit by claiming that subtle differences in each party’s shit are more important that the overall shitty nature of their actions in this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After police used Flock cameras to accuse a Denver woman of theft, she had to prove her own innocence⁩ ⁨⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  This is Politics, it’s not 1D or 2D, it’s N-Dimensional (with a very, very large N): it’s not just possible but pretty much a Mathematical certainty than in a country were there are only 2 parties they will match perfectly on some dimensions, even whilst not at all matching in others.

  Trying to dismiss away that aspect of Reality (which is incoveninent for tribalists) with sloganeering like “bothsiderism” is just parroting propaganda meant for simpletons.

  It’s pretty evident by their actual policies that strengthenning of police powers and the surveillance state are things in which both sides of the power duopoly in the US agree in the most, and it the face of both of those parties being shit on that domain your “yeah, but <tiny difference>” discourse is really just trying to distract away from the most nasty aspects of both of those taking big fat dumps on the face of every American by talking about subtle details in the shape and consistent of each one’s shit.

  Now, if you favorite party did start to diverge in that, you would have reason to celebrate, but it ain’t hapenning and discourse such as yours makes it even harder that it will ever happen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After police used Flock cameras to accuse a Denver woman of theft, she had to prove her own innocence⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  In case you haven’t noticed, the system in place now in the US became what it is today under both Republican and Democrat Administrations.

  One has to be a tribalist useful idiot to deny that “their side” has done as much to create a Surveillance State as the “other” side - amongst those few things which have bipartisan support in the US are strengthening of police powers and erosion of privacy.

  The comparison with most of Europe (with notable exceptions such as Britain and Russia) is very telling: it absolutely is possible to have low crime without reckless invasion of privacy, draconian police powers and a pay-to.pay Judicial System.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Weapons grade nuclear material is a whole different ball game from the merelly highly radioactive material needed to merelly make a dirty bomb.

  A bomb made with the stuff that’s not “weapons grade” won’t reach critical mass so there’re isn’t a nuclear detonation - all you have is a conventional bomb that spreads highly radioactive material.

  With the weapons grade stuff you can actually make a nuclear bomb (rather than merelly a dirty bomb), so something powerfull enough to wipe out a city.

  So weapons grade nuclear material is much more tightly controlled and way harder to get your hands on that merelly highly radioactive materials. Fortunatelly it’s also way harder to make (you need either a breeding nuclear reactor or special equipment to separate the U-235 isotope that can be used to make a nuclear bomb from the much more common U-236 one which cannot from uranium ore, and since these are two isotopes of the same heavy element, they are very hard to separate, hence all the talk about special “centrifugues” in nuclear weapons programs).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nearly 90% of Windows Games now run on Linux, latest data shows — as Windows 10 dies, gaming on Linux is more viable than ever⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In my experience AAA games from around 2000s and early 2010s often have problems running in Linux, especially if they have DRM.

  In some cases a pirated version will run just fine whilst the official one won’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It has been my general experience over the years that with just about all electronics devices with “everything and the kitchen sink”, you’re actually better off buying the elements separatelly.

  For example, you’re better of with a “dumb” fridge plus a good tablet and something to hang it on the fridge door. Another example is how a “dumb” TV and a TV Media Box separatelly are a better choice than a Smart TV.

  This is because those things usually have different technology life-cycles (i.e. the time period were a tablet is expected to remain useful and performant is much less than for a fridge), some parts are useful on their own and hence are more flexible to use if they’re separate (i.e. a standalone tablet has many more uses than one integrated in a Smart Fridge).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a way of showing one’s wealth (and peak dunnig-krugger status when it comes to technology) to visits?!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  An alarm that beeps when the door is left open more than X minutes (say, 2 minutes) only requires a stupidly simple circuit and about $5 in parts.

  No smarts needed (though it’s probably cheaper to make it with a microcontroller than have the timer circuit be done with discrete parts).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Here’s what ads on your $2,000 Samsung smart fridge will look like⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Receives a letter at home from Panasonic containing a message, a color printed sheet and a fridge magnet.

  Message reads: “Dear costumer, please use enclosed fridge magnet to hang provided advert on your Panasonic refrigerator”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gotta get those tickets!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The floor is the natural environment for babies, hence why they learn to craw before they learn to walk /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hundreds of public figures, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Virgin’s Richard Branson urge AI ‘superintelligence’ ban⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The rephrase it as a short(ish) metaphor:

  • It would be like you’re marooned at sea in a sinking ship and choose to address the risk of not having a good place to anchor when you get to the harbour instead of repairing the hull.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Not a meme, just superpawsition⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but it also duplicates the cat owners, so there’s one whose cat has died and a different one whose cat still lives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does he do it???⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks, the paper linked from that Wikipedia entry is very interesting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squiggly Boie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t heard of bitnet.

  Then again my knowledge of Machine Learning is 3 decades old (so, even before Recurrent Neural Networks were invented, much less Attention) and then some more recent reading up on LLMs from an implementation point of view to understand at least a bit how they work (it’s funny how so much of the modern stuff is still anchored in 3 decades old concepts).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many boomers and even some gen x believe so peristently that if you dressup and show up in person anywhere you will get whatever you went there for?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Because that’s how it worked for pretty much everything back in the day when your chances of getting a loan from the bank depended on the impression of trustworthiness you projected on the bank manager when you asked for it, rather than some obscure algorithm running in the bank’s systems that didn’t take in account any feedback from an actual human.

  Amongst large companies automation removed humans from the loop, at least at an early stage, so now your machine processable input and/or information about you extracted from some other sources about what you’ve done so far, matching whatever the algorithm is configured to favor is all that matters. Sure, beyond that you’ll almost certainly end up with a person making a final decision (for hiring, not for bank loans), but you first have to pass that big initial automated hurdle that’s supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff.

  Amongst other things this has killed “being judged as having potential” as a way to get a foot on the door, unless you have a high score on a metric supposedly correlated to it such as good grades at a supposedly elite university, since unlike “impression” such metrics can be mathematically evaluated and compared by algorithms.

  Mind you, when looking for work in smaller companies that haven’t outsourced their hiring, impressions still work since your first point of contact is going to be a person whose opinion counts rather than an algorithm or a person too low on the pecking scale for their judgement to be taken in account.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squiggly Boie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Right, if I understood it correctly, what you see as “IF” is the multi-headed attention stuff.

  However the Genetic Algorithms stuff is something completelly different from Neural Networks: it’s basically an Evolutionary method of finding the best “formula” to process inputs to generate the desired output by assessing different variants of the “formula” with the training data, picking the best ones and then generating a new generation of variants from the best ones and assessing those and keep doing it until the error rate is below a certain value.

  As far as I can tell Genetic Algorithms can’t really scale to the size of something like an LLM (the training requirements would be even more insane) though that technique could be used to train part of a Neural Network or to create functional blocks that worked together with NNs.

  And yeah, MLPs trained via simple Backpropagation are exactly what I’m familiar with, having learned that stuff 3 decades ago as part of my degree when that was the pinnacle of NN technology and model architectures were still stupidly simple. That’s why I would be shocked if a so-called ML “expert” didn’t recognize that, as it’s the most basic form of Neural Network there is and it’s being doing the rounds for ages (that stuff was literally used to in automated postal code recognition in letters for automated mail sorting back in the 90s).

  I would expect that for people doing ML a simple MLP is as recognizable as binary is for programmers - sure people don’t work at that level anymore, but at they should at least recognize it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squiggly Boie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You mean that they’re actually competing multiple variants of a model against each other to see which ones get closer to generating the expected results, and picking the best ones to create the next generation?

  Because that’s how Genetic Algorithms work and get trained, which is completelly different from how Neural Networks work and get trained.

  Also the links in Neural Networks don’t at all use IF-functions: the output of a neuron is just a mathematical operation on the values of all it’s inputs (basically a sum of the results of a function applied to the input numbers, though nowadays there are also cyclic elements).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does he do it???⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I was under the impression (from what I learned about how planes fly) that the spirals were actually a bad thing since energy was lost to turbulence via those (and hence why commercial jets have winglets on their wingtips) and the good part is the laminar flow of the air over and under the wings.

  Is this not so in animal flight?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squiggly Boie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, if you’re supposedly in AI/ML and don’t recognize a (stupidly simplified) diagram for a Neural Network, you don’t really make stuff with it, you’re just another user (probably a “prompt engineer”).

  Even people creating Machine Learning solutions with other techniques would recognize that as representing a Neural Network.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Squiggly Boie⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t really done Neural Networks in 2 decades, and was under the impression that NNs pretty much dominate Machine Learning nowadays, whilst stuff like Genetic Algorithms were way less popular or not at all used anymore.

  Is that the case?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jesus hates American "Christians"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, sorta.

  You also see plenty of people delegating their sense of Good and Evil to for example political leaders.

  A great example is people who would look at what’s going on in Gaza putting aside politics and going “yeah, knowingly killing tens of thousands of children is objectivelly bad” but as soon as their favorite political leaders start opinating about it, all of the sudden they’re all “I don’t believe that’s a Genocide” (even after the UN officially deemed it a Genocide).

  I’ve seen it happen in the country were I live - people who previously admitted that what was happening was bad, suddenly when their favored rightwing politicians took an interest in it and sided with Israel, start voicing quite different opinions which ape what those politicians are saying.

  As I see it the problem isnt specifically Religion or Politics, it’s people with high Tribalism (hence easilly swayed by the leaders of their tribes, such as religious or political tribes) and lacking or with a very weak moral compass.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Study: Global Fertility Rate Decline Now Linked Directly to the Commodification of Housing⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s nice to see an actually study confirming what I have been saying for years now.

  The only surprise for me is that this is happening in places like Germany which have higher salaries rather than only places like my native Portugal which for Europe has shit salaries.

  I have a Finance Industry background and lived in Britain for a decade before I came back to my home country, and Britain was about 5 - 10 years ahead in their realestate bubble, so it was painfully obvious to me when I arrive in Portugal that high house prices (in a country with shit salaries in European terms) was causing the country to have one of the most aged populations in the World:

  • Houses are too expensive so young people in their early career can’t afford them, hence continue living with their parents much longer (the average age to leave one’s parents’ home in Portugal is 34!!!) thus delaying starting a family.
  • Even after they start a family, to actually have a child, then need a bigger place to have a bedroom for the child, and for a second child they often need to get an even bigger place (if it’s a boy and a girl they need 3 bedrooms, or somebody is going to be sleeping in the living room) were again high realestate prices are an impediment.
  • Then there’s the problem that housing costs are so out of line with salaries that even the middle class needs TWO working adults to pay for the rent or mortgage of a one bedroom in any large city (which is usually were the best paying jobs are). Childbirth means one person being out of the workplace for at best 6 months, which isn’t too bad in Europe for people with good jobs as they get paid time off (though it affects people’s career progression), except that work legislation has in the last 3 decades been “liberalized” so that most young people don’t have an actual job - they have totally insecure gigs or at best 3 or 6 months contracts - so childbirth means losing one income from work for 6 months, leaving only ONE adult earning to pay for rent or mortgage to which now add the costs of having a child.
  • Then on top of this come the costs of raising a child.
  • Meawhile there are the risks for would be mothers and their would be babies as they get closer to their menopause as it becomes more risky for women to have children, something which certainly at least the more well educated couples consider.

  So because of high housing costs relative to incomes and insecure employment (for certain early in one’s career, for some for a lot longer), people massivelly delay just starting a family until they can earn enough to actually be able to afford their own home, then delay the having their first child until they can actually afford the time off work for one member of a couple or having climbed enough the career path that they have an actual secure job were they get paid time off AND until they can afford the costs of raising a child AND can afford to move to a house with a room for the child (or at least have a prospect of being able to do so in a few years before the child reachers their teenage years).

  So all this so that in their mid to late 30s they can have just 1 child.

  Then for the second child it’s yet more “climb the career until you can afford to raise more children” AND “earn enough to upsize your home to have one more room” and at this point people start worring about the risks for the mother and the baby of “having a child in your 40s”, plus people are getting a bit fed up with the decades of nothing but fighting (extra nasty in Portugal which has a “working long hours” culture) just to be able to get another kid

  So most people give up on having a 2nd child - the overwhelming majority of couples I know here only have 1 child.

  Remember, 2 children per person is still below the 2.4 average need to merely maintain population size.

  (Oh, and on the “funny” side, all this shit then leads to government choosing to import immigrants “because working-age population is falling” which then leads to other problems due to the higher rate of cultural misunderstanding and collisions when people with different cultures arrive in large numbers without enough time to integrate, all of which boosts the anti-immigration Far-Right)

  The solution, IMHO is two fold:

  • Build lots and lots of public housing which is sold or rented at cost. This was actually what happened in the 80s and it worked. Its what works in places like Singapore (which is a fucking Authocracy and yet doesn’t have this problem of Western “Democracies”). This attacks the problem of low supply and excessive margins on the Supply side of the Supply-Demand inballance in realestate.
  • Forbid ownership of realestate in Portugal for non-resident people or companies and locally registered companies where the controlling interest is directly or indirectly in the hands of non-residents. This is absolutelly compatible with EU regulations (and, I believe, Denmark already does it) since it does not discriminate on nationality, only residency (which means that Portuguese nationals who are non-residents get the same treatment). Also realestate tax should increase exponentially with the number of residential properties somebody owns. This attacks the problem on the Demand side of the Supply-Demand inballance in realestate.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone else notice an up tick in hostility on Lemmy lately?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to think like that until on the e-mail address I had for my lemmy.world account (an account which I left following that) I started getting e-mails in my native language from an organisation based in Tel-Aviv inviting me to attent a “learn about Israel” online course.

  This was when I was already very vocal about the actions of Israel in Gaza.

  That e-mail wasn’t public and as far as I know only server Admins have access to that stuff.

  When the largest Lemmy instance is infiltrated at the Admin level by state actors (and that’s also very clearly the case for Moderation in the main forums there, as reflected by their moderation actions with even one Moderator of the news forum being very openly Zionist in his posts elsewhere), the idea that there are bots and sockpuppets around in Lemmy trying to shift opinions for the benefit of nations and even large political forces, isn’t exactly outrageous.

  I mean, if I remember it correctly the budget of Israel’s Hasbara ops is somewhere around $1 billion a year, so plenty of money to have a few people at least part time trying to influence a place with maybe a few hundred thousand people, like Lemmy.