CarbonIceDragon

@CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨on topic⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The Lemmy three day challenge

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do AI bros and other staunch AI defenders seem happy about the potential of killing off the creative industries?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m no AI bro, but I do think this concern is a bit overblown. The monetary value in art is not in simply having a picture of something, a whole infamous subset of “modern art” commands high prices despite being simple enough that virtually anybody could recreate it. A lot is simply in that people desire art created by a specific person, be it a painting that they made, or commissioning a still active artist to create something, or someone buying a band’s merch to support their work. AI simply does not have the same parasocial association to it. And of course, it doesn’t at all replicate the non-monetary value that creating something can give to someone.

  I can, at most, imagine it getting integrated into things like advertising where one really doesn’t care who created the work; but even then there’s probably still value in having a human artist review the result to be sure of it’s quality, and that kind of art tends to add the least cultural value anyway.

  That isn’t zero impact obviously, that kind of advertisement or corporate clip art or such does still pay people, but it’s a far cry from the end of creative human endeavor, or even people getting paid to be creative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SAD⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not necessarily, there can never be a last time if there is never a first time after all…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Potentially habitable planet TRAPPIST-1b may have a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, The innermost Earth-like planet in the famous TRAPPIST-1 system might be capable of supporting a thick atmosphere⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, saying it would take half of forever with existing technology, when we do not have the technology to do it in the first place, seems a bit redundant. There are any number of hypothetical technologies for travel to relatively nearby stars that, while we don’t have them presently, at least do not violate physics and are more an issue of requiring a civilization of much larger scale than ours to afford to build them rather than one of if they’re physically possible.

  An analogy I once saw was this: suppose you were to go back in time to meet a medieval blacksmith, and you show him the blueprints for a modern jetliner. You might, with a lot of explaining of the relevant physics and engineering behind all the parts, be able to convince the guy that the machine could work if constructed. But, he’d have no idea of the process for how many of the parts are made, or the materials they’re made from, and if you included all that information too, the whole process would be so expensive and the size of the economy back then so small that in all likelihood, not even the richest kingdom on earth in his day could possibly afford to actually build and operate one. However, if the blacksmith took all that information and concluded “this can never happen, it’s just too hard”, time would prove him wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Potentially habitable planet TRAPPIST-1b may have a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, The innermost Earth-like planet in the famous TRAPPIST-1 system might be capable of supporting a thick atmosphere⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Terraforming would seem a bit unnecessary if you can send a crewed ship there. Manned interstellar travel, unless we’re wrong about the whole speed of light thing, is going to take decades at least to reach the very nearest stars (I’d imagine that it is more likely we’d go to those stars first, and only reach Trappist when people from those stars later launch their own ships, until eventually the outer edge of settled space reaches 40ly).

  That implies that, if you can send some colony ship to another star, you necessarily have the technology to build a space habitat that can sustain large numbers of humans in sufficient comfort to run a small civilization and all relevant industry, self-sufficiently using only the materials available in space from asteroids and such as inputs. You have this tech first, because the colony ship is itself just one or more of these habitats, on top of some massive propulsion system.

  As such, why even bother with terraforming planets? That’s a process that may potentially take millennia to truly finish, longer than it took your ship to even get there with some of the possible propulsion options, will only be viable on a fraction of worlds, and will still get you a place that probably does not have an earth like day or gravity or any number of other differences. You would then be back in the bottom of a gravity well, which requires a ton of energy expenditure to get back into space again. Why not instead, find some asteroids and comets in your target system, there’s probably going to be some around somewhere if our solar system is any indication, and build more of those habitats as needed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨the council⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  thats not-a-lie (maybe that works better spoken than written)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨wtf Cambrian⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  tbf there are some pretty weird looking creatures in the ocean even now. Like, would the giant deep sea Isopods really look that out of place next to stuff like Anomalocaris? We still have plenty of spiky worm shaped things living on the bottom of the ocean. And for the softer side of animals, would things like siphonophores really look that out of place in a lineup of Cambrian fauna, if placed there and shown to someone who wouldnt have the knowledge to recognize what they actually were?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists Want to Teleport a Whole Human. A Quantum Breakthrough Could Make It Reality.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is space 2 dimensional?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No stomach? Hadn’t heard that one before

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Burning Up⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  By that metric, kelvin would be even better though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elements of Renewable Energy⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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 ⁨. . .⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨. . .⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨choosing violence⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨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