Thorry
@Thorry@feddit.org
- Comment on Why does every commercial depiction of honey involve one of this things? Literally nobody has ever seen one of these in real life 1 day ago:
Do people actually leave spoons or knifes in the honey? I just open the jar, scoop out what I need with my knife and spread it on my bread. And a lot of honey also comes in squeeze bottles, that way you can just squeeze it directly on the bread or waffle or whatever. But even with those I still use a knife to spread it around.
And most utensils are made from highly corrosion resistant materials right? As they get wet and exposed to all sorts of stuff all the time. And what about that Nilered video about the taste/smell of metal?
- Comment on Why does every commercial depiction of honey involve one of this things? Literally nobody has ever seen one of these in real life 1 day ago:
Really? How does that work? I’ve never heard that before
- Comment on Cops are like vampires. They can't come into your house unless invited. 2 days ago:
I might have some bad news for you about cops my man
- Comment on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says people need to find success in traditional factory jobs again: ‘Every successful person doesn’t need to have a PhD’ 6 days ago:
This fucking sucks man, we can either be something like “prompt engineers” or “data labeling analyst” or we can go do manual labor. In the first case it’s a race until those jobs are also automated away. In the second case you can race your body giving up with your labor being devalued so much you are basically a slave. This AI future sucks.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
Unrelated question, but do you have access to mental health care where you live? No reason, just wondering.
- Comment on Earth needs more energy. Atlanta’s Super Soaker creator may have a solution. 1 week ago:
Many many proposals have been made in the past to utilize waste heat, some with success, others not so much. One of the few that have worked is taking waste heat from industrial processes, connect that to a regular heater (usually gas powered) and connect that up to tens of thousands of home as a central heating source.
One of the big issues is waste heat is usually in a very low energy high entropy form. The way we normally use extract work from energy is by moving it from a high energy low entropy state into a low energy high entropy state. This is due to the laws of physics and can’t be worked around, so extracting anything useful from waste heat is very hard. Most projects involve simply transporting the heat and using it as heating, that way no transformation is required for it to be useful.
I don’t know if this dude is onto something, but with the laws of physics being what they are, I would be surprised if what he has actually works very well. Like enough that it’s worth doing.
It’s for example very easy to plop a tec (peltier) device onto something a bit warm, cool the other side with the surrounding atmosphere, and out comes electric energy. Useful energy and with a lot of devices you get out a lot of power. However it is not worth doing, those devices cost money to produce and install and would need some maintenance. This makes the power it produces more expensive than what we get from even expensive regular power sources. And the power is only there locally, transporting electric energy is pretty hard. So it isn’t all that useful and not economically attractive. So it’s never done. Usually it’s better to put that time and money into making the thing producing the waste heat more efficient, that pays off a lot more often.
- Comment on I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right. 1 week ago:
Yeah I think around the Pentium 200mhz point was the sweet spot. Powerful enough to do a lot of things, but not so powerful that software can be as inefficient and wasteful as it is today.
- Comment on Giant Mirrors in Space Could Bring Sunlight After Dark, One Startup Says—and Astronomers Are Concerned 1 week ago:
I think one of these solar mirror companies was actually proposing using these as a way to maximise solar farms by having a little bit more light just before sunrise or just after sunset. A back of the envelope calculations showed that in perfect conditions they would hit about 0.0001% of the amount of power required for the solar panels to start working. It would also be at best for like 20 mins a day. And to top it off, it won’t work if it’s cloudy, foggy etc. all the conditions solar usually struggles with.
So where I live it gets dark and cloudy somewhere around end of September and we don’t see any light till maybe early March. This is the time where it is cold AF outside and we need maximum energy for heating our homes. So it is at this time energy is most expensive and cheap solar would really help. But since there is no sun (hence the cold AF part), there is also no solar (hence the expensive energy part). At other times in the year we already get loads of cheap energy from solar and we can easily store up enough to get through the night, so in that time something like 20 mins of extra solar would do basically jack shit. This means getting any money from this would be really hard, who is willing to pay for that little bit of energy, which is only available at times when energy is already cheap.
So it’s broken on both a physics side and also on an economic side. Plus you know the gigantic amounts of downsides. But I think somehow a startup with this idea got like millions of dollars for no reason at all.
- Comment on Statistically, probably with the beetles. 🪲 1 week ago:
Adrian Tchaikovsky also has the Children of Time series in which spiders are the main characters. A very fun read!
- Comment on Proton launches privacy-first alternative to Excel and Google Sheets 1 week ago:
Libre office is a fine tool, I use it myself. Calc is a somewhat capable spreadsheet application, although it has its fair share of issues and quirks. But that’s true for most software these days, although I do wish the windows would be on a random monitor at a random location and random size all the time.
However in this case they state their solution is a Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel competitor. These are tools one uses online in a browser to access files stored on the server of the provider. That’s pretty different from what Libre Office Calc offers. It’s a bit confusing because Microsoft calls their app Excel, which can refer to the online service or the offline local app. But with Google sheets it’s clear it’s the online service they refer to.
So the comparison isn’t a straight one. If a local app is an option, I would prefer that over an online service. So Libre office is the way to go. But many people prefer something that’s available on any device, including underpowered tablets and phones, and want their files to be accessible everywhere. For those people it’s good to have competition to Microsoft and Google.
- Comment on fawlty towers? 1 week ago:
On second thought, let’s not, for it is a silly place.
- Comment on Day 503 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 1 week ago:
Not only playing a game every day, but also writing about it, isn’t low effort by any means. I’m lucky if I get to gaming once every two weeks, let alone write about it.
- Comment on Day 503 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing 1 week ago:
Why are people downvoting this daily post? I like it, it’s fun to share with others and it gives life to a community and discussions. Thanks OP for keeping it up!
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 weeks ago:
Ah but have you tried burning a few trillion dollars in front of the painting, that might make a difference!
- Comment on Criminal court ditches American software giant– Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft? 2 weeks ago:
And on top of that these days we don’t want any software running locally, it all needs to be in the cloud. So we have thin clients connecting to virtual desktops for the end users. And guess what, that’s all Microsoft as well. So then you’d need a whole stack to replace that, which then includes hardware vendors providing something that works reliably with your own custom stack. Microsoft has so much of the needs covered, it’s so much harder to select a different provider for anything, as it complicated everything. Which is by design of course, but still the reality we need to deal with.
- Comment on Criminal court ditches American software giant– Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft? 2 weeks ago:
Yeah Microsoft doesn’t just offer software, they offer an ecosystem. That includes hosting, support, training, SLA, legal liability and interoperability. They also do a LOT of customisation for large companies and governments, much more than one would expect for a company that’s perceived as rigid as Microsoft.
I’m sure for a lot of the software we can find replacements in the non-Microsoft sphere, but that just leaves a bag of assorted pieces of software. That’s not enough and I’m not sure we can find replacements that match the user requirements for everything. That means we need different replacements for different companies/governments, which would lead to a big mess that nobody could ever maintain. And how is anyone going to get it to the level they feel comfortable agreeing to an SLA and liability?
So in my ideal world, all the EU countries get together and invest big into some kind of standard on how software like this should work and how it all works together. That would allow different companies to build software for different use cases, smaller parts of the whole, and through the standard all work together in a way that actually works. Then we can have service providers that create and perhaps partly customise an environment for a company or government. They can provide the training, support, SLA and the legal stuff. There would obviously need to be subsidies available for all of these companies to get to work on this. I would like the standard to require the whole stack to be open source, but that might be hard.
Now I realise this is really naive and has a couple of issues. First of all, is it even humanly possible to create such a standard? Something that isn’t super complicated and not overly restrictive to completely kill any innovation? And how long does it take to create something like that? We don’t have 10 years to work on it, the world moves too fast for that. Second issue is what companies would be willing to work on this? Even with subsidies, there wouldn’t be a lot of money to be made, no vendor lockin, no competitive advantage. Which is good for the side of the user, but not as good for the side of the supplier. Third issues, EU countries working together? Well good luck with that, on a good day it’s like herding a bunch of cats. I’m sure in three years we can have proposal tabled to put to a preliminary vote.
So yeah I’m not sure how we get out of this mess. It’s a lack of foresight and the fact governments move slow and the world moves faster and faster that got us to this place. If we had restricted Microsoft back in the 90s, things might have been different. We should not have bought in to the whole “Safe Harbor” thing, but that’s easy to say after the fact.
- Comment on Why do I always have "dreams" that give me anxiety (aka: nightmares)? Why do I never just get to re-live my happy memories in my dreams? Wtf brain?!? This is outrageous! It's unfair! 2 weeks ago:
This is mostly correct. It’s also the case that “dreams” are formed after you wake up. You aren’t dreaming while you are asleep, your brain is firing random shit that makes no sense. As soon as you start to wake it tries to piece together what the fuck was going on into something resembling a narrative. This piecing together is part of the waking up and not a part of the sleeping. This is why you can have a dream about an alarm going of for seemingly tens of minutes or even hours, while you are being woken up by your alarm going off. Your alarm probably hasn’t been going for more than a few seconds, but your brain incorporates it into the narrative. Now this isn’t to say you can’t have a bad dream or nightmare and be woken up by them. The random firing can definitely cause enough stress to wake you up. Especially if you are ill (fever dreams) or under a lot of stress in general, your brain can misbehave during sleep and wake you up. It’s just that the “story” part of the dream only happens when you wake up, while you are sleeping it is random.
- Comment on OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates 2 weeks ago:
And their products are so fucking shit. Today I wanted to shit post in a Discord server I’m a part of. I felt like if I put effort into it, it wouldn’t really be a shit post any more. The idea was minimum effort for a few laughs and we move on. So I loaded up ChatGPT and asked it to generate the meme image. I thought even if it messed up the text, I would just generate it without the text and put the text in with gimp or something.
I put in the prompt, it spewed a lot of nonsense about what I meant and how it was going to generate the image. If I would just say “Generate it”, it would generate the image. So I did, it then said I needed to be signed in for image generation. OK fine, I signed in with a Gmail account I only ever use for spam, just for occasions such as this. It was happy to start generating.
It hung on generating for a while, until it said done in the status thing top right, but nothing in the chat. I refreshed the page, which gave me the option to prompt again. I asked where is the generated image? It said here it is and presented a gray box. It said if you see a gray box you uploaded it wrong? Wtf are you talking about? I didn’t upload anything. It said it could try generating again. Same exact result, crashing on generation, refresh yielding a new different gray box.
Like for fucks sake, the one thing I thought it would be good at, low effort shitposting, it failed at. Why the fuck does this company have such a large market cap?
I can’t wait for this whole AI debacle to be over and done with. Nobody is ever going to pay for your buggy ass bullshit generator.
- Comment on Microsoft says Copilot will 'finish your code before you finish your coffee' adding fuel to the Windows 11 AI controversy that's still raging 3 weeks ago:
Also just because the code works, doesn’t mean it’s good code.
I’ve had to review code the other day which was clearly created by an LLM. Two classes needed to talk to each other in a bit of a complex way. So I would expect one class to create some kind of request data object, submit it to the other class, which then returns some kind of response data object.
What the LLM actually did was pretty shocking, it used reflection to get access from one class to the private properties with the data required inside the other class. It then just straight up stole the data and did the work itself (wrongly as well I might add). I just about fell of my chair when I saw this.
So I asked the dev, he said he didn’t fully understand what the LLM did, he wasn’t familiar with reflection. But since it seemed to work in the few tests he did and the unit tests the LLM generated passed, he thought it would be fine.
Also the unit tests were wrong, I explained to the dev that usually with humans it’s a bad idea to have the person who wrote the code also (exclusively) write the unit tests. Whenever possible have somebody else write the unit tests, so they don’t have the same assumptions and blind spots. With LLMs this is doubly true, it will just straight up lie in the unit tests. If they aren’t complete nonsense to begin with.
I swear to the gods, LLMs don’t save time or money, they just give the illusion they do. Some task of a few hours will take 20 min and everyone claps. But then another task takes twice as long and we just don’t look at that. And the quality suffers a lot, without anyone really noticing.
- Comment on Google is collecting troves of data from downgraded Nest thermostats 3 weeks ago:
I’m currently using a lot of those mini hygrometer sold under a lot of brands. Mine are branded Brifit, but I’ve seen other brands like Oria and Ankilo and many others.
Here is a listing from Amazon, please don’t buy it there, but to get an idea of the price and the specs:
They use bluetooth and are powered by a little CR2477 coin cell battery, which lasts about a year (varies a bit, I’ve gotten some to last 10 months, others 14 months). I bought a bunch of them at once, which drops the price a lot. I’ve been using them for about 2 years now and they seem to be accurate and report data often (every few seconds).
My Homeassistant server (tiny old Intel Nuc thing) is pretty central in my home and I have a USB bluetooth stick attached to it. It’s on an USB extension cable to have the antenna of the bluetooth stick out of the enclosure it’s in for better reception. The sensors are scattered throughout the house and all seem to have an excellent connection. The USB stick I use is a UGreen one which is very common, with excellent support in Homeassistant.
I think this is the stick I have, at least the picture matches, again please don’t buy from Amazon.
UGreen stuff is pretty good and sold in a lot of places.
Both the bluetooth stick and the sensors are China special, but these days it’s very hard to find anything that isn’t. Quality seems great tho.
- Comment on Google is collecting troves of data from downgraded Nest thermostats 3 weeks ago:
Yes smart thermostats are great. I live alone and have a somewhat random schedule. Being able to turn on the heat before heading home is a total game changer. If I’m away when I’m usually at home, I can change the schedule in advance, or change it when I already left if I forgot. This helps save money. It can also track usage, so you can double check your energy bill with your actual usage. Although I have a Homeassistant setup with sensors to track usage from the meters, but still a useful tool to have. If you use gas for example for heating and hot water, the thermostat can give the data needed to split up the gas bill between those and see where savings are to be had. It’s also an extra temperature and humidity sensor, keeping track of how comfortable your home is and it’s possible to act not just on temperature, but other factors as well. I have a bunch of temperature sensors scattered in my home and the curves are useful for tweaking heating and ventilation in the home. Giving an optimal balance between cost and comfort. And preventing things like mold, which might save on heating in the short term, but put on costs in the long term with health issues and mold damage.
I have a lot of automation, but I have one rule. Everything must still basically work when the internet is out or the home automation has issues. So I use physical switches with sensors and relays, when everything fails the lights will still turn on and off with the switch. If there is no internet, physically turning the thermostat up or hitting the big override button next to the heater still turns on the heat. Stuff like that is important, it’s a luxery and a convenience, but it must never become a hindrance.
I try to use open source stuff where I can and have contributed to some projects. I’ve made stuff myself like sensors with self made pcbs in 3D printed enclosures. But I also use some proprietary stuff, like for example the Nest thermostat. I bought it about 10 years ago and mostly because I loved the design. This was when they were recently acquired by Google and were still fully autonomous. Back then there weren’t many alternatives and the Nest was by far the best looking one (imho). The software absolutely sucks, the old Nest app didn’t get many updates with Google, but the older models still only work in the Nest app. But with Homeassistant I can work around most of it. It’s a shame because Nest had so much potential and was doing good stuff, now under Google their product are kinda meh.
- Comment on If dark matter doesn't emit, absorb, or reflect light, what happens when light hits it? 4 weeks ago:
Interesting little detail: Even though the light doesn’t interact directly with the dark matter, so in a sense it just passes through, the light can still be affected by the dark matter indirectly. Because the dark matter does have mass, or at least interacts gravitationally like it has mass, it actually deforms space-time. This deformation can cause light to travel through a longer path than one might expect.
This has been used to create dark matter “maps”, to show where there is more and where there is less dark matter. It also shows up in gravitational lensing.
- Comment on Do you guys know how awesome a printer is that is just working? 4 weeks ago:
I printed a large complex part once, only to see I overlooked another thing that got in the way of my part. Instead of changing my design and re-printing it (which would take hours), I walked over to the mill and milled off a section of my print so it would fit properly. Plopped it on, fits like a glove, design king status achieved!
- Comment on Subnautica 2 and InZoi publishers announce voluntary layoff program "amid the era of AI transformation" 4 weeks ago:
Nothing makes me hate a company more than them claiming to be “AI-first”. Like seriously fuck all the way off.
- Comment on Dyslexia 4 weeks ago:
The brain sees what the brain wants
- Comment on Interesting looking ring. Wonder what it means? 4 weeks ago:
Jaffa! Kree!
- Comment on Interesting looking ring. Wonder what it means? 4 weeks ago:
A Serpent Guard, a Horus Guard and a Setesh Guard meet on a neutral planet. It is a tense moment. The Serpent Guard’s eyes glow, the Horus Guard’s beak glistens, the Setesh Guard’s… nose drips.
- Comment on Maybe there was a cure for human cancer, but it didn't work at all in mice. 5 weeks ago:
Humans only discovered hygiene somewhere in the last couple of thousand of years. Evolutionary pressure for large animals works on time lines of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Before we got cleaner (and also after that) we also lived in unclean conditions, often are still covered in fleas and lice and we are still one of the greatest spreaders of disease. Humans and mice are extremely similar in many ways, just because we have a large brain doesn’t mean we are somehow no longer the animals we always were. We share much of our evolution with mice, our cells are extremely similar and we share 92% of our DNA.
Mice are an excellent point of comparison to humans. And because they are small, live short lives and grow fast, they are excellent to serve as a basis for testing. However it’s also worth remembering the mice aren’t the starting point, nor are they the end point. It’s just one of the steps in between and many other species and techniques are used. In a lot of cases, mice aren’t used at all, but some other test is done.
It’s also like people seem to think that researchers are just doing random crap to mice and seeing what works. Like I said there is a lot of stuff that comes before and a lot of stuff that comes after. Tests with mice are often done to research something very specific, with a carefully considered method of testing and expected outcome. If someone thinks of something so hyper specific to humans, they would simply not do any trials on mice since that wouldn’t yield any results. These days we’ve also gotten extremely good at growing cells and complex clumps of cells at large scales for not much money. And these can be actual human cells with actual human DNA and biological processes. This has made animal testing far less necessary than it was in the past.
Sure at some point if something is very promising but there are doubts about some complex interaction that might be an issue, animal testing can be useful. But if the thing to test is something so specific to humans, an animal closer to humans would be used, for example pigs or some monkeys or apes. And if those doubts aren’t there it isn’t like animal testing is a required step, it is possible to go to human trials without it.
Of course this depends heavily on what it is you are trying to do. For drugs for example animal testing is often done, but often not to figure out if it works or not. But to figure out what sort of dose is needed for enough to be absorbed, but not so much the drug is wasted or the patient would experience a lot of side effects. It’s pretty easy to do a short trial on some pigs and have the first human trial get the dose right straight away. At this point it’s more of a regular way of doing things than something absolutely required. In a lot of places regulation will require some animal testing, especially for drugs, , but these days with better lab tests and simulations it isn’t strictly required.
So it might be a fun shower thought, but it isn’t really how stuff works in real life.
- Comment on Nvidia reveals Vera Rubin Superchip for the first time — incredibly compact board features 88-core Vera CPU, two Rubin GPUs, and 8 SOCAMM modules 1 month ago:
And thus Nvidia keeps the money faucet running. Sorry AI companies, we’ve just created the latest and greatest. We know you have invested trillions already, but you need the hot new thing or the competition gets it and you are obsolete. Time to invest some more!
- Comment on NOW! 1 month ago:
YSK that this is indeed illegal in many places such as the EU for example.
However those tricky manufacturers have a few tricks to get around this. One of the things they do is to create special “discount” SKUs. Despite their name, these SKUs are often not discounted at all and kept artificially high. Their specs usually aren’t great, so the value for money is poor most of the time. However when something like a holiday sale comes around, these SKUs get discounted massively. That way the shops can still claim the discount is huge and would technically be legal, even though there are plenty of other very similar SKUs in the same series that were available for less.
This isn’t a new thing, so called “retail” SKUs have also been around for a long time. Ever since webshops started out-competing retail stores manufacturers have been creating retail SKUs. These are often very similar or the same as another SKU in the series, but given a unique number and sometimes name. These SKUs are then only sold by distributors to retail outlets. Then when a shopper is in the store and looks up the price of the SKU on the internet, they don’t see a dozen webshops with a lower price, but instead only other retail chains with a very similar price. This is to stop people from going to stores, get advice and look at all the models, only to then buy the selected model online. Of course smarter people can easily figure out which SKU is the corresponding non retail SKU. But if you are smart enough to do that you can probably figure out what model to buy without going to a store.
Still it’s good for the law to exist and it does help a lot. The whole SKU shenanigans are only for some things, such as TVs, notebooks, appliances such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and some other stuff people usually go to stores to buy. For a lot of smaller stuff, such as PC components for example, this usually doesn’t happen.