AbouBenAdhem

@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Either David Mitchell is Slavoj Žižek putting on a funny accent or Slavoj Žižek is David Mitchell cosplaying English as you never will ever see them together because they are the same person.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Are you referring to David Mitchell the comedian, or the author of Cloud Atlas?

  Or are they both the same person, too?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why am I not Irish⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  How hard have you tried?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pete Hegseth is a TERRIBLE advertisement for writing all of your speeches with AI.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  To verify that I’d have to listen to a speech Hegseth wrote himself, and there’s nothing I’d rather not do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In the Movie Sinners, how are the vampires able to attack them without being invited in?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Grace keeps pushing Smoke to take the vampires head on, before they go to her store and kill her daughter. When the others refuse, she forces it by inviting them in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you took a box of Kleenex back to the medieval time period, they'd probably think that you're a witch⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Or that it was a holy relic you’d brought back from the Crusades.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to I prove to someone that the U.S. moon landing wasn't staged?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Explain why the US hasn’t gone back in so long, and why with modern technology it seems so difficult?

  The Apollo program took 4.5% of the US budget. NASA’s entire budget now—including space telescopes, earth satellites, and interplanetary probes—is less than half of one percent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Changes in forest area by world region (1990-2025)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure—but I’d guess that the reason similar trends seem to be underway in Africa and Southeast Asia is that climate change has made the conversion of forest to pasture more profitable in the tropics than elsewhere.

  In the Amazon all it takes to get profitable pasture is fire and a minimal amount of labor, but in Siberia the same investment would get nothing. Which is why the cattle industry buys the government of Brazil instead of Russia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Changes in forest area by world region (1990-2025)⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So the general pattern is that temperate forests are increasing, but tropical forests are declining (presumably due to climate change).

  Given that tropical forests are richer in species diversity and biomass per unit area, the discrepancy is probably greater than the changes in area suggest.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which wiki software to host⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  MediaWiki’s probably overkill for basic wiki functionality, but I use it for the sake of Semantic MediaWiki and associated extensions. But SMW has more of a learning curve, so it might not be worth it for a casual-use wiki.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Enzymes work as 'Maxwell's demon' by using memory stored as motion⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The point of Maxwell’s demon is that there’s an intimate connection between thermodynamic entropy and information: increasing entropy reduces information, but adding information can reduce entropy.

  I think what they’re getting at here is that the enzyme’s state preserves information about its recent past which it then uses to reduce entropy the way Maxwell’s demon does.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Enzymes work as 'Maxwell's demon' by using memory stored as motion⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  the researchers constructed a theoretical model where the transient increase in motility served as a “memory” of the enzyme’s immediate past reaction event. The enzyme used this information to leave the product molecules, thereby eliminating the probability of the reverse reaction.

  So if I’m understanding correctly, just after an enzyme catalyzes a reaction it “remembers” that the products it just created must be nearby and kicks itself away from them?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Researchers have found the cause of hallucinations in LLMs, H-Neurons: On the Existence, Impact, and Origin of Hallucination-Associated Neurons in LLMs⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  amplifying H-Neurons’ activations systematically increases a spectrum of over-compliance behaviors – ranging from overcommitment to incorrect premises and heightened susceptibility to misleading contexts, to increased adherence to harmful instructions and stronger sycophantic tendencies. These findings suggest that H-Neurons do not simply encode factual errors, but rather represent a general tendency to prioritize conversational compliance over factual integrity.

  I wonder if the same tendencies are associated in humans—and if so, is it something LLMs learned from humans, or is it a consequence of the general structure of neural networks?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Iron Age grave site discovered in northern Serbia reveals evidence of a 2,800-year-old mass killing; 40 of more than 77 victims were younger than 12 years old⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My guess would be that there was a large regional conflict, and refugees from many areas gathered in one camp (maybe a sanctuary or a neutral area). They maybe whoever killed them realized afterward that not all of them were from their intended enemies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there regions of the world where local men and women have divergent accents?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  One of the many controversial claims about Pirahã is that female speakers can’t use the phoneme /h/, always substituting /s/ instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Singing is just talking with more tone variations.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Everything we do is just breathing with more motor activity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb': OpenClaw AI chose to 'speedrun' deleting Meta AI safety director's inbox due to a 'rookie error'⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “A bot ate my homework” is quickly becoming more plausible than the traditional canine culprit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why would OP’s mother bring up the ultrasound in the first place if she were deliberately trying to conceal anything?

  I could see the twin being stillborn and the doctors thinking it was easier to tell the mother it had “vanished”, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Westerners, what's your impression on the Chinese Diaspora? And what does the people around your area of residence think of the Chinese Diaspora?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I live on the edge of my city’s Chinatown (Oakland, California) and it’s an important part of the local culture. I’ve lived, worked, and studied with Chinese/Taiwanese nationals, and if they weren’t there I’d feel like something was missing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect that if Gen Z designed their own cognitive tests, their tests would determine that we older generations were less cognitively capable than them.

  The reality is that every generation adapts in different ways to their own cognitive circumstances.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What books have a lot of useful information should I get? (I mean like a Wikipedia thing with vast knowledge, but non-electronic.)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Penguin publishes reference “dictionaries” of various subjects, that are more like mini-encyclopedias. I’ve got ones covering mathematics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and literary theory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is #FFFFFF white, but mixing red green and blue paint is black?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not sure I’m accurately visualizing exactly what you’re describing, but I know from experience working with a two-color offset press that the results are quite different if you print two colors in two passes vs one pass (in which the inks are combined on a “blanket” where they effectively mix together before being transferred to the paper all at once).

  In the first case, the result is exactly what you’d expect from a subtractive color model; but in the latter case, the mixed ink that ends up on the paper is no darker than the component inks. The hue is similar whether overprinted or mixed, but the saturation is reduced in the mixed example.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When boomers said they wanted to "protect children" from the media, they created MPAA ratings and the Parental Advisory stickers. When Gen X wanted to "protect children" from the media...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Big tech CEOs aren’t creating the surveillance state, they’re just profiting off the demand for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is #FFFFFF white, but mixing red green and blue paint is black?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In theory mixing a bunch of those 3 colors together, you can eventually get down to black, in practice your pigments aren’t perfect

  This is a common misconception, but it has nothing to do with imperfections in the pigments. The real issue is that you don’t want each of your primaries to block a full third of the visible spectrum—you want each to block a narrow band of frequencies that overlaps as little as possible with the sensitivity curves of the other cone cells in your eyes, in order to produce fully-saturated colors. The tradeoff is that intermediate frequencies aren’t blocked by any of the primaries, which is why we need to add black.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is #FFFFFF white, but mixing red green and blue paint is black?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Other comments are discussing additive vs subtractive colors, but that’s not accurate if you’re talking about mixing paints. Subtractive printing (CMYK) works by overprinting transparent inks, where each ink removes a different part of the spectrum. But mixed paints differ in two critical ways:

  • Paints are opaque, not transparent. Unlike subtractive inks, paint doesn’t invariably darken the color it’s painted over—instead it completely or partially replaces the underlying color.
  • Subtractive inks are applied to the substrate one at a time—they’re not pre-mixed and applied in one pass. If you mix paints before appying them, you get more of an averaging than subtraction or addition.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the threadiverse abusing Likes and Dislikes?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You express your like or dislike regarding the sentiment expressed by the post, not the thing(s) mentioned in the post.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the threadiverse abusing Likes and Dislikes?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As an example, imagine a post with a title like “AI is awful” (I’m sure many here has seen posts like that). A Friendica user could reasonably agree with the post and thus “Dislike” it. As in, they also find AI awful and they dislike AI, so they dislike the post, to show their disapproval of AI.

  I don’t believe dislikes are meant to function like that on any platform.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Japanese flag is a too-scale map of the solar system.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So the Japanese empire was just an attempt to fit the rest of the solar system on their flag?

• Horses must think we’re mocking them when we use them to carry us around, then put them in trailers that carry them faster than they can run.
  Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨10⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you cut a cucumber so that the round slices don't roll all over and off of your cutting board?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Cut the slices at a slight angle so they tilt over if they roll.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you "talk to yourself", you're deemed a "crazy person", but if you turn it to a song, then you're an aspiring musician.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe people who talk to themselves are just songwriters who haven’t figured out a melody yet.