AbouBenAdhem
@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
- Comment on Does the ping between your eyes and brain increase when you're tired? 6 hours ago:
In the literal sense of the time it takes neuronal spikes to travel from your retina to your visual cortex, I doubt it.
The more likely cause, I think, is the amount of resources your brain is devoting to the real-time modeling of your environment that those visual signals feed into, and that has to be processed before you become conscious of any changes.
- Comment on Trump’s war on windmills started in Scotland. Now he’s taking it global 1 day ago:
Doom Quixote.
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 1 day ago:
I kind of see the relationship between computer science and programming as parallel to the relationship between linguistics and speaking foreign languages. You don’t need to learn linguistics to speak another language—so AI translation isn’t taking the linguistics out of translating because it wasn’t a necessary element to begin with.
- Comment on Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks 1 day ago:
As a 50-something, I can see the case for putting the “golden age” of the internet between the birth of Wikipedia in 2001 and Facebook in 2006.
- Comment on What's the equivalent of rose coloured glasses for always seeing something in a negative perspective? 1 week ago:
A jaundiced view?
- Comment on What would remain for a future species if humans were to vanish tomorrow? 2 weeks ago:
See the Silurian hypothesis:
The Silurian hypothesis is a thought experiment, which assesses modern science’s ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization, perhaps several million years ago.
- Comment on Who discovered/"invented" fire? 3 weeks ago:
Dont say Prometheus
Ok—it was Προμηθεύς.
- Comment on Taking screenshots of everything is no different than elders printing out emails. 3 weeks ago:
These days elders are taking screenshots of emails and printing the screenshots (and wondering why they’re cut off).
- Comment on Judge backs AI firm over use of copyrighted books 4 weeks ago:
IMO the focus should have always been on the potential for AI to produce copyright-violating output, not on the method of training.
- Comment on Artificial intelligence and the wellbeing of workers: no evidence of a sizeable negative impact of AI on workers’ well-being and mental health. 4 weeks ago:
Why would the article’s credited authors pass up the chance to improve their own health status and health satisfaction?
- Comment on Artificial intelligence and the wellbeing of workers: no evidence of a sizeable negative impact of AI on workers’ well-being and mental health. 4 weeks ago:
Critical paragraph:
Our research highlights the importance of Germany’s unique institutional context, characterized by strong labor protections, extensive union representation, and comprehensive employment legislation. These factors, combined with Germany’s gradual adoption of AI technologies, create an environment where AI is more likely to complement rather than displace worker skills, mitigating some of the negative labor market effects observed in countries like the US.
- Comment on Is it still shopping local if I'm in Bentonville AK and it's Walmart? 4 weeks ago:
How much of their profits do the Waltons put back into the Bentonville economy?
- Comment on What's the best way to respond to a family member who says the COVID vaccines are being used to depopulate? 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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. 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks ago:
They’ve got to do something with the cows once they’re too old to milk.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks 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 weeks 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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? 1 month 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"? 1 month ago:
My a priori expectation of where [thing] would be before I knew where it was.