AbouBenAdhem

@AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you argue for a cause like affordable housing for everyone, is it necessarily hypocritical if you also own investment properties?⁩ ⁨⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re arguing for a particular public policy, then generally no. If you’re arguing for social change driven by private behavior, then perhaps.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where Roman coins have been found⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It looks like coins have been found on the sea routes that avoided the Parthian/Sassanian empires, but not on the overland routes. I’m guessing merchants exchanged their coins on the Roman/Persian frontier, beyond which the Iranian coinage was the local standard anyway; but in places like southern India (south of the Kushans and Guptas) which was politically fractured, Roman coinage became the de facto currency of exchange.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where Roman coins have been found⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Wish I could see a map like this with the finds colored by mint date.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where Roman coins have been found⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Much of the coinage went as pay to soldiers stationed along the Danube and the Rhine, who then traded with people on both sides of the border.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anyone automate anything with smart thermostats and outdoor temp?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have a thermostat, but I have indoor and outdoor temp and humidity sensors, and a window position sensor. It notifies me (via lighting color) if I should open the window because the outdoor conditions are better than indoors, or vice versa.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If what they taught us about checks and balances was a lie maybe what they taught us about civil disobedience was a lie too.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Civil disobedience can overlap with both direct action and protest. But that’s my point: we were only ever taught about the latter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If what they taught us about checks and balances was a lie maybe what they taught us about civil disobedience was a lie too.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  One misconception I had about civil disobedience from what I’d learned in school is that it’s a reliable means of drawing attention to your cause: your willingness to subject yourself to legal punishment will communicate to the public how critical you consider the issue.

  What I learned from witnessing it first-hand is that the media will invent its own narratives about your actions out of whole cloth, and your ability to communicate anything to the public is subject to arbitrary media distortion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If conditions on earth are perfect for life to form shouldn't have happened more than once?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For over three billion years, all we know of the evolution of life is from the chemical signatures it left behind, and from the genetic information of the surviving descendants. From that we can conclude that all current life arose from a common origin roughly coinciding with the first chemical signatures of living activity, and the most parsimonious explanation is that life arose on earth only once. But it’s also plausible that some of that early chemical activity was produced by forms of life that arose independently, but were displaced by ours before the emergence of multicellular organisms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a word for the happiness in finding the exact right word?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Felicity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I "sabotage" my own online content to throw a wrench in AI training machines?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Ironically, the thing that most effectively poisons AI content is other AI content. (Basically, it amplifies the little idiosyncrasies that are indistinguishable from human content at low levels but become obvious when iterated.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If there's a sort of "apocalyptic" event but there are still surviving communities, will people be able to make eyeglasses again, or are people with vision issues gonna be fucked?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Just saw a YouTube documentary that reminded me of this comment—it describes how Galileo made his lenses by hand from window glass using an artillery ball as a grinder.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are eugenics bad seen?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For one thing, the idea that there are “bad” genes stems from the outdated idea that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between genes and physical traits—but the reality is that most genes govern hundreds or thousands of traits, and most traits depend on similar numbers of genes. So bad traits usually result from the wrong combination of genes that are not bad in themselves—take sickle-cell anemia, which results from the wrong combination of genes that by themselves offer malaria resistance. (Most cases are far more convoluted than that.) If you remove the genes that cause the “bad” traits, you’re also removing the good traits they cause in other contexts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are eugenics bad seen?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Without even looking at the human issues, the underlying idea that you can improve a species by removing its biological diversity in favor of the “best” variant is catastrophically wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Our kids are in a mental health crisis, and it has to do with their phones. Author @jonathanhaidt lays out the facts in his new book #TheAnxiousGeneration⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  All of Haidt’s writings read to me like what I’d expect if you pulled a random person off the street and forced them at gunpoint to imitate an academic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Imagine there was a society in which blue eyed people are referred to with blee/bler pronouns, and green eyed people are referred to with glee/gler pronouns...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There are plenty of examples of languages with two, three, or no grammatical genders (which don’t always correlate with biological genders—e.g., some languages see ”animate” and “inanimate” as genders.)

  If it isn’t arbitrary, why is there so much variation?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In the star wars holiday special, there's a segment where Princess Leia sings. This act retroactively makes her a legitimate Disney princess.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Does diegetic singing count?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If there's a sort of "apocalyptic" event but there are still surviving communities, will people be able to make eyeglasses again, or are people with vision issues gonna be fucked?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can make a rough magnifying lens by trial and error using glass and a hand grinder—not the same as prescription lenses, but for many it would be better than nothing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There is likely a government agency that can identify people by their cat.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t think of a scenario where that would be useful.

  Someone’s walking around in a disguise, but their cat follows them?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thanks I'd rather my beer stay analogue⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  there is no “AI” in “IPA”

  …because they’re still in the process of putting it there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If suffering is good because it gives life meaning, wouldn't it follow that hurting people is good?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The original (and still valid) meaning of “to suffer” is “to tolerate”.

  Is it possible that whoever told you that “suffering is good” had that definition in mind?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨True or false⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A neural network can learn to closely imitate someone making logical inferences, but that’s different from making logical inferences itself. It doesn’t have a sense of whether it’s correct or incorrect—just a sense of how similar it is to its training examples.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK about Changing your Profile Picture to Clippy⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Were these people too young in the early 2000s to recognize Clippy for what it was? It was never benign—ChatGPT is exactly what Microsoft always wanted to make, but Clippy was as close as it could get at the time.

  This is like protesting Trump with pictures of George W. Bush.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI beats Elon Musk's Grok in AI chess tournament⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Up until the semi finals, it seemed like nothing would be able to stop Grok 4 on its way to winning the event,” Pedro Pinhata, a writer for Chess.com, said in its coverage. “Despite a few moments of weakness, X’s AI seemed to be by far the strongest chess player… But the illusion fell through on the last day of the tournament.” He said Grok’s “unrecognizable” and “blundering” play enabled o3 to claim a succession of “convincing wins”.

  I think the main takeaway is that these models are fundamentally inconsistent, and you can never assume they’re going to be reliable based on past performance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone say "What ho!" anymore?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Was it ever a common exclamation, or was it specific to Bertie and Wooster?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘We didn’t vote for ChatGPT’: Swedish Prime Minister under fire for using AI⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The typical pattern for leaders is to get “second opinions” from advisors who end up telling them whatever they want to hear, so… maybe asking the equivalent of a magic 8 ball is a marginal improvement?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists grow a mini human brain that lights up and connects like the real thing⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So they culture different brain tissues and blood vessels separately and then glue them together manually. Are the resulting blood vessels fully functional, such that they could keep the organoid alive indefinitely?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Soup of Theseus⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like homeopathic soup.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Humanity will likely survive climate change, but the vast majority of humans won't.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Take the horseshoecrab, or the tardigrate or even the cockroach.

  None of those are species—they’re a family, a phylum, and a (partial) order, respectively. While those clades have been relatively stable morphologically, species within each clade still come and go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you put a "s" in front of the "sh" in chivalry, they turn into a "k" like in schism⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  English makes perfect sense—it’s all the other languages we keep stealing words from who can’t agree on a common spelling system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Humanity will likely survive climate change, but the vast majority of humans won't.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  No species lasts forever—and the faster their environment changes, the sooner their expiration date.