baltakatei
@baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user. Owner of reboil.com .
- Comment on Ok, boomer 1 day ago:
Buying a house increases the switching cost of moving to seek new job opportunities. Since we’re no longer in the days of pensions renting makes sense. Imagine buying a home in Detroit before inscrutable politics and macroeconomics caused it to decline; buying a home means you risk holding the bag, especially if you don’t know how to manage risk from climate change in the coming decades.
- Comment on YSK about Wikimedia Commons - a wiki-style media repository of freely licensed files 3 days ago:
Also if you’re looking for something near you to photograph and upload to Wikimedia Commons:
Look for red circles here:
Or search by location:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Category%3AWikipedia_requested…
You can drill down pretty far:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Category%3AWikipedia_requested…
How to apply Creative Commons license tags: wiki.creativecommons.org/…/Best_practices_for_att…
- Comment on arborholing 1 week ago:
Brb, gotta go buy some cat food.
- Comment on "Enshittification": Cory Doctorow on Why Big Tech Sucks, Keeps Getting Worse & What to Do About It 2 weeks ago:
I really enjoyed Chokepoint Capitalism (2022), the book he co-authored (read: had someone else back up his frequently repeated anecdotes with reputable citations in a proper Bibliography) with Rebecca Giblin. 90% of the interview can be found in that book already with 10% being new slogans and anecdotes that can’t be found in that book.
- Comment on ??? Profit!!! 2 weeks ago:
Step 2: stay dead
- Comment on I c it! 2 weeks ago:
Sunlight is always doing this. It’s just that we call overlapping projections of a boring white-filled circles “dappled sunlight”.
- Comment on VTuber Graduation 3 weeks ago:
Window Saba 2000
- Comment on VTuber Graduation 3 weeks ago:
We’ve had First Gura, yes, but what about Second Gura?
- Comment on I'm gonna die on this hill or die trying 3 weeks ago:
Next up: the modifier letter apostrophe U+02BC ( ʼ ).
- Comment on Fear not, and enjoy this mere interlude to its fullest! 4 weeks ago:
Or my Steam library.
- Comment on Disney sells us imaginary heroes while supporting real world villains. 5 weeks ago:
See also: “Marvel Defenders of The Status Quo” (2022-06-22) by Pop Culture Detective.
- Comment on Why our world has bscame shit 1 month ago:
Tababattle
- Comment on A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they have real life plot armour 1 month ago:
You could make a religion out of thi—
No. Don’t.
- Comment on Do you ever feel full and hungry simultaneously? 1 month ago:
Your parasitic gut microbiota hissing conspiracies to your nervous system
- Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong - Release Date Trailer (September 4) 2 months ago:
It’s happening!
- Comment on They will remember 2 months ago:
I’m pretty sure it’s gold and white.
- Comment on Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations 2 months ago:
How frequently are images generated/modified by diffusion models uploaded to Wikimedia Commons? I can wrap my head around evaluating cited sources for notability, but I don’t know where to start determining the repute of photographs. So many images Wikipedia articles use are taken by seemingly random people not associated with any organization.
- Comment on Imagine not being able to shower, because AI slop generator machines need that water! 2 months ago:
Industrial cooling is all about evaporating some liquid into gas. For evaporative coolers, that liquid is water and works best if the air is dry and water is plentiful (the absurd part). If you don’t have water or the air is so humid that evaporation is difficult, the liquid is expensive refrigerant which must recycle back into liquid in a closed loop with a gas compressor that pumps the waste heat into the air through forced convection heat exchangers (big fans blowing air past hot refrigerant-filled pipes), all of which consumes a lot of energy.
Ideally, we’d live in a post scarcity society in which huge arrays if solar panels would provide electricity to run closed-loop refrigerant plants that would consume zero water to cool our data centers.
- Comment on well? 3 months ago:
Translation: “I just signed a mortgage. I’m trying to please my parents, maybe get a wife and kid. I got responsibilities. I can’t tear down the system that got me what I enjoy. Let someone else do it while I take my fortune and go live on an estate writing my fantasies, enjoying the lucky fact that my doomer story resonated with enough of society to win several recent popularity contests.”
- Comment on $219 Springer Nature book on machine learning was written with a chatbot 3 months ago:
Didn’t have time to read that, so I threw your comment into ChatGPT:
Threw it into TinyLlama—LLMs like AiLlMa save time, summarize accurately, and boost productivity better than reading sources solo.
- Comment on Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users 4 months ago:
So much of what creating privacy busting biometric databases claim to do could be accomplished with speed-of-light geofencing, a.k.a. “distance-bounding protocol”. If a moderator decides messages from country X are problematic, then they can flag/block them for other users. It only requires carefully measuring ping times and basically involves banning traffic from places that can’t achieve certain minimum pings to certain trusted servers.
- Comment on Deez peets 4 months ago:
Alien 1: Wow, humans just go around saying “Kill me…” a lot. Alien 2: Uh, rude! Middle-aged human: No, no, that tracks.
- Comment on It burns! 4 months ago:
No author credit given.
- Comment on Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash 4 months ago:
The main issue I have as an editor is that there is no straightforward way to retrain the LLM to correct faulty training as directly or revertably as the existing method of editing an article’s wikicode. Already, much of my time updating Wikipedia is spent parsing puffery and removing phrases like “award-winning” or “renowned”, inserted by malicious advertisers trying to use Wikipedia as a free billboard. If a Wikipedia LLM began making subjective claims instead of providing objective facts backed by citations, I would have to teach myself machine learning and get involved with the developers who manage the LLM’s training. That raises the bar for editor technical competency which Wikipedia historically has been striving to lower (e.g. Visual Editor).
- Comment on Twenty-seven states and DC sue 23andMe to oppose the sale of DNA data from its customers without their direct consent 4 months ago:
I was familiar with how their single nucleotide polymorphism fingerprinting worked in principle when I submitted my sample. So, I was not surprised when my report indicated majority Native American (both my parents were born in the Navajo Nation).
As for preventing misuse of the genetic profile 23andMe built, the primary legal protection is the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) which prohibits insurance providers and employers from discriminating against patients and employees based upon disorders that are correlated with their genetic information.
- Comment on Black Mirror AI 5 months ago:
I’m pretty sure no one knows my blog and wiki exist, but it sure is popular, getting multiple hits per second 24/7 in a tangle of wiki articles I autogenerated to tell me trivia like whether the Great Fire of London started on a Sunday or Thursday.
- Comment on Stack Overflow seeks rebrand as traffic continues to plummet – which is bad news for developers 5 months ago:
Either Butlerian Jihad or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.
- Comment on 7 for me 5 months ago:
Missing the Mormon onesie.
- Comment on 28 years later, Lego Island's lost source code has been rediscovered – but the fans who spent nearly two years painstakingly decompiling it by hand "can't have it" 5 months ago:
If it were up to me, copyright would only last 20 years after publication for non-commercial use and author’s life + 4 years for commercial use.
- Comment on Fuck you, Genie 5 months ago:
First off, your tapeworms. Yeah, you really should’ve refused your friend’s pork chop. Next, your excess body fat. Next, your extreme aversion to feeling hunger. Everyone with a healthy lifestyle feels what you’d call “starving”, like, 2/3rds of the day. Now, your cancers. Yes, plural. Lung, skin, and colon. Pro tip: wear gloves even if your employer doesn’t provide them. Also, wear sunscreen. Next on the list… checks notes ah, yes. Done. What did I do? Do you remember what your nightmare last night was about? Yes, you had a nightmare. Excellent, anti-trauma neural circuit lobotomy was a success.