Hamartiogonic

Hamartiogonic , 10 hours ago

Having seen enough exceptions in biology, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone found a multicellular bacterial species that violates everything we know about bacteria. Biology is completely wild, and it’s really hard to come up with a rule or a category that always works and nobody has any problems with it.

Hamartiogonic , 1 day ago

And that’s why you need to figure out what’s the right balance of work and inconvenience vs. the amount of privacy you get in return. Setting up a degoogled android is possible and relatively easy too. Living with that phone and interacting with the real world around you in 2024 is a completely different matter, and it’s entirely understandable if that isn’t your cup of tea.

Hamartiogonic , 2 days ago

That’s a good point. “Determining the cause of death” implies that the person is dead. It’s like braiding the hair of a bald guy.

Hamartiogonic , 3 days ago

At school, I thought our understanding of chemistry was really good. Years later, I realized that complicated solutions aren’t covered by any of the equations we have. You’re can do fancy calculations, but you’re always stuck with simple solutions and standard conditions. In real life, you have to deal with super messy non-standard stuff all the time.

Top scientists end up developing semi-empirical models, or even particle simulations, and that’s the best we can do right now. Nobody fully trusts those predictions, so we’re still going to need lab experiments before making any big decisions.

The good news is that there’s still so much to discover.

Hamartiogonic , 3 days ago

A huge part of global CO2 emissions come from various industries, so they certainly have a lot to improve. We should definitely start with that instead of blaming regular consumers of everything.

Switching to completely renewable energy sources requires grid energy storage, which we don’t really have at the moment. While we’re building renewable energy plants and the facilities to balance out the mismatching nature of energy production and demand, we’re still going to need some sort of energy during the transition period, and that’s when nuclear energy comes in handy. The way I see it, it’s not a long term solution for everything, but a temporary tool for managing the transition period, which is apparently going to take decades.

The private sector does what’s economically attractive and viable, but policies dictate what makes economic sense and what doesn’t. Therefore, I think we should all vote for the local politicians who support renewable energy and grid energy storage.

Building large reactors isn’t economically attractive, so maybe SMRs could help with that. Time will tell. Or maybe we need to make it more expensive to build and run fossil fuel plants, and politics would be the right tool for that.

Hamartiogonic , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

First, you need to find a place where soup restaurants have some special privileges compared to normal businesses. Then, just start a soup restaurant there and serve cereal and milk instead.

If you can’t find such a place, then maybe you can ask your local politicians to pass a bill like that. Would be nice if soup restaurants had to pay only half the amount of taxes compared to everyone else. Would be good for the owners, and fun for everyone else to see where the resulting legal battles go. Suddenly, you would find lots of companies selling just about anything and everything as soup and claiming they don’t have to pay the usual taxes.

Hamartiogonic , 4 days ago

This is the way. If OP doesn’t like olives, that just leaves more for the rest of us. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Hamartiogonic , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

All of this also touches upon an interesting topic. What it really means to understand something? Just because you know stuff and may even be able to apply it in flexible ways, does that count as understanding? I’m not a philosopher, so I don’t even know how to approach something like this.

Anyway, I think the main difference is the lack of personal experience about the real world. With LLMs, it’s all second hand knowledge. A human could memorize facts like how water circulates between rivers, lakes and clouds, and all of that information would be linked to personal experiences, which would shape the answer in many ways. An LLM doesn’t have such experiences.

Another thing would be reflecting on your experiences and knowledge. LLMs do none of that. They just speak whatever “pops in their mind”, whereas humans usually think before speaking… Well at least we are capable of doing that even though we may not always take advantage of this super power. Although, the output of an LLM can be monitored and abruptly deleted as soon as it crosses some line. It’s sort of like mimicking the thought processes you have inside your head before opening your mouth.

Example: Explain what it feels like to have an MRI taken of your head. If you haven’t actually experienced that yourself, you’ll have to rely on second hand information. In that case, the explanation will probably be a bit flimsy. Imagine you also read all the books, blog posts and and reddit comments about it, and you’re able to reconstruct a fancy explanation regardless.

This lack of experience may hurt the explanation a bit, but an LLM doesn’t have any experiences of anything in the real world. It has only second hand descriptions of all those experiences, and that will severely hurt all explanations and reasoning.

Hamartiogonic , 5 days ago

Really? I should totally give it a go some time. Sounds like the ideal life hack for me.

Hamartiogonic , 5 days ago

Had they done it with Xitter, the result would have been a total racist.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist

Hamartiogonic , 5 days ago

That’s just the media doing its thing. Information content is a byproduct of making money. Actually, educating the public isn’t strictly necessary, because you can also manipulate emotions to attract attention and clicks.

Hamartiogonic , 5 days ago

If you’re in a city, bikes and public transportation are the answer. Rural areas are stuck with cars though. America seems to be a bit of an exception to this rule, because lots of things would need to change before any of this could potentially happen.

Hamartiogonic , 4 days ago

Our perception of it is also highly distorted due to the bubble we live in. Chinese are living in a different kind of bubble where everyone can more or less understand each other, as long as they stick to the written form. The languages may be different, but they are written using the same system, which makes communication possible. Also, the Great Firewall of China keeps Chinese people inside that bubble and foreigners outside it.

Hamartiogonic , 10 days ago (edited 10 days ago)

Remember those mobile games where you can watch ads to get some gold and diamonds or simply pay for them with real money? Well, I can imagine a dystopian future where that logic has been applied to everything.

Wanna press an elevator button? Pay with shopping center diamonds or watch this quick ad.

Wanna try on this shirt before buying it? Ads. Is this made of cotton? Ads.

Take the escalator to the next floor? Ads.

Wanna check the info screen to figure out where you can find a restaurant in this shopping center? Ads.

Wanna unlock different parts of the menu? Ads. Wanna see the prices too? Ads. Allergens? Ads again.

Need to go to the toilet? Ads. Want some toilet paper? More ads.

If you encounter this literally every 30 seconds, spending some money on those shopping center diamonds suddenly becomes a very appealing idea.

On the outside of the mall you see a punk looking guy with a Molotov cocktail in his hand. You feel a sudden urge to join in whatever he is up to.

Anyway, if you want some more suffering and sadness, simply dump the first lines to GPT and ask it to take this dystopia to its logical conclusion. It could get pretty wild.

Hamartiogonic , 4 days ago

I think it is also related to the economy as a whole. While the pandemic was dragging on and on, inflation got much higher and central banks responded by increasing the interest rates. As a result, investors no longer had access to infinite free money.

Turns out, there are lots of companies that relied on constant funding instead of actual revenue. Those companies are undergoing some major changes at the moment.

Hamartiogonic , 13 days ago

So, the key is to run your business for loss. Wait, that’s called a charity, not a business. How is this thing supposed to work?

Hamartiogonic , 13 days ago

That’s true. If something doesn’t directly make money, it can still exist because of taxes or another arrangement like that.

Hamartiogonic , 15 days ago

Once you realize that you don’t sort or ever even revisit them, you can start using the browsing history to serve the same purpose.

Hamartiogonic , 14 days ago

That’s an interesting way to use that feature. Must be because we use the same app in very different ways.

For me, the tabs contain only the things that I need today. Having a tab older than 3 days is very rare. Bookmarks contain only a few links, but I actually visit them frequently, so they sit in the bookmark bar. History contains everything else, and I don’t visit that place very often. When I need to dig through the history, I just sort it by last visited and use a search word to filter out the irrelevant stuff.

It wasn’t always like this, but here’s what works for me these days. In the past I had a list of curated bookmarks, but eventually I realized I don’t really need them for anything.

Hamartiogonic , 15 days ago

In the early days of laser development, it was seen as a solution seeking a problem. A few decades later, it actually turned out to be really handy, but it would have been tough to sell this idea to anyone before that. Imagine how hard it is to find funding for research that solves a problem that doesn’t exist.

Hamartiogonic , 18 days ago

It should be called the WISHFUL list. It stands for “Wildly Improbable Scenarios Happening Unbelievably Far in the Unseen Later”.

Hamartiogonic , 17 days ago

This is the way.

Hamartiogonic , 15 days ago

LOL. Far in the unseen later, it is then.

Hamartiogonic , 8 days ago

Congrats!

Hamartiogonic , 18 days ago

Selection bias. There’s plenty of overlap between the groups of people who know about it, care about it, use FOSS, use Lemmy etc. It’s basically a prominent characteristic of the stereotypical Lemmy user. We’re still a small and surprisingly homogenous group of people. If Lemmy ever grows like Mastodon, you’ll begin to see more diversity.

There’s also something you could call the “fish out of water” bias. If you’re not LGBT, you’ll suddenly notice how many LGBT people there are on Mastodon. If you’re not into ML, you’re going to notice the people who are.

Hamartiogonic , 20 days ago

Oh, and no youtuber would ever say anything like “pause the video here if you need more time to read the details” and nobody ever adds any single frame easter eggs in their videos either.

Hamartiogonic , 24 days ago

Can not read at all.
Total mystery to me.
Will I ever know?

Hamartiogonic , 25 days ago

So, you mean music composed before 1800? Bach and Mozart should be fine, whereas Beethoven is way too modern.

Hamartiogonic , 27 days ago

Usually those documents leave many legal back doors open, just in case. It doesn’t automatically mean that they are currently backstabbing you, but they want to have that option available to them. If you see lots of open doors like that, they are there for a reason. An honest company doesn’t need any, whereas a shady company wants all of them.

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago

I’ve noticed that the search results are getting less and less relevant to what I’m actually looking for. I guess one day the search bar will disappear like the headphone jack of the iPhone.

Hamartiogonic , 29 days ago

Oh that thing where in between the ads you can watch low quality reality shows for a few minutes? Yeah, those were the days…

Hamartiogonic , 29 days ago

Rookie numbers! Needs more apostrophes.

Hamartiogonic , 28 days ago

LOL, brilliant adaptation!

Hamartiogonic , 28 days ago

And then there are the recaps you get every now and then. People making these shows know that most viewers aren’t even really actively watching. It’s just background noise you put on while cooking or doing household chores. When you go to a movie, there are no recap, because the director expects to have your undivided attention at all times.

Hamartiogonic , 24 days ago

Sounds to me that Meta defines privacy in a very particular way. You’re still going to give all of your data to Meta, but anything outside this transaction is in the realm of privacy where you can have rights and settings.

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago

Generally speaking true. However some companies manage to get the hype train going which leads to people buying bad products. As a result, a company can still survive by selling bad headphones or bad water bottles. Bad reviews can balance things a bit, but if their marketing budget is as big as the defense budget of a small country, there’s not much a bad review can do.

Obviously, this doesn’t really apply to small startups with only pennies to spend. Their marketing consists of sending samples to reviewers, and if that gamble backfires, for any reason, things aren’t going to look very good for the company. Maybe the product was bad, and they had it coming. Maybe the product was ok, but the review sample was broken. Who knows.

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago

Add lootboxes and timers.

If you don’t pay to post, there’s a 50% chance of your post getting deleted after anyone sees it. Pay some money to get more favorable odds. Oh, but you don’t but that stuff with money. You gotta use xitter turds first that, and some times you can get those from xitter boxes. In order to buy the lootboxes, you have to spend real money.

If you haven’t bought any lootboxes in a month, xitter will take control of your account and start automatically posting flat earth nazi crypto trash.

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

And when Xitter starts posting NFT trash in your name, you can restrict the spread of those posts by spending some Xitter Turds, which you can get from the lootboxes.

Oh and the cooldown timers! After every post, you have to wait 24 hours, but you can cut that wait in half by spending some Xitter Turds again. Let me tell you, it’s going to be unlike any service before it. EA and Ubisoft have so much to learn here.

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago

Same thing with fusion reactors.

All the current machines out there are for research purposes only. Nobody can currently power an arc furnace of a steel mill using only fusion power. Sure, there’s been some progress with fusion and quantum computing, but it takes a while to get to an actual practical application of the technology.

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago

So, do you think that quantum computing has a much longer way to go?

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago

Better start preparing for the coming exodus. Try Odysee, Peertube and Nebula and see what works for you. Once the enshittification hits critical mass, you’ll be ready to let go of that sinking ship.

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago

Yeah, there’s garbage too, but I don’t subscribe to any of that. Just watch Linux and electronics tinkering videos instead.

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago

Maybe the only thing FF users will notice is the chrome exodus. That counts as being affected, right?

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago

The thing about tab grouping is a valid point. I’ve been living in my FF bubble for such a long time that I didn’t even know about tab groups.

I was able to test that feature on my work computer, and the groups are indeed really nice. Normally, I don’t really run into the problem that this feature solves, because I have several FF windows spread across several virtual desktops. This way, all the different topics can be kept well organized while still keeping the tab bar relatively neat and tidy. However, if you want to keep everything in a single window, groups would help with that. I really hope FF devs make that happen soon.

Hamartiogonic , 1 month ago

Now I’m really curious. How do you read those comments?

Hamartiogonic , 21 days ago

Americans call it cowboy coffee, but for a long time before coffee machines were a thing, pretty much everyone outside Turkey and Italy woud simply call it coffee. That has been the normal way of making coffee for ages.

Hamartiogonic , 24 days ago

I recall watching a defcon speech given by someone who used to make malware. He opened the speech by apologizing and saying that he knows that he will burn in hell.

Hamartiogonic , 24 days ago

What about the table of nuclides? IMO that’s the best way to list elements in a logically consistent manner. The trouble is, nature is a messy kraken that just won’t fit neatly into a shoe box. You can try to squeeze it in, but the lid won’t close because there are always a few tentacles sticking out.