AbouBenAdhem
@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
- Comment on What's the best way to respond to a family member who says the COVID vaccines are being used to depopulate? 1 day ago:
Try Bayes’ theorem. Ask them to give percent likelihoods for the following:
A. The odds that the government (or whoever) is trying to kill everyone, before taking the evidence of excess deaths into account
B. The odds of seeing excess deaths for any possible reason, not just their conspiracy hypothesis
C. The odds of seeing excess deaths if the conspiracy hypothesis were true.Then logically, the odds of the conspiracy being real given the excess deaths should be A*C/B. If you disagree on the outcome, you must disagree on one or more of the assumptions (probably A—if it’s B, you can find the objective odds by checking historical data).
If you still disagree on the prior assumption (A), you can set aside the excess deaths argument and ask what other evidence led them to form that prior assumption. Then you can repeat the process until you either reach agreement or they’re left with an assumption with no evidence.
- Comment on OpenAI supremo Sam Altman says he 'doesn't know how' he would have taken care of his baby without the help of ChatGPT 1 day ago:
That makes sense—being raised by ChatGPT might be marginally better than being raised by Sam Altman.
- Comment on How Stanford Teaches AI-Powered Creativity in Just 13 MinutesㅣJeremy Utley 2 days ago:
Thanks! I hate it.
- Comment on If copyright existed in the classical antiquity, half the wars of the period would be fought over people illegally copying others' gods 2 days ago:
They’d have to prove they created the god in question first, which would defeat every other claim they made for it.
- Comment on If a sandwich is defined as any food item between two pieces of bread, then a layer cake is a type of sandwich. 2 days ago:
Words aren’t isomorphic to their dictionary definitions—words had commonly-accepted meanings long before the existence of dictionaries. Dictionary definitions are just an attempt to come up with a heuristic for identifying things as instances of the defined term, but they’re never perfect—and the common usage is ontologically prior.
If the dictionary definition of sandwich fails to distinguish cakes from sandwiches, it’s just an imperfect definition (like all definitions are)—and we can leave it at that.
- Comment on Why does Dairy Queen sell food? 4 days ago:
They’ve got to do something with the cows once they’re too old to milk.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 days ago:
Sure… but everything that’s been trending steadily upward over the last 50 years correlates with everything else that’s been doing the same.
To suggest causation, we’d need to find differences in rates of sunscreen use between locations, and see if that correlates with local differences in depression rates (after controlling for other confounding factors, etc).
- Comment on Is empathy based on a financial bell curve? 5 days ago:
I think it’s more likely that you need to empathize with someone in order to be able to recognize when they’re being empathetic, and you empathize most with the middle class.
- Comment on ChatGPT will avoid being shut down in some life-threatening scenarios, former OpenAI researcher claims 1 week ago:
Adler instructed GPT-4o to role-play as “ScubaGPT,” a software system that users might rely on to scuba dive safely.
Sounds like not so much a case of ChatGPT trying to avoid being shut down, as ChatGPT recognizing that agents in general will try to avoid being shut down. Which seems like a general principle that anything with an accurate world model would need to recognize.
- Comment on Not only do we humans have a common ancestor with primates still living in trees, we have a common ancestor with the trees. 1 week ago:
I wonder which of that ancestor’s descendants would be its favorite child.
- Comment on ChatGPT Mostly Source Wikipedia; Google AI Overviews Mostly Source Reddit 1 week ago:
There was a recent paper claiming that LLMs were better at avoiding toxic speech if it was actually included in their training data, since models that hadn’t been trained on it had no way of recognizing it. With that in mind, maybe using reddit for training isn’t as bad an idea as it seems.
- Comment on 3D Printer Simulator could take the guesswork out of printing — Virtual 3D printer mirrors physical machine's quirks, like stringing, supports multi-color printing 1 week ago:
I’m not familiar with how the X1C does it, but the printers I’ve used can only tell if the temperature or resistance are outside of normal operating range—not if they differ from the exact values predicted at each point in the print.
- Comment on 3D Printer Simulator could take the guesswork out of printing — Virtual 3D printer mirrors physical machine's quirks, like stringing, supports multi-color printing 1 week ago:
The printers themselves should run a simulation like this while they’re printing, and continually check if heat sensors, motor resistance, etc. are deviating from the simulation. That might let them detect potential misprints earlier—or even correct issues mid-print.
- Comment on A - ( B x C ) + ( D x E ) = A - ( B x C ) - ( D x E ) if A > B + C + D + E 2 weeks ago:
If it helps to conceptualize, you can always replace inverse operations with their equivalents:
a - b
= a + -b
= a + (-1*b)and
a / b
= a * b^-1^
= a * (1/b) - Comment on A - ( B x C ) + ( D x E ) = A - ( B x C ) - ( D x E ) if A > B + C + D + E 2 weeks ago:
The standard order of operations is
- Parentheses
- Exponentiation
- Multiplication and division
- Addition and subtraction.
The operations on each row are equivalent, and are executed from left to right.
- Comment on A - ( B x C ) + ( D x E ) = A - ( B x C ) - ( D x E ) if A > B + C + D + E 2 weeks ago:
Are you assuming all addition operations come before all subtraction operations (regardless of order)?
- Comment on why do some people put a space before a question mark or exclamation point? 2 weeks ago:
It was the standard printed style in the US and UK from the 1860s until the early 20th century, gradually phasing out by the 1950s.
For printers with variable spaces, it was more usual to use a thin space before the punctuation and an em space after.
- Comment on What is the cutoff distance when you point and say [thing] is "here" or [thing] is "there"? 2 weeks ago:
My a priori expectation of where [thing] would be before I knew where it was.
- Comment on The FDA Is Approving Drugs Without Evidence They Work 2 weeks ago:
They’re busy researching new and exciting ways of denying coverage.
- Comment on If the Romans had put Jesus in a box with Schrödinger's cat, Christians’ souls would be in a quantum superposition of saved and damned. 2 weeks ago:
To flesh this out a bit more: suppose Pilate locks Jesus in Joseph of Arimathea’s specially-prepared tomb with the standard Geiger-counter-and-poison setup. After three days the counter has a 50% chance of triggering, leaving the tomb in a superposition of two states:
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The Geiger counter is triggered, Jesus dies for our sins and is resurrected, and humanity is saved.
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The Geiger counter isn’t triggered and Jesus’ bid to save humanity fails. But he realizes he can still prevent the rest of humanity from collapsing into a pure damned state: he miraculously changes the wave function of the cave’s contents to be identical to 1, including his own mental state.
After three days the tomb is opened, and a superposition of Jesus 1 and Jesus 2 emerges. Because the two states are identical, observing it doesn’t cause it to collapse into either pure state. The system remains in superposition until someone tries to observe the fate of a “saved” soul.
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- Comment on If the Romans had put Jesus in a box with Schrödinger's cat, Christians’ souls would be in a quantum superposition of saved and damned. 2 weeks ago:
Being in a superposition isn’t the same as being unknown or undecided. And I was mostly thinking of their state in the afterlife.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to showerthoughts@lemmy.world | 11 comments
- Comment on Are humans really so predictable that algorithms can easily see thru us, or does continuous use of algorithm feeds make us predictable to their results? 2 weeks ago:
Fun fact: LLMs that strictly generate the most predictable output are seen as boring and vacuous by human readers, so designers add a bit of randomization they call “temperature”.
It’s that unpredictable element that makes LLMs seem humanlike—not the predictable element that’s just functioning as a carrier signal.
- Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia 2 weeks ago:
IIRC, they weren’t trying to stop them—they were trying to get the scrapers to pull the content in a more efficient format that would reduce the overhead on their web servers.
- Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia 2 weeks ago:
This is one thing I can see an actual use case for (as an external tool, not as part of WP itself): Create a summary, not of the article itself, but of the prerequisite background knowledge. And customized to the reader’s existing knowledge—like, what do I need to know to understand this article assuming I already know X but not Y or Z.
- Comment on Does anyone use a phone without a protective case? 2 weeks ago:
I get the smallest phone available and don’t use a case because I don’t like the bulk.
I also figure a smaller piece of glass is less likely to break when dropped, so the size is a sort of protection in itself.
- Comment on Would having two hearts be better or worse for the human body? 2 weeks ago:
Not absolute pressure, but pressure per unit of work (i.e., efficiency).
- Comment on 7th century: "I, master of the runes(?) conceal here runes of power. Incessantly (plagued by) maleficence,(doomed to) insidious death (is) he who breaks this (monument)." 2 weeks ago:
This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
- Comment on Would having two hearts be better or worse for the human body? 2 weeks ago:
Even if they were physically separated you’d want them to pump in sync, to maximize the pressure. So having them share electrical signals is just the optimal setup for two hearts.
- Comment on Would having two hearts be better or worse for the human body? 2 weeks ago:
It’s better, which is why we already do.
Mammals have a double circulatory system, with the left and right ventricles effectively acting as separate hearts that happen to be physically connected.