leftzero
@leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on The demise of Flash didn't bring any big HTML5/JS equivalent for watching animations; fast internet and better video compression made those types of animations become raster videos as well 1 hour ago:
HTML5 is nowhere near as capable. Webgl . Is there a graphical tool to use it? JavaScript tool?
How about p5.js…?
- Comment on The Earth is reflecting less and less sunlight, study reveals 1 hour ago:
how is that horrifying?
Less albedo -> more heat -> ice caps melting -> less albedo and more greenhouse gases -> much more heat, and so on.
It’s a vicious cycle, and there doesn’t seem to be any viable solution. We could put shades between us and the sun, but that’d probably reduce light too much and kill most plants, leading to even more carbon being released.
We’re fucked, and probably way beyond any chance of unfucking ourselves. We let those pass by years ago.
- Comment on Why Japan's internet is weirdly designed 2 days ago:
Same reason fax is still a thing you need if you want to do anything official or business related, why PC-98 was a thing, why their smartphones are weird, why they invented the term Galapagos syndrome, or why they use laptops that still have compact disk drives and look like this:
No, really, this is a 2025 model.
Japan innovates early. They innovate fast. And then they sort of… stop.
Technology in Japan looks futuristic for a while, then the rest of the world catches up, but, since Japan has already been there for a decade and made different decisions their technology looks… odd, and then the world carries on, while Japan seems stuck in some kind of retrofuturistic limbo.
Of course this is happening with different innovations at different times and paces, so from an outside perspective Japan is always a weird combination of futuristic, weird old alternate future, and just plain weird.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
Monstrous is what it is.
The very concept of earning one’s living, as if we didn’t deserve to be alive without sacrificing said life for the privilege.
- Comment on Is anyone NOT steaming their Music? 4 days ago:
Steaming seems a bit too extreme… it might damage or peel off the labels, or even damage the discs themselves, depending on the temperature (and I don’t want to see what it’d do to tape!).
Personally I’ve always found a microfiber cloth to be sufficient.
- Comment on !football@sopuli.xyz , for football fans (the one where you touch ball wit your foot) 1 week ago:
If you called gridiron gridiron instead of football no one would have to clarify either.
There’s about 3.1 billion¹ more fans of football (or football association) than of gridiron (or gridiron football, or American football, or handegg), so it’s evident to everyone except Americans which one is the default.
(Not to mention one is an entertaining sport while the other is an ad delivery system built around watching people who’s only allowed path to education is to enslave themselves to corporations suffer permanent brain injuries).
1.— Using the American puny billion here (a thousand million) instead of the proper one (a million million) because like so many other harmful or inferior stuff you Americans have managed to force it into an international standard and would complain I was being confusing if I used the proper word.
- Comment on Mermaid Diaries 1 week ago:
They aren’t as cool, sure, but they’re still covered in chromatophores (and cuttlefish also have ink, so the point still stands anyway).
I just couldn’t find a gif of one using them, so I got one of a cuttlefish. 🤷♂️
- Comment on Mermaid Diaries 1 week ago:
Who cares about pens and ink?
Damn things got an HD screen all over their bodies, they don’t need ink to write whatever they want all over themselves…
- Comment on The 2025 Ig Nobel Prize Winners 2 weeks ago:
OK, the teflon one is monstrous and should get its perpetrators perpetually banned from any position of responsibility, and the drunk bat one depends on whether they force fed the poor critters alcohol or they just ate fermented fruit by themselves, but the rest look like perfectly cromulent science, especially the pasta sauce one… that’s important research, and should get government funding.
- Comment on AI medical tools found to downplay symptoms of women, ethnic minorities 2 weeks ago:
Garbage in, garbage out.
Especially when you shove it into a garbage maker.
- Comment on Kinky 2 weeks ago:
There’s always that one.
Same with close family.
- Comment on tall tails 3 weeks ago:
Smaller dinosaurs might have had fluff, bigger ones probably didn’t, like most big mammals.
Giraffes have hair, though, and woolly mammoths were a thing, so big fluffy dinosaurs might have been a thing, especially in colder climates.
Also, looking at bird behaviour, I wouldn’t be surprised if even mostly bald dinos had some colorful feathers on their arms, tail, or head for displaying…
- Comment on Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code 3 weeks ago:
I’m fairly certain it’s writing 90% of Windows updates, at least…
- Comment on xkcd #3140: Biology Department 3 weeks ago:
Aphids are frequently born pregnant, and give birth to live offspring (effectively clones of the mother).
Only about every 30 generations or so they produce males, who mate with the females, who then produce eggs.
- Comment on xkcd #3140: Biology Department 3 weeks ago:
Trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three…many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers.
They don’t realize that many can be a number.
As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS
— Sir Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
No, LLMs produce the most statistically likely (in their training data) token to follow a certain list of tokens (there’s nothing remotely resembling reasoning going on in there, it’s pure hard statistics, with some error and randomness thrown in), and there are probably a lot more lists where Colorado is followed by Connecticut than ones where it’s followed by Delaware, so they’re obviously going to be more likely to produce the former.
Moreover, there aren’t going to be many texts listing the spelling of states (maybe transcripts of spelling bees?), so that information is unlikely to be in their training data, and they can’t extrapolate because it’s not really something they do and because they use words or parts of words as tokens, not letters, so they literally have no way of listing the letters of a word if said list is not in their training data (and, again, that’s not something we tend to write). Same with counting how many letters a word has, and stuff like that.
- Comment on 3 weeks ago:
Connedicut.
- Comment on "Very dramatic shift" - Linus Tech Tips opens up about the channel's declining viewership 4 weeks ago:
Because I am watching maybe 70-80% english content I decided the lesser evil is to just set the language to english instead.
Google has always made it extremely clear that they don’t believe it’s possible for the human brain to know more than one language, and that anyone who claims to know more than one is a liar and a witch and has no place in their platforms.
- Comment on "Very dramatic shift" - Linus Tech Tips opens up about the channel's declining viewership 4 weeks ago:
They’re more or less making the same amount of money from half the amount of reported viewers.
This would pretty much confirm that they’ve stopped counting viewers who use adblockers.
- Comment on xkcd #3135: Sea Level 5 weeks ago:
Ever seen a ferrofluid, which follows the shape of magnetic fields? Same thing, but with gravity.
Of course, that only accounts for a fraction of those 16 meters… but there’s a lot of ocean water. Get it moving (because the Moon and the Sun move, and the Earth rotates under them, and there’s a whole lot of ocean currents on top of that, due to differences in water temperatures and salinity, and coriolis forces, and whatnot) and it builds up a lot of inertia.
Push it into geography that keeps narrowing and narrowing like a funnel, and the only place it can go is in, and up.
Water gets in there, wants to get out, but there’s a whole damn ocean pushing it in, so it has no option but to keep accumulating into the funnel.
Also, having the geography look a bit like a Tesla valve that’ll easily let water in but not so easily let it out probably doesn’t help either; place’s bound to get close to overflowing, before it can empty itself out.
- Comment on You are stardust. 5 weeks ago:
Most of the atoms you’re made of were born in stars long dead; the rest were born in the big bang.
- Comment on Inspiring. Innovating. 5 weeks ago:
Too late.
The thing about oceans is they have massive amounts of inertia.
We’re still surviving on the inertia from before we fucked them up, but we’ve already fucked them up, and some of the consequences of that won’t be apparent until 50 or 100 years from now.
Same with fixing them. We won’t see the effects (or the unintended side effects) of anything we do to fix them for decades, and even then they’ll probably be unnoticeable under the effects of how much we fucked them up before trying to fix them.
Stopping is probably indeed the best option, hopefully we haven’t damaged them enough that they won’t fix themselves eventually… but that’ll take hundreds or more probably thousands of years.
- Comment on Imgur's Community Is In Full Revolt Against Its Owner 5 weeks ago:
There are more extreme things, but then that starts being something other than “protest”.
Eh, watch some French protests, especially ones involving French farmers. Spraying manure into government buildings is one of the classics.
As long as you don’t kill anybody (or any pets or livestock), it’s still just a protest.
(And Medialab AI doesn’t seem to have any human employees left, only executives and marketing drones, so no one would get hurt if it got burned down, on the contrary, it’d be a net benefit for humanity).
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 5 weeks ago:
Thing is, back in those days computers were deterministic.
A certain action caused a certain reaction, and always the same reaction (given the same context).
Anyone could learn that, as long as they bothered to read the screen (a surprisingly rare talent, to be fair).
Now, at least on windows, it’s anyone’s guess what random mayhem a certain action might cause, or where the interface to perform that action has gone after the last update, supposing it still exists and the system survived the update.
No one can learn that. And anyone foolish enough to try will certainly be driven insane.
- Comment on Who is the enemy? 5 weeks ago:
I’m an IT person and I like computers, as long as they’ve never been turned on and they stay that way.
- Comment on The Browser Wasn’t Enough, Google Wants To Control All Your Software 5 weeks ago:
One rich asshole called Larry Ellison…?
- Comment on Teddybears - Punkrocker 1 month ago:
Batman is a lunatic occasionally playing rich playboy to finance his crusade against crime, born from untreated trauma.
And most of his villains are just as insane as him.
Gotham is basically a vicious circle of maniacs driving each other further insane.
- Comment on Taylor Swift’s new album comes in cassette. Who is buying those? 1 month ago:
The only advantage of tape was, at the time, it’s smaller size and portability
And not being read-only.
Also, you could spool them with a pencil.
- Comment on Stop! 1 month ago:
Nice. The good old times…
- Comment on I have tomorrow off :) 1 month ago:
That’s a cyberman, from Star Trek.