CarbonIceDragon

@CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists Want to Teleport a Whole Human. A Quantum Breakthrough Could Make It Reality.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  That depends on the nature of what “you” ultimately turn out to be. I tend to suspect (though with only a suspicion to go on and not proof, I probably wouldn’t be volunteering) that what “you” ultimately are is the pattern of information stored in the structure of your brain, and thus, any sufficiently perfect copy of that information is the “same” person regardless of continuity of the body. Though creating a second copy before destroying the original would have the caveat that as soon as the second you exists, the different perspective and experience will lead them to diverge into two different people who both have equal claim to the original identity, so that I think to do this, you’d want to destroy the original slightly before, making the process more like resurrection in a new location.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  While I do agree, I also find that even though I find VR a lot more intense and enjoyable than any flat screen game I’ve played, I also only rarely use mine even still. There’s something about it that seems to make it a hassle to use casually somehow, between actually getting the headset straps feeling comfortable, getting the passthrough cables plugged, launching driver programs on both the pc and the headset just to get to steamvr. It’s not a problem at all if I’m feeling specifically like doing VR stuff for a couple hours as it doesn’t take that long, but if I’m recently home from work and want to just chill for a bit without really knowing what, even that inconvenience means that the VR stuff basically never gets used for me.

  My current VR headset feels a lot more polished than my previous, older one, or previous experience with earlier devices owned by people I was visiting, and admittedly I bet it’s probably a bit smoother on standalone than on pc passthrough like I go for, but I feel like to really take off, putting it on is going to need to not feel like setting up a printer whilst wearing a box on your head.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google creating an AI agent to use your PC on your behalf, says report | Same PR nightmare as Windows Recall⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “hey Google, download Firefox for me please.”

  -“Im sorry Dave, I cant let you do that…”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The universe is bottle-necked at processor speed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would think of life as being ordered, yes. complicated, and with components small enough that we have a hard time envisioning it, but its not really much different from what you would get if you made a bunch of microscopic robots able to assemble more of themselves, and had them stick together to form a larger structure. We would probably imagine such things be made of something other than water and carbon chemistry, because when we make machines we usually use metal and silicon, but at the scale of cells where a component can be an individual molecule, carbon chemistry works well. I just think that we have poor intuition for what chaotic and ordered systems look like if the scale is beyond what we can see unaided.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The universe is bottle-necked at processor speed⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  why doesnt it make sense for a natural system? What do you expect a natural system to look like? As far as I can imagine, a universe that can be observed must display some consistent sent of mathematical rules (because any universe that did not, would be too chaotic to allow an ordered system like life to exist within it, and therefore all observers will find themselves existing within the limited ones), and a simulation is just itself executing a bunch of mathematical rules, and so any universe you can exist in will appear indistinguishable from a simulated one from the inside (unless the simulators do something specifically to reveal it).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clever, clever⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Something I saw from the link someone provided to the thread, that seemed like a good point to bring up, is that any student using a screen reader, like someone visually impaired, might get caught up in that as well. Or for that matter, any student that happens to highlight the instructions, sees the hidden text, and doesnt realize why they are hidden and just thinks its some kind of mistake or something. Though I guess those students might appear slightly different if this person has no relevant papers to actually cite, and they go to the professor asking about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Infinite Suffering⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Arguably these are different amounts of bad even before considering this: We generally consider existing preferable to non-existence to some extent when suffering isnt taken into account, consider that if you murder someone quickly and painlessly in their sleep without waking them, they dont really themselves suffer from it, but people will still find you to be a murderer, and would object to the idea that you might do it to them. In the top example, killing the people actually kills them, but in the lower example, it arguably doesnt, because the experiences of the people involved never actually cease, therefore, the lower paths seems to me to be preferable because you supposedly get equivalent amounts of “suffering”, but different amounts of time that people spend in non-existence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Consume⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess photosynthetic life has been responsible for catastrophic climate change before

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is space 2 dimensional?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The last bit about the big bang isn’t really how it works to my understanding. The big bang is compared to an explosion, but its actually more like a balloon inflating, if you imagine the surface of the balloon as analogous to space. The galaxies don’t all move away from some original center to the universe, new bits of space get “added” in between every bit of space, so that every object gets farther away from every other object. If you go backwards in time far enough, every point sees itself as being the center. At least, that’s how I’ve seen it explained.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨under the ice⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Kinda reminds me of a salp

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If a corporation were subject to normal human health risks, we would have a clean environment and trillions invested in fighting climate change.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not really convinced that this would change their behavior much tbh, given that corporations are already prone to sacrificing their own financial future for short term profit increases, despite existing for nothing but financial gain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Platypuses⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No stomach? Hadn’t heard that one before

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Burning Up⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  By that metric, kelvin would be even better though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elements of Renewable Energy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Where does geothermal fit in all this? I don’t think it can really be used as an energy storage system unless there’s some technique I’m not thinking of, but since it isn’t as intermittent, it doesn’t really need much energy storage either, as far as I’m aware. I’ve noticed it seems to get left out of a lot of discussion on renewables, but I’m not sure why.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No Man's Sky adds fishing, a fishing skiff, a new expedition, deep-sea diving and loads more⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Doesnt really tell you what it is tho, beyond something very vague. Its not like promising some feature, getting hyped over it, then finding it isnt as much as what was hyped up

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No Man's Sky adds fishing, a fishing skiff, a new expedition, deep-sea diving and loads more⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve honestly kinda come to appreciate how NMS doesn’t really publicize their updates much beforehand. It’s not super hyped up for a month where one hardly feels like playing the game cause it will have more later, and it’s hard to be let down over something you didn’t anticipate being different before. It’s just “oh cool, they added more stuff to the game again”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honey⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wait, is it really just nectar with less water content then? Could make honey ourselves without all the bees by just collecting a bunch of nectar and evaporating off some of the water?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy devs are considering making all votes public - have your say⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  hypothetically, I suppose it could alternately be done by instances just federating the number of votes from their instance and only storing who voted what internally. Though then you might get issues with very easy vote manipulation if a server just says a lot of people voted a certain way without needing to make accounts to “justify” the fake votes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We keep running into LLMs that are pretending to be people, but I bet there are a handful of people out there pretending to be LLMs.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I dont know about LLMs specifically, but its happened with other AI tech. Like those amazon grocery stores where they wanted to make an AI that just sees what items you take and bills you for them without you having to go through a checkout line, but ended up having to cancel the idea after the AI didnt actually work the vast majority of the time and they just had hired a bunch of people in India to look at camera footage and identify what people had bought instead for those purchases. I would not be surprised if some AI startup or another wasnt just exploiting the desperation of people on MTurk or whatever to get something done and just pretending to have groundbreaking AI tech doing it to fool investors.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨. . .⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair. It does seem a bit inefficient to make the crust and then not eat it though

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨. . .⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Empty carbs in moderation are fine, it’s not like they’re poisonous or anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨choosing violence⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This makes me wonder: if you give them nicer soil than they evolved in, can they still use those nutrients instead, or do they require insects to survive now?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gecko⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That I’m not sure about, I know a lot less about skinks than I do geckos, but some quick searching suggests that at least some skinks can regrow a dropped tail

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gecko⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty much yeah. Heres an example from leopard geckos:

  The top is one with the original tail, and the lower is one with a regrown tail

  (Neither of these are my pictures, I just googled some for an example)

  In this case at least (I’m unsure if every species is like this), the regrow tail doesn’t really regrow the bones or original bumpy texture, it’s just a smooth fat blob in generally the shape of the tail, though often a bit thicker, shorter, and more blunt at the end. Image Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gecko⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Should be noted that it isn’t geckos in general that don’t grow it back, just that kind (crested gecko). Though a regrown tail in other species still will be substantially different than the original

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Helixx wants to bring fast-food economics and Netflix pricing to EVs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Giving the article a quick read though, it does look like this isnt their real issue, since near the end it says that the final van isnt supposed to be printed, its to be made via more traditional means and the printing is just for the prototype. However, their model seems to be that they want to get other people to actually make their cars, but then sell all the manufacturing equipment and parts to those factories. Which seems dubious to me, because while they compare it to McDonald’s franchising, it misses that McDonalds both operates by selling a well known brand that customers might find more appealing than an unknown restaurant, which is a benefit that a startup wont have, and that doing this enables the company to not have to run tons of locations everywhere directly, which must be located that way for a restaurant, but dont for a product like a vehicle that can be made efficiently in a few centralized locations.

  Honestly what this seems more like is an attempt to make something almost like an mlm scheme but for cars; its not exactly the same, since theyre not getting their customers to rope in new ones, but they are creating a situation where what they actually sell only has appeal in that the customer is promised that they can make money from then selling to other people, thus meaning that as long as the customer is sold on this idea, the company makes money regardless of if making these pretty bad sounding cars actually turns a profit or not. I dont suspect it will work for them, given their customer base is a much more limited supply of businesses with the right amount of factory space and not just gullible individuals, and if the inefficiency of their decentralized production means that their customers close up shop, that business will dry up. They might make a bit of money at first from roping in a few companies into this scheme, but Im skeptical that will last long.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As advertised⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Vore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Have rock⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, you can’t really say that we’re going to drive ourselves to extinction, until we’ve been driven to extinction. Most things people list as likely to do this, climate change, nuclear war, are things that could conceivably do so, but honestly aren’t likely to. Destroy civilization maybe, but that just takes disrupting supply lines hard enough. Extinction means nobody, anywhere on the planet survives, even if it’s some little pocket of people in some corner of the world whose climate is good after warming is considered and which isn’t a target of any nuclear arsenals, because in a number of generations such a little pocket can grow to repopulate the planet again. It’s not an impossible thing for sure, but killing off a species capable of surviving in almost any climate zone found on the planet, with the ability to manipulate the growth of it’s own food supply, and adapt new tools actively in response to problems within a single generation, is a difficult task.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI and Anthropic are ignoring an established rule that prevents bots scraping online content⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Id say yes, but for reasons that dont have to do with AI as I dont really view AI training as piracy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Life By You devs spent “a month in purgatory” prior to closure, says laid-off designer, despite their sim-like exceeding Paradox's expectations⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tbf is there any game publisher that doesn’t act like this? I like a lot of paradox’s games too, but expecting any company to be the “good” company in the industry is asking for disappointment.