adespoton
@adespoton@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Having problems with unread emails? Entice the recipients with more emotion 3 days ago:
Subject: That lawnmower you borrowed
Dear sir,
I am SLAMMING you for your delay in returning my lawnmower. Please return today, or you won’t BELIEVE what happens next! 9 out of 10 billionaires don’t WANT you to know!
- Comment on Is there a medieval equivalent of the youtube channel "Primative Technology" 3 days ago:
Bards. There were bards.
- Comment on Is there a medieval equivalent of the youtube channel "Primative Technology" 3 days ago:
It’s the answer that came to my mind when I saw the question. I was not disappointed to see someone had already written it 😃
- Comment on If one were so inclined, could you take your plot of land, parcel it up into 1-meter-squared (or smaller) sections, and sell each of those sections to different people/companies? 3 days ago:
Depends on your local laws. If there are no municipal or regional laws against it and the zoning allows for it, yes, you could do it.
You could also form a corporation that is owned by a lot of people and use that to buy a regular plot of land, and that would usually comply with local regulations. That’s how strata corporations work.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 days ago:
On the other side of this, I once had a co-worker who bought a keystroke recorder and attached it to his own computer.
The person who had been messing with his computer saw the mini camera he had set up but missed the keylogger. He was able to figure out who it was and what they were up to from that.
- Comment on America’s drone 9/11 is coming — and just like on 9/11, we aren’t ready 1 week ago:
Why over 11?
- Comment on Right to Repair Gains Traction as John Deere Faces Trial 1 week ago:
In the time it takes for all this to play out, all the farmers could recoup their potential losses and then some by replacing their JD investment with Kubota, who supports independent repair shops.
Of course, with the debt load most farmers carry, that’s easier said than done.
If the federal government set up a replacement program though, and shipped all the JD machinery to Ukraine where hackers know how to modify the software, everyone but JD would win.
- Comment on Austrian government agrees on plan to allow monitoring of secure messaging 1 week ago:
Right; so anyone using Apple Messages or WhatsApp or Signal still has private messaging; it’s those message apps that only encrypt in transit that are leaving data exposed to authorities. Personally, I don’t have an issue with that like I do with EU chat control. But it’s mostly performative.
- Comment on Austrian government agrees on plan to allow monitoring of secure messaging 1 week ago:
Er, does this compel everyone to cooperate, or is it just a “yeah, police are legally allowed to monitor encrypted communications” kind of thing?
The first seems dystopian and the second performative, and neither seems like it will do what Austria’s government says it will.
- Comment on Why is there such a negative connotation with the poos of horses, bulls, and bats? 1 week ago:
Horses, because they used to be everywhere. Step in the street, and you were likely to step in some.
Bull, because it’s very big and smelly and there was usually some around (steer manure is still prized for gardening).
Bats… because it rains from above and is really gross, and you’ve got a high likelihood of getting really sick from it.
Why we don’t go on about pigeon and seagull guano though? I have no idea.
- Comment on Experts warn mobile sports betting could be gateway to gambling crisis for young men in New York 1 week ago:
The difference is that black market gambling is distributed. It means that there are fewer protections for people who engage in it.
But legalization just means most of the action is controlled by a handful of corporations, and the government is involved in protecting the flow of money, of which they get a cut.
- Comment on Experts warn mobile sports betting could be gateway to gambling crisis for young men in New York 1 week ago:
Why limited to young men in new york?
That’s like saying that submerging a young man’s head in water for over five minutes could lead to death.
- Comment on In this day and age is it possible to create a commune? With majority of vegetables coming from one acre and all put in to get wifi to our subdivision? So the bill is not that high? 1 week ago:
Usually in the US they call it a co-op instead of a commune, but yeah, things like that are already done.
- Comment on Spicy food never affects my gut and everyone thinks it's really weird. How unusual is this and what could be happening to explain why spicy food doesn't affect me? 1 week ago:
Most people have taste receptors in their gut as well as on their tongue. It helps regulate how quickly your muscles contract to move stuff along through your intestine.
Some people don’t have as many, and some people build up a tolerance to capsaicin (in both their mouth and gut).
- Comment on How would I pop a bag of popcorn on the microwave? 1 week ago:
Dump it out and use it like any other popcorn. It’s pre-salted and the bag contains the oil you’d otherwise need to add.
But don’t put it in an air popper; the oil is likely to catch fire or just cause the kernels to burn.
- Comment on CRISPR-Edited Stem Cells Reveal Hidden Causes of Autism 1 week ago:
Yeah; despite this study essentially saying “we can now reliably manufacture the inheritable attributes that trigger ASD in mice, and have eliminated the ones not directly implicated.”
Somehow this will be interpreted as “proof that scientists are causing Autism by adding chemicals to our <insert thing here>.”
- Comment on CRISPR-Edited Stem Cells Reveal Hidden Causes of Autism 1 week ago:
Wow… right at the end:
He adds: “Interestingly, the genetic variants we studied are also implicated in other neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. So, this library may be useful for studying other conditions as well.”
These have been harder to pin down than autism spectrum. So this could have some pretty profound consequences.
- Comment on YouTube might slow down your videos if you block ads 1 week ago:
I’d be more likely to just assume delivery quality was going downhill and look for another streaming video hoster/provider. Why would someone link slow speeds to a plugin that filters out the stuff you don’t want?
- Comment on YouTube might slow down your videos if you block ads 1 week ago:
Currently blocking ads consists of keeping uBlock Origin up to date. Not blocking ads generally means going to a different platform after a single ad roll.
I have no issues with pre-roll ads; it’s the interstitial ones that drive me away.
- Comment on YouTube might slow down your videos if you block ads 1 week ago:
If they know I’m blocking their ads, why wouldn’t they just block the video altogether? That’s what they currently do.
If it’s already blocked, slowing it down to “blocked… but slower” seems rather pointless?
- Comment on Were people happier in the past? 1 week ago:
At an individual level, the more you know, generally the more miserable you are. This likely operates at a societal level too.
- Comment on What water bottles are completely free from the problem of weird chipping/shavings of the material which could put material in the water, even when dropping it or when using Bottle Bright tablets? 2 weeks ago:
Been using them for 15 years; the bottles get a few dents in them, but I’ve even been able to hammer most of those out.
Haven’t used a plastic water bottle since the early 90s.
- Comment on Turkmenistan | "Door to Hell" starting to close after 54 years 2 weeks ago:
We need more news stories like this. Great that they’re getting a source of methane captured to do useful work instead of just polluting the atmosphere.
- Comment on If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better? 2 weeks ago:
The solution isn’t so much to replace plastic as it is to eliminate “single use” from our way of life, except as needed for emergencies (eg, situations where the only way to be sanitary is by destroying the object after use).
If you eliminate the majority of non-reusable stuff from your life, the rest becomes much easier. The volumes of plastics would be much lower such that much of it could actually be recycled at least once.
The second bit is to always incorporate end of life into a product’s lifecycle. Shrink what’s allowed to go in landfills. Provide a system to reclaim and often re-use damaged or worn out materials. Design things so they can be easily parted (broken up into parts) so that if a battery dies, you take the old ones in for servicing and either get them replaced or refreshed, instead of tossing the entire device.
Groceries? I no longer use bags; I get the store to give me the flats it gets its stuff in, and I fill those up with my groceries. General shopping? I have a set of cloth bags that stay in my car and another I can shove in my pocket when I’m walking.
I’ve got a metal water bottle I take with me when I go places.
Rejecting single use will get us much further than rejecting plastic.
- Comment on I'm looking for an article showing that LLMs don't know how they work internally 3 weeks ago:
No, they really don’t. It’s a large language model. Input cues instruct it as to which weighted path through the matrix to take. Those paths are complex enough that the human mind can’t hold all the branches and weights at the same time. But there’s no planning going on; the model can’t backtrack a few steps, consider different outcomes and run a meta analysis. Other reasoning models can do that, but not language models; language models are complex predictive translators.
- Comment on I'm looking for an article showing that LLMs don't know how they work internally 3 weeks ago:
They walk down runways and pose for magazines. Do they reason? Sometimes.
- Comment on I'm looking for an article showing that LLMs don't know how they work internally 3 weeks ago:
The study being referenced explains in detail why they can’t. So I’d say it’s Anthropic who stated LLMs don’t have the capacity to reason, and that’s what we’re discussing.
The popular media tends to go on and on about conflating AI with AGI and synthetic reasoning.
- Comment on Is there a more convenient way to do this? 3 weeks ago:
If you have an iPhone, it has a built in translation app too, that does voice to voice with written summaries.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
It’s like switching from cigarettes to chickory.
- Comment on Has the use of a comma instead of the word "and" in English news headlines always been a thing? 5 weeks ago:
Eats Shoots and Leaves