Spzi
@Spzi@lemm.ee
- Comment on Does anyone feel like an actual adult? 2 weeks ago:
I feel like I’m pretending to know what I’m doing.
I guess that explains the observation. As kids, we’re fooled by the pretenders. So we grow up with this expectation.
- Comment on Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not 3 weeks ago:
A decision can be based on either determinism or randomness. Neither is what people consider free will.
If there was a third option, what would that be? Explain how a decision can be neither determined nor random nor a mixture of both.
- Comment on There are 40 quintillion black holes in our Universe 4 weeks ago:
For large estimates, it would be suspicious if it wasn’t round.
The number is 40,000,000,000,000,000,000. That can mean two different things.
- It’s exactly that many. Not ,001, not ,999. That is your “assumption”.
- Not all of those digits are significant digits.
To illustrate with an example of that article:
if a length measurement yields 114.8 mm, using a ruler with the smallest interval between marks at 1 mm, the first three digits (1, 1, and 4, representing 114 mm) are certain and constitute significant figures.
Let’s assume they measured these 40 quintillion with a “ruler” which has a resolution of 1 quintillion. In that case, they could just as well say the number is 40.1539577 quintillion, or dream up any other combination of digits after the leading ‘40’ (like, for example “000,000,000…”). Because they don’t know.
But if they noted a non-zero string of digits, readers would wrongly assume their ruler has sufficient precision to measure these smaller digits.
So this notation conveys two insights:
- We know the first digit(s): It’s 4. (and maybe 40, 400, …)
- We don’t know the smaller digits, but we do know the magnitude.
So a non-round number would be suspicious, because it pretends to have precision which it most certainly cannot have.
- Comment on A sobering thought! 4 weeks ago:
The trick is to find a partner while you’re still alive. Screw those single persons!
- Comment on xkcd #2846: Daylight Saving Choice 4 weeks ago:
That causes problems with culture/language/communication.
Like the saying “from 9 to 5” could not be applied to other timezones anymore. Or when reading direct speech in a book, “Let’s meet at 15:00”, you wouldn’t be able to tell anymore what time of the day that means.
Since both approaches have pros and cons, I think we would need overwhelmingly good arguments to justify a change.
- Comment on xkcd #2846: Daylight Saving Choice 4 weeks ago:
Let’s jump straight to decimal time then.
1^h^23^m^45^s^ is 1 decimal hour, 23 decimal minutes, and 45 decimal seconds, or 1.2345 decimal hours, or 123.45 decimal minutes or 12345 decimal seconds; 3 hours is 300 minutes or 30,000 seconds. This property also makes it straightforward to represent a timestamp as a fractional day, so that 2023-10-26.54321 can be interpreted as five decimal hours and 43 decimal minutes and 21 decimal seconds after the start of that day, or a fraction of 0.54321 (54.321%) through that day (which is shortly after traditional 13:00)
- Comment on Former chemical engineer in the coal industry, urging B.C. municipalities to change the term natural gas to "fossil gas" 5 weeks ago:
If you are not in charge, replace the “You” with whoever is in charge. When you said “I won’t give it up” it seemed you had some control.
- Comment on Former chemical engineer in the coal industry, urging B.C. municipalities to change the term natural gas to "fossil gas" 5 weeks ago:
If that wording makes a difference, these people should not be in charge of what energy enters their home, or not be in charge period.
Also TIL, the attempt to rename it is not new: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas#Name
- Comment on Former chemical engineer in the coal industry, urging B.C. municipalities to change the term natural gas to "fossil gas" 5 weeks ago:
You can install your own panels and turbines and storage, or do it together with some neighbors or the city.
Independence is possible with renewables, but not so with fossil fuels.
- Comment on xkcd #2844: Black Holes vs Regular Holes 5 weeks ago:
Falling in is only “definitely fatal” if it’s too big. For all we know, black holes can be tiny and light. We can debate if you can still “fall in” one of those. Maybe the process is more like passing by, or some mote of dust sticking to your clothes.
- Comment on The Observable Universe Might Be A Black Hole, Suggests A Chart Of Everything 5 weeks ago:
Black holes still have finite mass, and can be lighter than Earth.
- Comment on Some instances have gone down recently, did we miss any? 5 weeks ago:
Read these as exceptions. Most instances are fine, which is why they are not talked about. Recently there was a post discussing uptimes. Many had more than 99.3%.
- Comment on **Simplest solution for fragmented communities:** Redirect comments to one post (by asking or with new functionality) 5 weeks ago:
- User makes a post in community A
- User makes crossposts in communities B, C, and D
- Posts in communities B, C, and D are locked, with a link to the post in community A
- If someone wants to make a comment about the content, they can do so in the main post in community A
Doesn’t work because of defederation.
Assume users from instance X can see B, C and D, but not A.
Now all they get is three teaser posts, referring to community A, which is invisible and inaccessible for them.
Because of defederation, each community must be able to work as a standalone.
- Comment on Lemmy active users down, comments steady and posts up 5 weeks ago:
That, and people trying out Lemmy, but not continuing to use it at some point for some reason.
Like I peeked into two or three other platforms before sticking with Lemmy. I don’t even know their names anymore.
- Comment on What happened to lemmy.ninja? 5 weeks ago:
Let’s hope it is just hiding …
- Comment on Individuals with major depressive disorder tend to use ineffective emotion regulation strategies. This is not due to a lack of knowledge. 1 month ago:
Who’s that judge, and why do we pay attention to them?
Aside from deserving, let’s talk about possibilities! What are the options?
- Comment on xkcd #2841: Sign Combo 1 month ago:
signs may only apply to the road after them, so you could validly stop just before it.
My thoughts exactly; problem solved. Just do what the first sign says before the others apply.
- Comment on My list of services I still miss in the fediverse 1 month ago:
I’ll try in a less hostile manner, if I may.
You’re right that Lemmy is decentralized if we view it from far away. Individual instances may disappear, the network itself still remains.
The other person’s perspective was more zoomed in. If we look at individual instances, they can very much disappear, and users of that instance will have lost functionality. That includes both people with accounts on that instance, and users of communities hosted there.
For big instances, we can imagine they are both. So even if one of their instance servers goes down, no functionality or data is lost, as they continuously internally mirror their data.
However, most instances are monoliths.
- Comment on My list of services I still miss in the fediverse 1 month ago:
Big instances could be decentralized services as you describe. So one of their servers could go down without any functionality being lost.
So while federation does not imply decentralization, it also does not exclude it. In theory. In practice it excludes it a bit, since the fractured nature means more instances remain under the threshold above which it makes sense to have a decentralized instance over a monolith.
- Comment on My list of services I still miss in the fediverse 1 month ago:
Not sure how a (de)federated Wiki would look like.
Partially defederated comment sections of Lemmy posts can be pretty confusing. Users coming from different instances can see entirely different comment / reply structures.
I’m not sure if that would be a problem with a Wiki, but it’s certainly something to think through before starting.
Another point: Why? Who gains what if a Wiki is federated? What problem does that solve?
- Comment on xkcd : Timeline of Temperature Changes on Earth 1 month ago:
There are ways to capture carbon in seawater, kelp is the fastest growing I know of.
Okay, that type of geo engineering is a good counter argument against my previous comment. It comes with other issues and does not solve all issues, but still, good point.
- Comment on xkcd : Timeline of Temperature Changes on Earth 1 month ago:
What conclusion would change if the graph started at an earlier, warmer period?
As far as I know, three crucial things would still hold true:
- Earth has not been as warm as today since humans existed, in the past 200’000 years. We don’t know if we can thrive in these conditions. Chances are, we can’t. We’re optimized for another climate. We have no precedent wether future Earth is habitable for us.
- Earth has never warmed this rapidly, never. Speed matters a lot, as lack of time makes the difference between adaption and extinction.
- Whatever the cause, and however normal it may be, the current development, and rate thereof, causes substantial issues on many fronts.
- Comment on xkcd : Timeline of Temperature Changes on Earth 1 month ago:
Reduce emissions. That’s cheaper, more effective and safer than any other method.
Geo engineering commonly only tries to fix temperature. While that would be a big achievement, it does not change the CO~2~ ppm. And that translates to ocean acidification. Which translates to mass extinctions. Which is still an existential threat also for land living species, and us.
There is only one solution to fix both (and many other, related / caused problems): Fix the source.
We cannot engineer our way out of all the individual symptoms. Just leave fossil fuels in the ground.
- Comment on xkcd : Timeline of Temperature Changes on Earth 1 month ago:
I can already hear the anti-man-made-climate-change crowd shrieking…
Generally a good source for this use case. You can sort by popular arguments or arguments by type, and for many answers choose from different detail levels, sometimes even languages.
I didn’t find your specific question in their catalogue of answers, but they have a blog post about that topic: skepticalscience.com/two-centuries-climate-scienc…
- Comment on Results of the "Can you tell which images are AI generated?" survey 1 month ago:
Right, thanks for the corrections.
In case of GAN, it’s stupidly simple why AI detection does not take off. It can only be half a cycle ahead (or behind), at any time.
Better AI detectors train better AI generators. So while technically for a brief moment in time the advantage exists, the gap is immediately closed again by the other side; they train in tandem.
This does not tell us anything about non-GAN though, I think. And most AI is not GAN, right?
- Comment on How many? 1 month ago:
Who else counted the fingers before reading the text? I save you the hassle, it’s 5.
- Comment on Results of the "Can you tell which images are AI generated?" survey 1 month ago:
As with other AI-enhanced jobs, that probably still means less jobs in the long run.
Now one artist can make more art in the same time, or produce different styles which previously had required different artists.
- Comment on Results of the "Can you tell which images are AI generated?" survey 1 month ago:
And this is why AI detector software is probably impossible.
What exactly is “this”?
Just about everything we make computers do is something we’re also capable of; slower, yes, and probably less accurately or with some other downside, but we can do it. We at least know how.
There are things computers can do better than humans, like memorizing, or precision (also both combined). For all the rest, while I agree in theory we could be on par, in practice it matters a lot that things happen in reality. There often is only a finite window to analyze and react and if you’re slower, it’s as good as if you knew nothing. Being good / being able to do something often means doing it in time.
We can’t program software or train neutral networks to do something that we have no idea how to do.
Machine learning does that. We don’t know how all these layers and neurons work, we could not build the network from scratch. We cannot engineer/build/create the correct weights, but we can approach them in training.
Also look at Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The adversarial part is literally to train a network to detect bad AI generated output, and tweak the generative part based on that error to produce better output, rinse and repeat. Note this by definition includes a (specific) AI detector software, it requires it to work.
- Comment on User independant defederation 1 month ago:
It’s refreshing to see someone hate these abominations with the same passion I do, and bring up very similar points. Thanks.
- Comment on What's the dumbest thing you've shipped? 1 month ago:
A design professor actually proposed this idea to us. Make the user feel how the computer is working, so they can appreciate the result more.