AbouBenAdhem
@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
- Comment on In the American class warfare, there seem to be an awful lot of parallels between typical Republican voters and Uncle Tom, a negro who was exceedingly subservient to his slave masters. 9 hours ago:
Uncle Tom had his issues, but he wasn’t hateful toward anyone.
- Comment on How far away are we from someone using AI to create an animated TV show by themselves. 1 day ago:
When you say “by themselves”, you mean one person would still write the scripts manually, and AI would replace the grunt-work animation teams that shows like the Simpsons and South Park employ in East Asia?
- Comment on Bluesky says it won’t train AI on your posts 1 day ago:
If the AT protocol allows public access to content, they can’t create a proprietary training set. But the content is available for anyone who want to add it to a public training set.
- Comment on Maybe prehistoric cave paintings were actually the worst paintings of their time, because bad artists were forced to practice in caves where no one could see them. 2 days ago:
There was a last major migration out of Africa starting around 70–50,000 years ago that coincides with both the disappearance of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and with the appearance of representational art. Earlier Neanderthals made artistic crafts like shell jewelry, but it wasn’t representational.
- Comment on Maybe prehistoric cave paintings were actually the worst paintings of their time, because bad artists were forced to practice in caves where no one could see them. 2 days ago:
Prehistoric people leaving things in caves is practically the only way we still know about them, but that doesn’t mean humans normally hung out in caves as a permanent lifestyle. We have evidence of people making wooden structures in Africa long before the first cave paintings—and compared to structures, caves would have been cold and dark, unlikely to be conveniently located, and contested for by cave-adapted animals.
It’s because the caves were so shitty that subsequent people left them untouched for tens of thousands of years.
- Comment on USA President term limits 2 days ago:
Legally, yes. (But of course, the Supreme Court has turned interpreting the Constitution into a game of Calvinball.)
- Submitted 2 days ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 10 comments
- Comment on Maybe the concept of nothing does not exist. Maybe the fabric of Spacetime is always there. 2 weeks ago:
According to quantum field theory particles are just fluctuations in fields that permeate all of space, so sure.
- Comment on Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds 2 weeks ago:
Not with a typewriter, though.
- Comment on Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, that’s why we need at least… two of them.
- Comment on Google’s DeepMind is building an AI to keep us from hating each other 3 weeks ago:
TIL Jürgen Habermas is still alive.
- Comment on I'll share a troubling fact with you if you share one with me 3 weeks ago:
The McKelvey–Schofield chaos theorem proves that, if an electorate is presented with a series of proposed policy changes and everyone votes according to their honest preference, the proposals can be fashioned and ordered in such a way that any policy can be made to win—even one that no voter prefers to the original.
- Comment on New Kindle e-readers no longer appear on computers 3 weeks ago:
Many authors stipulate that their books must be sold on Amazon without DRM, so their readers can back up and use their books outside Amazon’s ecosystem. Does preventing users from accessing their files violate any conditions that were implied when people bought and sold books with that feature?
- Comment on Are there any historical or modern day true stories (like the story of The Buddha) of someone born rich and privileged who just walked away from their family and turned down money and an inheritance? 3 weeks ago:
The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was born into Russian nobility.
- Comment on Why is voting before the deadline in US elections referred to as 'early voting'? 3 weeks ago:
It’s a state-level policy, and there have been a few states that were ahead of the curve.
- Comment on Why is voting before the deadline in US elections referred to as 'early voting'? 3 weeks ago:
Historically, all regular voting was done in-person on election day and mail-in ballots were a special exception (e.g., for people with disabilities). It’s only in the last few election cycles that voting by mail became the norm, and most people still use the pre-existing terminology.
- Comment on What do you call your first cousin's child? 3 weeks ago:
First cousin once removed.
Maybe the websites saying “second cousin” are actually talking about the children of two first cousins?
- Comment on Are you tasty to mosquitoes? Study offers clues into when and why they bite 4 weeks ago:
They also identify compounds in human sweat that increase biting behavior in mosquitoes as well as bitter compounds that suppress egg-laying and feeding behaviors…
Is that how anti-malarials like quinine work?
- Comment on Is it possible to run a reverse proxy only on a specific service or port? 1 month ago:
A typical use case is to forward a single port to the proxy, then set the proxy to map different subdomains to different machines/ports on your internal network. Anything not explicitly mapped by the reverse proxy isn’t visible externally.
- Comment on The 42 year old new hire at your job confesses to you that he has had 48 different jobs in his life. What is your opinion on that? 1 month ago:
Maybe he worked a few years at a temp agency?
- Comment on How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality. 1 month ago:
The theory you’re referring to sounds like the free energy principle (or a variation of it).
- Comment on YSK: You don't own your Kindle e-books. 1 month ago:
Yeah. In my case, though, a lot of my library consists of relatively expensive reference works that I use regularly and that would be prohibitive to replace if Amazon decided to play games with them.
- Comment on YSK: You don't own your Kindle e-books. 1 month ago:
Yeah—I finally got a physical Kindle in part to simplify the process of downloading and backing up my ebooks.
To be fair, though, their devices and apps have mutually-incompatible file formats, so if the only point of downloading a file were to put it on an offline Kindle via USB (which is the only use case they acknowledge), they’d need to know what device you’ve got so they can convert it to an appropriate format.
- Comment on YSK: You don't own your Kindle e-books. 1 month ago:
I don’t know.
You can put unmanaged files (in a readable format) onto a Kindle via USB, though, so if you’d backed up the file somewhere you could presumably put it back again.
- Comment on YSK: You don't own your Kindle e-books. 1 month ago:
There are also Kindle books sold without DRM at the request of the author.
- Comment on Why does my beard grow back faster after shaving? 1 month ago:
The rate at which your hairs emerge from their follicles is constant, but the rate of increase of the total length of the hairs slows down and eventually stops because the hairs naturally wear down over time.
Imagine that your hair is like pasta being extruded into water, and that it slowly dissolves over time. The more time the pasta is in the water, the faster it dissolves—and it eventually reaches an equilibrium where the length stops increasing at all. But if you cut off the pasta at the extruder and time the new pasta coming out, it will be the full extrusion speed instead of the extrusion speed minus the dissolution rate.
- Comment on California governor vetoes bill to create first-in-nation AI safety measures. 1 month ago:
Newsom on Sunday instead announced that the state will partner with several industry experts, including AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, to develop guardrails around powerful AI models. Li opposed the AI safety proposal.
That’s reassuring—Li is one of the best-qualified people for the role, and she isn’t in the pocket of any of the major players.
- Comment on Most file types are just a renamed .zip 1 month ago:
Zipping a file repeatedly typically doesn’t reduce the size further after the first time.
- Comment on Most file types are just a renamed .zip 1 month ago:
AKA “Why zip compression doesn’t reduce things any more”.
- Comment on In rare move from printing industry, HP actually has a decent idea 1 month ago:
I wouldn’t be surprised if their AI rewrites their terms of service if you try to print it.