leftzero
@leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on tall tails 3 days 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 5 days ago:
I’m fairly certain it’s writing 90% of Windows updates, at least…
- Comment on xkcd #3140: Biology Department 5 days 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 5 days 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 5 days 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 5 days ago:
Connedicut.
- Comment on "Very dramatic shift" - Linus Tech Tips opens up about the channel's declining viewership 1 week 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 1 week 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 2 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. 2 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. 2 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 2 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? 2 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? 2 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 2 weeks ago:
One rich asshole called Larry Ellison…?
- Comment on Teddybears - Punkrocker 3 weeks 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? 3 weeks 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! 3 weeks ago:
Nice. The good old times…
- Comment on I have tomorrow off :) 4 weeks ago:
That’s a cyberman, from Star Trek.
- Comment on Teddybears - Punkrocker 4 weeks ago:
CA: Brave New World (Order) is about how slavery is okay when the President General does it and loves his daughter or something
What? Ross ended up in jail, and was never portrayed as the good guy…
- Comment on Teddybears - Punkrocker 4 weeks ago:
what Captain America is up to these days. Is he already the poster boy for ICE?
Well, yeah, he basically was, for a while.
(These fascist types tend to identify more with the Punisher, though, despite the fact that he’d be the first to shoot them full of bullets.)
- Comment on 'Ad Blocking is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned By Top German Court 4 weeks ago:
If I understand it correctly, they’re arguing that any unauthorized “modification of the computer program” (i.e. the web page) is a copyright violation.
This wouldn’t only affect adblockers… this would affect any browser feature, extension, or user script that modified the page in any way, shape, or form… translators, easy reading modes, CSS modifiers (e.g., dark mode for pages that don’t have it, or anything that improves readability for people with vision problems), probably screen readers…
This would essentially turn web browsers into the HTML equivalent of PDF readers, without any of the customisability that’s been standard for decades…
- Comment on what are in you're top 3 favourite games of all time? 5 weeks ago:
Favourite of all time?
Wing Commander (2 if I have to pick one, otherwise 1, 2, and secret missions).
Monkey Island (3 if I have to pick one, 1 to 3 otherwise).
Third is difficult, but… Disco Elysium, I guess…?
(What games I’ve spent the most time playing, though…? Definitely Crusader Kings 2 and 3, followed by Stellaris.)
- Comment on If I wanted to bury a hard drive for archival purposes (e.g. Country becoming Dictatorship), how to keep the contents from being damaged and where is the safest place to bury it? 5 weeks ago:
SCSI ain’t weird!
- Comment on If I wanted to bury a hard drive for archival purposes (e.g. Country becoming Dictatorship), how to keep the contents from being damaged and where is the safest place to bury it? 5 weeks ago:
Good flash memory might last a decade, maybe a bit more.
Average flash memory probably won’t.
- Comment on If I wanted to bury a hard drive for archival purposes (e.g. Country becoming Dictatorship), how to keep the contents from being damaged and where is the safest place to bury it? 5 weeks ago:
The standard (and tested for decades) answer is tape.
M-Disc might also be an alternative.
- Comment on I should call her. 5 weeks ago:
DRR… DRR… DRR…
- Comment on Black Holes 5 weeks ago:
graph function singularities exist as physical features in our world
Do they, though…?
As I (mis?)understand it, as a massive star begins to collapse, getting denser and denser, the gravitational gradient gets steeper and steeper… time (from the perspective of an outside observer) gets slower and slower… to the point that, from our point of view, the full collapse (or maybe even any collapse below the Schwarzschild radius?) hasn’t happened yet, and won’t happen until the extremely distant future, beyond the end of the universe…
So, in that sense, from the point of view of “our world”, no singularities (except possibly the big bang) would ever exist (yet), all of them being censored not only by event horizons, but by being shoved into the perpetually far future, beyond time itself…
And, speaking about event horizons, isn’t the whole “light isn’t fast enough to escape” concept a misinterpretation of sorts…? As I (again mis?)understand it, it’s not a matter of speed, but of geometry… The way space-time is twisted in such a gravitational gradient, once you get past the event horizon there are no longer any directions pointing towards the outside.
Which is another from of cosmic censorship (or a different effect or interpretation of the above), preventing anything inside the event horizon from causally interacting with the outside universe…
So, if these singularities are hidden beyond sight, causally, visually, and geometrically isolated from the rest of the universe, and perpetually shoved into the far future… can they really be said to exist in our world…?
(Of course there’s always the big bang, but we can’t really observe that one, only its effects, and it’s not necessarily exactly what the original post was talking about anyway…)
- Comment on You have one job. 5 weeks ago:
The right Unix-like OS
It’s always been BSD, it’ll always be BSD.
- Comment on You have one job. 5 weeks ago:
I believe last time I saw it it was hanging from Donnie’s diaper, like a forgotten strip of toilet paper…
