Contramuffin

@Contramuffin@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When people say the AI bubble will burst, what exactly does that mean?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A bubble means that investors are putting in more money into a particular field than the field is really worth. How does that happen? Well, investors make money by investing money into small companies and hoping that they get bigger over time. And they need to make guesses in which company they think will actually get big. While investors generally try to make these guesses logically, there’s inherently a bit of “trust me bro” involved in making these decisions.

  A bubble happens when investors increasingly rely on “trust me bro” to make their investment decisions. And so they put in more and more money into a field that might not really need or deserve that much money. Not to say that the field is intrinsically useless - just that the hype has overtaken the actual usefulness of that field. So when you see something that’s being hyped up, you should generally view it with caution.

  AI as a field is currently very hyped up right now, and so there’s concern that AI might be a bubble.

  How does a bubble pop? Randomly and without warning. The problem with bubbles is that they’re driven primarily by hype and “trust me bro,” and so if anything blows the hype, it will cause all the investors to snap back to reality and pull all their money. That’s a lot of money being pulled from a single field at the same time, and that’ll absolutely crash the field. A company going under might trigger a pop, or it could be a random news article that went viral saying that AI is a fraud, or it could be a lackluster product launch. Hype is inherently unstable, and so it can be difficult to predict when and why a bubble pops.

  The implosion that happens during a pop isn’t referring to any particular company, it’s referring to the entire field as a whole. It could very well happen (though unlikely) that not a single company goes bankrupt during a pop. It’s merely that those companies would lose a lot of the investor funding that they have previously been relying on

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨anyway, i started blastin'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  So will bacteriophages and viruses be snapped as well? Does it mean that scientists can utilize the Thanos snap to determine for good whether viruses are alive?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lab toys⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Just yesterday I had a CO2 valve close on me during an experiment while I was away for a moment. It takes effort to turn the valve so it couldn’t have just shaken closed or something. The valve was in the corner of the room and was blocked off by boxes, so nobody could have accidentally bumped it. And, besides, nobody was in the room anyways. Before the experiment I made damn sure that the CO2 valve was open, and even looking through the computer records (which records the CO2) says that the CO2 valve was open until I walked away.

  I still have no idea how the valve could have closed on its own. Now, I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation. I’ve clearly angered the science gods and I would do well to sacrifice some more cells to the science gods to appease them

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How long do you think we'll keep seeing "formerly Twitter"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Without another name change, I don’t think that phrase will ever go away, for the simple fact that X as a name is too short and nondescript. In speech, X could refer to a someone you broke up with, or it could just be the beginning of another word, serving as a prefix. In text, it could refer to the actual letter itself, or the close button on a window, or a placeholder, or something NSFW.

  There’s simply too many ways that X can be interpreted that even if people associate Twitter with X, people will still specify “formerly Twitter” just to avoid confusion

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Magic Words⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Science is like going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. There’s always more things to do and more things to check out. At some point you just have to draw the line and say that enough is enough. Other scientists are likely to ask why you stopped where you stopped, and so saying that “it’s outside the scope of the paper” is basically the nice way of saying that you stopped because you felt like it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do PhDs HAVE to use Dr?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most PhD’s in university actually prefer to be called by their first name. As a graduate student, one of the most jarring culture shocks is to learn to call professors by their first names. At least that’s the case in the US, not sure about elsewhere

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I or should I not use/bother with using Linux? (READ THE WHOLE POST)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a multifaceted answer for me, I feel.

  Linux is weird, on a technical level. It’s funky and broken and has weird quirks you have to remember. But it’s not malicious. Wendel from Level1Tech said it best in one of his videos: the headaches with Linux are haphazard, the headaches with Windows are adversarial.

  It’s not a perfect solution to Windows, but at least for some people, the respect that it has for its users (ie, no ads, not trying to fight you on everything you’re trying to do, gives you the ability and freedom to tinker as you please) offsets its technical problems.

  Additionally, Linux is missing a lot of core applications. There’s many applications that do have a Linux version, and many that can run through a compatibility layer, and out of those that are left, many have really solid replacements. Heck, you might be surprised to find that some of the software that you use already were originally intended to be replacements for Windows-only applications.

  But there’s still a handful of core applications that don’t work on Linux and don’t really have a good replacement, and even missing 1 can easily break someone’s work flow. No, LibreOffice isn’t a full replacement of Microsoft Office, no, GIMP can’t actually replace Photoshop.

  As for terminal, there’s no way around it. You will have to open terminal at some point. To be clear, most, if not all, things that you might imagine yourself doing likely has some way of doing it through a GUI. The issue is that as a new user, you don’t know where the GUI is, or what it’s called, or how to even ask. And when the tutorials that you find online tell you to just use terminal, that ends up being the only practical way of getting things done. So it’s a weird Catch-22, where only experienced users who know where all the menus are will know where the GUI options are, but it’s the new users who need it the most.

  My understanding is that Linux developers in the past several years have been explicitly trying to make the OS more accessible to a new user, but it’s not quite there yet.

  Overall, I think Linux is deeply flawed. But seeing how Microsoft seems to be actively trying to make Windows worse, Linux ends up being the only OS where have faith that it will still be usable in 2 years.

  If anything, the more people switch to Linux, the more pressure there will be to make the OS more accessible to new users, and also for software companies to release a Linux-compatible version of their software. Some brave people just need to take the dive first

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We're all on the spectrum⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I get very suspicious if a paper samples multiple groups and still uses p. You would use q in that case, and the fact that they didn’t suggests that nothing came up positive.

  Still, in my opinion it’s generally OK if they only use the screen as a starting point and do follow-up experiments afterwards

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do our brains process reality? I heard our eyes were just low-res cameras and our brains were doing all the heavy lifting in 'rendering' reality.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think having higher frame rates isn’t necessarily about whether our eyes can perceive the frame or not. As another commenter pointed out there’s latency benefits, but also, the frame rate affects how things smear and ghost as you move them around quickly. I don’t just mean in gaming. Actually, it’s more obvious when you’re just reading an article or writing something in Word. If you scroll quickly, the words blur and jitter more at low frame rates, and this is absolutely something you can notice

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Data is a plural⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “is” is correct here, due to the implied nouns. “Data” in this case is an appositive and serves to describe the implied noun, “word.” And “plural” is an implied noun for “plural word”

  You can see it most clearly if you fill in the implied nouns:

  (the word) data is a plural (word)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oxygen⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s very simple - the sun isn’t burning. The sun is actually a very large healing crystal. As you may know, healing crystals capture the harmonic vibrations of the universe and turn them into things that are good for our health, like warmth, vitamins, essential oils, and positive ions.

  The sun is made out of a healing crystal that converts the vibrations into warmth, witch is what we see as sunlight. The sun is so big that it’s able to capture a lot of harmonic vibrations and so it makes a lot of warmth.

  The real question is who polished the healing crystal that forms the sun, and who put it up into space. The natural answer is that it’s clearly done by my good friend Moonlight Namaste, and she will teach you how to do the same thing if you visit her blog and sign up for her meditation classes. With enough guided meditation, you too will start to see the universal vibrations and learn how to change your oscillations to match the universal vibrations. The first 200 people who sign up will get a free dream catcher, so sign up today!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mental hell⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Definitely not the same, at least in my experience. It differs by field, but in my field, grad programs basically have zero classes, and whatever classes there are are generally automatic A’s. In turn, the difficulty comes from the fact that you are basically in indentured servitude to your advisor, and there is no actual recourse for trivial things like “overwork” and “burnout.”

  I know of people who did 70 hour work weeks, and for a period of time, I had to do that as well. Also, you get paid less than you would if you had just gotten a 40 hour per week job at a company.

  Anyways, the advisor that you pick really makes or breaks your experience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Academic writing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s something that people, in least in my field of microbiology, have been recently aware of and are trying to correct. The problem is not just an in-group signifier, since everyone, even experts, finds the author insufferable and difficult to understand

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mornings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is it alright to go around wiping the OS off of other people’s computers?

  • is what your comment reads like to me.

  To be clear: each machine generally needs a computer to be permanently plugged into it. Generally the computer belongs to the university. You’re not plugging in your own personal laptop into the machine. Saying to install Linux on these computers is essentially tampering with the university’s electronics and IT will be very unhappy that you did that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Krillin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on the cultivar. Rice does have different flavors, and some are definitely tastier than others, at least in my opinion. Japanese sticky rice is my favorite, and although I wouldn’t eat it on its own, I can totally see why someone would enjoy it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Launches⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the thing - in space, orbits don’t decay. Orbital decay only happens if there’s dust or atmosphere that you bump into along your orbit to slow you down. But in interplanetary space, there’s no dust or atmosphere, and certainly not enough to decay your orbit fast enough to achieve results (otherwise, the Earth would have already decayed and melted in the Sun)

  You need to spend fuel to lower your orbit to hit the Sun, and you need to spend fuel to raise your orbit to escape the solar system. It turns out to be really freaking difficult to hit the sun because it simply requires so much fuel to lower your orbit enough to hit the Sun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Slapping Chicken⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fun fact: someone actually did it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨brown recluse⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a joke that every spider, no matter what it looks like, will eventually be called a brown recluse (usually by someone who doesn’t know how to recognize a brown recluse)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For the Lizadies out there!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, you’re right. It’s mentioned in the Wikipedia article that lack of genetic diversity is a large concern for obligate parthenogenic animals

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Words truly matter⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The hate jar has visible condensation. The moisture probably is driving the mold growth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PLA warping during print⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I find that it’s best to use 65C for the bed temperature for the first couple of layers, and then drop the temperature to 50C. If you’re using Cura, there should be an option to do that, but you’ll need to dig through the advanced settings to find it. Doing this has completely solved warping for me (Ender 3 Pro v1 with PLA filament). My understanding is that it works because the temperature differential between the top and bottom layers causes a pulling force that causes the warping that you see. You really only need it to be hot on the initial layer, for the print to stick properly. And afterward you only need to maintain a temp that’s just hot enough that the print doesn’t pop off. Hence, 65C initial, 50C for everything else afterward

  Probably less relevant, but I also find that adhesion improves if you have the printer go at half speed for the first couple of layers. Again, there should be a setting in Cura, but it’s in the advanced settings

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I need to survive for 3 days while pooping, and eating as much as possible. It can't take up too much space. What food do I pack?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Haribo sugarless gummy bears have a strong laxative effect. I’d say that’s a pretty strong contender

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨👀👀👀⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “Acceptance pending minor edits”: Heart go extremely fast

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Good game soundtracks?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ori and the Blind Forest. Every song in the soundtrack is brilliant

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cosplay⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Who’s to say that Ai Hoshino isn’t also blind?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Airpods⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There was an assassination attempt on Trump recently. He barely escaped being shot in the head and managed to get away with only a graze that damaged his right ear

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump Airpods⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, the point is that trump wouldn’t use the right airpod, so it will always be at full charge

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Outer wilds: at what point should I give up?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Flying is definitely the first challenge that players tend to meet. Just use autopilot. You can cancel the autopilot mid-flight, and you absolutely should cancel the autopilot if you start to see that a planet is getting in your way. Most people just fly with the autopilot, and that’s really my biggest advice.

  If you really insist on flying manual, don’t treat it like driving a car. Spaceships (both real and in-game) drift most of the time. You want to get up to speed (400 m/s is a good top speed most of the time) and then drift the rest of the way to your destination. Do you see the white dotted arrows coming out from the planet that you’re targeting? You want to get those arrows to be as short as possible. If the arrows are visible, that means you’re not lined up with the planet and you’ll miss the planet

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Outer wilds: at what point should I give up?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s slightly untrue. The physics is in fact accurate. It’s just that the ship engine is so powerful that you can effectively ignore the gravity. If you’ve ever tried to land on the ___ _______, you’ll know that by far the easiest and safest way is to utilize orbital mechanics

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Outer wilds: at what point should I give up?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, people tend to have that problem, especially if they’re treating it like driving a car. If you want to fly manual, never fly more than 400 m/s, because then you won’t have enough time to slow down.

  My actual advice though is to just use autopilot. People seem to forget that you can cancel autopilot. If you start to see that there’s something getting in your way, cancel the autopilot and push the ship to the left or right (it’s easier to go around the planet than to slow down). Once you’re clear, resume autopilot.