adespoton
@adespoton@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Kratsios: NIST needs ‘to go back to basics’ on standards for AI, not safety evaluation 1 day ago:
To me, it’s too late for NIST there. China is driving the agenda in AI now, because the US took too long to get organized.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 days ago:
No. Please no. Learn another instrument and some music theory before playing a shaker. People can totally murder a piece of music with a badly played shaker, throwing off all the other musicians.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 days ago:
As someone who’s been a drummer for over 30 years, let me say that drummers very much cover other drummers. Most of my drum practice has been practicing other drummers’ patterns and techniques.
But percussion is generally more rewarding than limiting yourself to an 8-piece drum kit or a cahone. Piano is a percussion instrument after all. But my favourite percussion instrument is the djembe — really versatile drum once you learn how to use it. Second favourite is kettle drums — but they’re rather niche.
Things I recommend a beginner percussionist avoid are tambourines and shakers. They’re easy to play badly, and you really need to master rhythm before you can make them sound good.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 days ago:
Why not harmonica? They’re likewise keyed instruments and can be taken anywhere.
I’d argue though that the easiest instrument to pick up is a stick.
The easiest to learn music theory from? Any keyboard based instrument (piano, concertina, accordion, harmonica (virtual keys), autoharp, etc.). Bells, glockenspiels, vibraphones and xylophones are pretty easy too, but you need the aforementioned sticks as well.
- Comment on Wi-Fi 8 won't be faster, but will be better - more details emerge just hours after Wi-Fi 7 protocols are officially ratified 2 days ago:
Second is the rise of AI-powered systems that depend on fast, reliable access to edge or cloud-based intelligence.
I’m sorry… what?
Is that just word salad? I’m not seeing “AI” as being anything but an excuse there. On the cloud side, AI involves server farms with physical interconnects. Same for endpoint AI, and edge server AI.
Are they saying that accessing these systems depends on fast, reliable access? Like, faster and more reliable than using Google from your web browser over the past 20 years?
The whole point of ML systems is that all the heavy compute and speed dependent stuff happens somewhere with dedicated bandwidth to handle it, and the interface can be slower and lossier because the service can take more steps without guidance.
- Comment on Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users. 5 days ago:
I don’t know how Duckstation does it, but Retroarch cores (Beetle/Mednafen and PCSX) support widescreen?
- Comment on If you had 1 dollar and 24 hours what would you do? 6 days ago:
We used to start with random objects; usually something nobody would want.
- Comment on What do you think is the largest number a human can actually grasp / truly comprehend? 6 days ago:
As an average, I usually see the number 7 bandied around. After that we start “chunking” where each group becomes its own conceptual object.
This is why phone numbers without the area code have 7 digits in North America.
- Comment on Selfhosted peer-to-peer reddit alternative built on IPFS 1 week ago:
Well, I fail to see what makes it better than Freenet. Which ended up becoming exactly that.
- Comment on Is it possible to make wireless charging broadcast electricity throught an entire house similar to how wifi can broadcast to the entire house? 1 week ago:
Not for a full house, but there are per-room solutions on the market today.
The problem is the rule of squares… for the field to be strong enough to charge devices at the edge of its range in a house, it would have to be strong enough to scramble all electronics and possibly cook your food at the emitter.
But one per moderately sized room? Yeah; very energy inefficient, but you can get it installed today.
- Comment on Israeli settlers attack West Bank Christian village 1 week ago:
The problem is that your joke is exactly what a proportion of the population would write in all seriousness. And when called on it, they’d respond with “it’s just a joke! Don’t be so uptight!”
But if NOT called on it (because everyone thinks it’s just a joke), they’ll run with it in all seriousness.
So better just to downvote, signalling to people that the PoV isn’t considered OK.
If the /s makes it no longer funny, then it’s probably a good idea to think about whose expense you’re finding it funny at.
- Comment on Israeli settlers attack West Bank Christian village 1 week ago:
Why do they still get to call themselves settlers? Imagine what they’d be called elsewhere if they crossed a border to live in land that belonged by international treaty to someone else, and then burned the resident’s cars and wrote threatening graffiti and threw things at people’s houses?
- Comment on I'm an Israeli-American thinking of moving to Canada, is it a friendly place to move to? 1 week ago:
Really, it depends where you live; Canada has all the same types of people as the US. The difference is that so far, we have stuck with neo-liberals in power instead of neo-conservatives.
Outside the cities is more conservative, but only in some ways. We like our social services for the most part, even if healthcare is a shadow of what it was 50 years ago — but again, healthcare is now administered at a provincial level, so different provinces will have emphasis on different levels of care.
On the education side, expect the college of teachers to be without a contract 2 years out of every 10 — which results in strikes. Also, a lot of “extra” programs like the arts are massively underfunded at the elementary level. Teachers often go above and beyond to provide equipment and programs out of their own pockets because the government no longer provides the funding.
All that said, I feel a lot safer living north of 49, and feel like even if there still are things like systemic racism, at least it gets called out and doesn’t usually lead to violence.
Oh yeah, and school shootings are VERY rare.
- Comment on Mastercard, Visa Under Fire As Petition To 'Not Police' Legal Content Blows Up 1 week ago:
Am I the only one who thought from the headline that MC and Visa were censoring fake legal documents and not adult entertainment?
- Comment on Is it possible to sell semi-old computers/parts? 1 week ago:
For Macs, I’d visit 68kmla.org, which has a buy/sell/trade forum. There are other forums specific to other platforms as well,
- Comment on The company behind Candy Crush is preparing to lay off around 200 employees amid a push to replace designers, researchers, and creative staff with AI. 1 week ago:
Heh; I remember when Candy Crush was just one guy and an Apple Developer account.
- Comment on Google, Microsoft say Chinese hackers are exploiting SharePoint zero-day 1 week ago:
Yeah; allies still care because of the US military industrial complex. Compromising the US still compromises a large chunk of the world, making things even worse for everyone than the current US administration can do on its own.
- Comment on EU commissioner shocked by dangers of some goods sold by Shein and Temu 2 weeks ago:
Why shocked? Temu essentially does an end run around most traditional regulatory controls. There’s a reason stuff’s so cheap on it.
- Comment on How Apple’s iOS 26 and Google’s Android 16 Will Change Our Phones 2 weeks ago:
The one thing I’m continually annoyed about though is battery management.
Why, in this day and age, do we not have a smartphone that can last on a single charge for a week? Instead, after a year or two of use, the devices with a glued in battery can barely last 8 hours on a charge.
Doesn’t seem all that smart.
- Comment on OpenAI just launched its new ChatGPT Agent that can make as many as 1 complicated cupcake order per hour, but even Sam Altman says you probably shouldn't trust it for 'high-stakes uses' 2 weeks ago:
There’s also the fact that
- It’s only really good at this if you want it to generate Python, PowerShell, bash, or C++ code. Try any other language and it quickly assumes you’re using outdated and often incompatible libraries or doesn’t really understand how the language functions.
- at the end of it all, neither you nor the AI has learned anything new; you’ll have to put in the exact same amount of work the next time. If you do it yourself, then over time that 10% advantage goes away.
Now, these things could both change over time, but humans are much more efficient to train than current state of the art probability sieves we call GenAI.
- Comment on The grueling 135-mile journey of a 66-year-old runner through one of the hottest places on Earth 2 weeks ago:
Danny Westergard running Death Valley.
I have to say, that’s a run I’d love to do myself when I’m that age, but I don’t think I could afford the infrastructure it would need for me to survive it.
I already run 30km regularly, sometimes in temperatures as low as -13c and as hot as 30c. I’d probably try to do Death Valley mostly at night and deal with the cold.
- Comment on Scientists achieve first experimental observation of the transverse Thomson effect 2 weeks ago:
Summary of what you need to know to understand the experiment and the results is in the writeup:
Our knowledge of how heat and electricity interact within materials is rooted in the Seebeck, Peltier, and Thomson effects, all identified during the 1800s.
The Thomson effect causes volumetric heating or cooling when an electric current and a temperature gradient flow in the same direction through a conductor.
Scientists have long theorized that a transverse version of this effect should exist when an electric current, temperature gradient, and magnetic field are applied in orthogonal directions in a conductor.
Remember that heat is just molecular motion/kinetic energy; it’s the relationship between the movement of molecules and electromagnetic radiation that’s being explored here, and there’s only so many ways motion and electron energy states can interact with each other.
- Comment on Trump says Ukraine should not target Moscow 2 weeks ago:
Trump also says to forget about Epstein.
And all sorts of other stupid things.
I just assumed this meant Ukraine should target Moscow.
- Comment on is there any way to invest ethically as a sole individual? 2 weeks ago:
Single word answer, but it really is the best option: invest in people who need a kick start but are for the most part too poor to be grossly unethical.
Just make sure you’re investing in an ethical microloan company; some of them aren’t above a bit of grift themselves.
- Comment on YouTube's Latest Update Shows That Online Monoculture Is Dead 3 weeks ago:
I don’t miss spending hours trying to get a slot on the modem pool.
But I’m still happy to while away a few hours on mume.org or some random Diku server.
- Comment on YouTube's Latest Update Shows That Online Monoculture Is Dead 3 weeks ago:
Facebook was never fine; it just wasn’t a silo effect at first—but it was still a privacy and security nightmare.
- Comment on YouTube's Latest Update Shows That Online Monoculture Is Dead 3 weeks ago:
I remember cliques and a lack of online monoculture on Usenet and IRC before the World Wide Web even existed; the web exploded things even further, as did the privatization of DNS and takeover of funding by VCs and ad conglomerates. All that had happened by 1998.
- Comment on Why doesn’t Apple/Samsung/Google use new tech like every other phone maker? 3 weeks ago:
I’ve been using Apple products since 1979. I’d definitely say that the statement is true; Apple rarely leads the charge. That doesn’t mean they never do, but they tend to, in most cases, wait for a trustworthy tech to come along, and then push forward with it, dragging the rest of the market along behind them. There’s always innovations and synergies, many of which wouldn’t happen naturally in the market, but the stuff they integrate is generally already well tested and proved.
Counter examples include the original Macintosh, the Newton MessagePad and kinda-sorta the iPhone. More common behavior is related to things like PowerPC/ARM, USB, Firewire/Thunderbolt, nVME, trackpads, wireless peripherals, and the like.
- Comment on YouTube's Latest Update Shows That Online Monoculture Is Dead 3 weeks ago:
When was this?
Asking as someone who’s been on the Internet since 1989.
- Comment on Computer Scientists Figure Out How To Prove Lies: An attack on a fundamental proof technique reveals a glaring security issue for blockchains and other digital encryption schemes. 3 weeks ago:
For decades, many computer scientists have presumed that for practical purposes, the outputs of good hash functions are generally indistinguishable from genuine randomness — an assumption they call the random oracle model.
Er, no. The falsity of this is taught in virtually all first year CS courses.
Computer programmers and other IT workers? Sure… but hash functions have never been considered a substitute fore pure randomness.
That’s why we have a random generator in each computer based on thermal variance, I/O input, and other actually random features. And even then, we have to be careful not to hash the randomness out of the source data.