ascense

@ascense@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Striking Motorcyclists More Than Any Other Brand: New Analysis⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Most frustrating thing is, as far as I can tell, Tesla doesn’t even have binocular vision, which makes all the claims about humans being able to drive with vision only even more blatantly stupid. At least humans have depth perception. And supposedly their goal is to outperform humans?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Samsung’s latest stick vac can alert you to calls and text messages⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Given it’s samsung, I doubt they have the time to have a crisis. Work hours for Korean tech companies can be quite insane, e.g. koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/…/2063906

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best game ever?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Has to be Outer Wilds for me. I can’t think of any other game that would have left such an impact on me, in such a short amount of time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teslas have been consuming a lot of gasoline lately.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Last I ran the numbers, it seemed like on paper charging off an industrial scale generator was around 20-30% more fuel efficient per km than directly running an ICE car, but I based it on the advertised efficiency values of a random average seeming diesel car, compared to rather pessimistic charging loss and efficiency numbers for the EV. The inefficiency of even modern ICE cars is quite astonishing, even compared to the engine in a generator that can constantly run at the optimal RPM and load for efficiency.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uber Eats undercover: Delivering your food for $1.74 an hour⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One issue I’ve heard is if a restaurant chooses not to use the service someone else can set up a page in their name without permission, and the platforms often won’t do anything to prevent it. Then confused delivery drivers start to show up, and customers complain to the restaurant about the markups/high pricing even when the restaurant is not actually involved at all.

  On top of all that, many people just use delivery apps to find local restaurants, so you lose a lot of visibility if you aren’t listed, but for that one you can argue it’s in fact paying for the service you get (i.e. marketing).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We like music because our brains crave pattern recognition.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I strongly believe that our brains are fundamentally just prediction machines. We strive for a specific level of controlled novelty, but for the most part ‘understanding’, i.e. being able to predict, the world around us is the goal. We get boredom to push us beyond getting too comfortable and simply sitting in the already familiar, and one of the biggest pleasures in life is the ‘aha’ moment when understanding finally clicks in place and we feel we can predict something novel.

  I feel this is also why LLMs (ChatGPT etc.) can be so effective working with language, and why they occasionally seem to behave so humanlike – The fundamental mechanism is essentially the same if massively more limited. Animal brains continuously adapt to predict sensory input (and to an extent their own output), while LLMs learn to predict a sequence of text tokens during a restricted training period.

  It also seems to me the strongest example of this kind of prediction in animals is the noticing (and wariness) when something feels ‘off’ about the environment around us. We can easily sense specific kinds of small changes to our surroundings that signify potential danger, even in seemingly unpredictable natural environments. From an evolutionary perspective this also seems like the most immediately beneficial aspect of this kind of prediction. Interstingly, this kind of prediction seems to happen even on the level of individual neurons. As predictive capability improves, it also necessitates an increasingly deep ability to model the world around us, leading to deeper cognition.