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AnarchoEngineer

@ AnarchoEngineer @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
10
Comments
422
Joined
9 mo. ago

  • xkcd #3200: Chemical Formula

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  • I’m not a physicist, but even if Astatine is being produced in minute quantities by decay, a half life of 8hrs should probably put it lower on the numbers than Americium.

    Americium is produced anywhere you have lots of free neutrons. This may be rare on earth outside of nuclear power plants and bomb test sites, but not necessarily rare in the universe. Especially since it has a half life of 432years, so unlike astatine it can actually accumulate a bit and not just decay immediately.

    Astatine basically doesn’t exist. The total amount in the entirety of earth’s crust at any given time is estimated to be less than a gram.

    So I feel like the amounts should be flipped or at the very least closer in orders of magnitude.

  • Friends tell me Fediverse is the Esperanto of social media

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  • The US and countries with ties to it created and owned basically all historical internet infrastructure.

    Kind of hard to even learn about Esperanto if you’re living in an area that lacks internet access. Also Much harder to host or participate in online communities for a niche topic if you don’t have easy internet access.

    Furthermore, the net is still largely written in English, so unless you speak some English it’s going to be difficult to find communities for niche topics you like.

  • Friends tell me Fediverse is the Esperanto of social media

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  • Yeah, except it’s “most prevalent in places with widespread open internet access”

  • If a multi-dimensional political compass existed, how many dimensions would it have? What would be those dimensions?

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  • If we are trying to avoid losing any information due to abstraction, I’d say at least somewhere in the low hundreds.

    All actions are done out of desire and human desires are numerous and often contradictory even in the same person. Many people who think they are utilitarian likely still wouldn’t be okay with the Omelas structure of torturing a single kid even if that act allowed thousands of others to live painless lives.

    Is it more right to avoid violence altogether, or is violence to prevent the slaughter of others better than doing nothing?

    Morality is complicated and since morality dictates much of how we interact with others, it is likely the most significant factor in politics.

    The second most would be personal desires. People with weak or localized empathy don’t tend to care about any politics that doesn’t affect them or their desires directly. Since desires are also diverse, this is multidimensional too.

    Now, that being said, if our goal is to reduce the dimensionality as much as possible… the answer is basically any number you want.

    Data analysis techniques will let you reduce the dimensionality of n-dimensional data to whatever number you want. In fact using similar techniques to word embedding would likely be very effective even if you simply group people by how similar their views seem to be (no need for you to actually define dimensions)

    If we assume that there are around as many important dimensions to politics as there are typical English words, then we can assume the number of dimensions needed for encoding a person’s politics without losing relationships would be about the same as a word embedding vector.

    In typical LLMs this is anywhere from around 50-300 dimensions.

    Honestly, now I’m really fucking curious. If you created a quiz with thousands of political/philosophical questions and then had a large enough number of people take the quiz, you could legitimately do this with an autoencoder and see how many hidden neurons (dimensions) you would need for a precise encoding.

    You might not be able to tell what those dimensions represent, but it would be incredibly fascinating to be able to subtract political ideologies from one another like you can with word embeddings.

    Like with good embeddings you can subtract “France” from “Paris” then add that to “Poland” and it will give you a vector very close to “Warsaw”

    Imagine being able to map out political or philosophical ideologies like this! You could ask it how far away two ideologies are too, or ask it what the average between two ideologies is, etc.

    I feel like that would be incredibly fascinating to mess around with AND like the average example it could give you an idea of gaps in our political spectrum, ideologies that don’t exist yet or haven’t been named. It could show you attractor points or clusters and give insight into inherent human nature.

    Damn I want to make this.

  • Anon runs some tests

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  • Fake: avoiding genetic diseases with gene editing is possible, increasing human intelligence by genetics alone is called eugenics and its 100% bullshit

    Gay: Sam Altman is gay (this also makes him a fucking blood-traitor because he supports homophobic politicians; then again, just by being a billionaire he’s a disgrace to all of humanity regardless of sexuality.)

  • pls no

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  • I knew a kid who would do datura. Surprisingly normal dude for someone who would occasionally decide to microdose hell itself lol

  • Those who've switched to Linux in the last year, how is it going?

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  • If you already tried proton and it hasn’t worked for the games you want to play, you have my sympathies. However, if that’s not the case, I highly recommend trying it out.

    I’ve been running Arch on my main PC for two years and, so far, Steam’s Proton has worked with every game I’ve tried it on.

    If you need to install the game using a windows installer like a repack, wine seems to work for that. Then, as long as you can find the game’s exe, you can add it to steam and choose to have it run via proton. And after that it launches just like every other game would.

    Even NVIDIAs raytracing has worked for me which is kind of an impressive feat considering how much of a pain NVIDIA graphics can be on Linux sometimes.

  • ‘Climate change is here’: Experts warn environmental crisis is decades ahead of forecasts

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  • I live in the Rockies. The mountains around me have been completely bare of snow for almost the entire winter. Like the peaks are just bare gray stone where the snow used to be year round.

    I keep hearing people saying how sad it was they couldn’t ski this year because there was never snow… we basically haven’t had any winter/cold-weather at all, and they’re upset about skiing… I’m pretty sure there are more serious things to worry about.

  • a bit of advice

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  • Abbott: “So say you’re 40 and you like a girl that’s 10. Well you’re really too old for her because you’re 4x her age. So let’s say you wait 5years. Now you’re 45 and she’s 15, so you’re only 3x as old as her, but that’s still a bit much, so you wait another 15years and now you’re 60 and she’s 30. Only half your age now.

    How long do you have to wait till you’re both the same age?”

    Costello: “Well 4 then 3 then 2… at this rate she’d better be willing to wait for me too.”

    Abbott: “what do you mean?”

    Costello: “Going like this, eventually she’ll be older than me and she better wait for me to catch up.”

    Abbott: “Why would she wait for you?”

    Costello: “WELL I WAITED FOR HER!”

  • NSFW

    Do you think sex impairs your smoking?

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  • Yes, the smoke flavor can’t permeate all of you evenly if part of you is blocked by (or inside) another body.

    If you must have sex while smoking, change positions often to minimize this

  • Social Democrats: We must reform the precious!

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  • I’m reasonably certain an anarchist would have purged gollum, plus Sam is the one thinking about his friends and small community while Frodo is constantly focused on world scale events.

    Sam just wants to grow potatoes and keep his friends safe. If that means killing a spider that literally almost ate the devil then sure he’ll do that, but mostly he just wants to be a gardener.

    Frodo also turns on Sam despite how helpful/loyal Sam has been the entire time and later is corrupted by absolute power. This is reminiscent of a certain ml country that turned on anarchists as soon as the revolution happened…

  • The singular they is actually such a natural part of the English language, the people complaining about it almost certainly use it without noticing

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  • My English teacher back in highschool was very picky about using “they” like most people do. I can hear him say “you have to use FORMAL LANGUAGE” in my head still lol

    If it’s an unknown person we were told to use “he or she” instead of “they” and “his or her” instead of “their” despite the fact that no one fucking talks that way when referring to an unknown individual.

    Like even saying “everyone should bring their laptop to class” would be marked wrong because “everyone” is singular so the “correct” version is “everyone should bring his or her laptop to class” which imo is way more confusing

    However, he was also fine with us using masculine singular pronouns when the gender of a person wasn’t known, which I guess is kind of the case in like Spanish and some other Latin languages but still, just really weird rules

  • If she wears makeup - she is no angel.

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  • Growing up with sisters, I’d say she’s actually probably wearing makeup in both pictures.

    The left is “full face” makeup so like foundation everywhere and highlights and contour and blush etc. etc. lots of layers and up close it’s obvious.

    The right is a “no-makeup look” which is not actually no makeup but minimal makeup meant to look as though it’s natural. Thats likely why her eyebrows are perfect and her skin is completely blemish free in the “no makeup” photo.

    Full face makeup is common for performers or when going out to some fancy event. Dates could count here but probably not most dates since it takes serious time and effort to put on and take off a full face look. And it is somewhat uncomfortable / annoying to have on. But it gives a lot more possibilities for artistic flare too. So many women (or just people in general) find it fun to do.

    Minimal makeup is still art but also takes significant skill to get right even though there’s often much less makeup to put on.

    I highly doubt most people are going on many dates in full face makeup. Probably more makeup than just a minimal look, like eyeshadow/eyeliner, but probably not putting on three layers of makeup over their entire face

  • On familiarity

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  • Funnily enough, all my engineering professors seem to encourage the use of genAI for anything as long as it’s “not doing the learning for you”

    What’s funny is that there’s basically no practical use for GenAI in engineering in the first place. Images like technical drawings need to be precise and code written for FDM/FEA etc. needs to be validated by some kind of mathematical model you derived yourself.

    They say “it’s a useful new tool” and when I ask “what is it useful for” they typically have no answer besides “writing grant proposals” lol

    There are lots of useful applications for machine learning in engineering, but very few if any practical applications for genAI.

  • Can't partner with that eViL AuThOrITarIan china after all!

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  • Sorry I couldn’t parse that first sentence could you rephrase?

    Also, I actually have been on Weibo but it really seemed too like… pop culture obsessed? Not my thing, plus my Mandarin sucked even back then when I was still actively learning it

    I have also seen c/manufacturingconsent.

    Anyway, I’m guessing you brought up Weibo as a “people can talk bad about the government there so clearly they don’t censor anti China speech” but that’s really not an argument.

    China is pretty open about its regulation of the media. I mean you’ve likely read the terms and conditions for some of their media platforms so you already know it’s against their policies to promote ideas contrary to the vision/interests of the CCP or create dissent or however they phrase it. I’m sure small comments slip through here and there because their impact is small and censorship takes effort, but major posts against the government are not staying up very long. (If you can find long standing / popular dissenting post on Weibo to prove me wrong I’ll change my mind on this)

    As for bringing up manufacturing consent and “what the west is trying to do” guess what buddy, if lots of people/organizations are doing a fucked up thing, it’s still a fucked up thing.

    To be fair, I think trying to ensure your citizens hear good news is actually a pretty good idea, but I’m not a big fan of censoring news in order to make that happen.

    Want to make the good news I see outnumber the bad 10:1? Fine, but leave the bad news in there. And I definitely don’t think organizations should censor their failures/problems. Admitting when you’ve made a mistake shows you’re trying to improve; hiding your mistakes makes you seem much less trustworthy in general.

  • Can't partner with that eViL AuThOrITarIan china after all!

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  • Not everywhere else, China bans speech that shows the party or the country in a negative light lol

  • Hunting License

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  • “The culprits: Shameless poachers, hunting humans without a permit.”

  • Does smelling your food while you cook it make it taste bland?

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  • I never would’ve thought this was a thing. To be fair, I don’t get the “smell is a major factor in food taste” at all. I can taste things just as well with my nose plugged as I can without. (Possibly because allergies meant childhood me could rarely ever smell much at all)

    Anyway this is fascinating, and I wonder if animals with even stronger senses of smell are fine with bland food because they get nose blind faster so basically all food is bland. Or, do they rely primarily on smell to the point that taste from the tongue just doesn’t really influence full taste as much as smell?

  • Are You Emotionally Prepared To Die?

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  • One of the reasons my panic attacks never last long is that I feel like I’m dying and once I think “hey wait why am I freaking out? I don’t care if I die and if I do I’d rather not die feeling so stressed” usually my body calms down very fast.

    Same thing with a time when I almost drowned. I realized I’d rather just let go, so I stopped flailing about and let myself start sinking. Then it’s like “okay this is taking longer than expected to die, I could probably push myself up to take a breath or maybe even swim to shallow water before I die”

    Accepting death is a great way to calm yourself down in stressful situations and calming yourself down is helpful in most stressful situations lol