megopie

@megopie@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Major L⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  In the us, there was a dark and dismal corner of poltical science called Kremlinology, where far to much attention was payed to the positions various people were during speeches and parades, trying to determine who was and was not influential with in party at any given time, and then try to determine Soviet policy and action based on this.

  Having access to the archives, we now know that they were almost entirely wrong, and the times when they were right were basically just random chance.

  Like, it was ancient divination more than it was real analysis. People called them out on it at the time, but, they were influential because the CIA was gullible and congress was desperate for any sort of insight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google says 75% of the company's new code is AI-generated⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  *75% of code was written by people who were required to have an AI plug in installed.

  Probably also having their usage ranked.

  Also have had their work loads increased and their deadlines shortened.

  And if they don’t hit the metrics and meet the shorter deadlines… they get fired.

  I’m sure that’s a recipe for functional, well tested, efficient, and secure software. Definitely not creating a shit ton of technical debt.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨snow isn't real⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They had to build a really tall ladder to get this view. Quite the project.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Land where⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The nasa blog on the final day said. “At 5,400 feet, Orion’s drogue parachutes were cut and the three main parachutes deployed, reducing velocity to less than 200 feet per second and guiding Orion on its final descent and splashdown.”

  Which is to say “less than” roughly 60 meters per second. Somewhere else on the site I couldn’t find again they mentioned it being a touch down speed of 20 miles per hour, which is a fair bit slower at about 9 meters a second, but that’s still a car crash if you’re hitting a solid surface.

  The point remains. Getting a large object like that down to a soft, non injurious, speed is not practical with just a parachute. Other techniques must be employed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Land where⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So, the issue does come down to the chutes. A chute capable of reducing decent speed to 10m/s is significantly larger than one capable of getting the speed to 60 m/s. Impractically large on a weight constrained thing like a space capsule.

  The Soyuz uses a small set of retro rockets to reduce speed in the last few seconds before touch down, and even then it’s like being in a car crash.

  On the Vostok capsules the astronauts didn’t even land with the capsules, they just bailed out and parachuted down.

  Landing in the ocean is significantly more comfortable and less complicated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Space Honey⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This was legitimately a significant concern that early space programs had. Like, how well would people be able to swallow in free fall, would certain kinds of food cause problems? The food experiments during the Gemini program are pretty interesting

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Struggle⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  See the trick is you gotta combine that with eating more fiber!

  Then your will piss more and you will poop better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A shrubbery!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, but consider that if there is bark, cinnamon is bark.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A shrubbery!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So… are they spices? Like cinnamon?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who needs red flags when you've got a nice shade of high viz⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nonsense, just a protective layer of tarnish.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gotta go fast⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, it… does expand when freezing… so maybe?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US tech firm Oracle cuts thousands of jobs as it steps up AI spending⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “It’s here right now and definitely working and producing productivity and revenue, but also we need to cut costs so we can keep spending money on it. Hmmm? Why not use the revenue it’s generating to pay for it, well, you see, we’re just scailing so fast it’s not enough. Oh, why not fund it with credit? The banks won’t let us put up the nvidia chips as collateral to buy more nvidia chips anymore.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows boss promises to heal the operating system's wounds⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So spraying Windows with the assistant, regardless of how users felt about it, was somehow an accident?

  Probably more that internal politics at the company lead a bunch of project leads to try implementing it. If leadership keeps emphasizing how important AI is, and people who have “done stuff with AI” keep getting promoted, then of course people are going to shove it anywhere they can, and of course the higher ups will approve it. It’s classic group/cult think in a hierarchical system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘The era of invincibility is over’: the week big tech was brought to heel⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t let this become a “protect the kids” thing. The intentionally addictive and manipulative design of these platforms has been just as harmful to people across a wide spectrum of ages. The solution is not to ban kids from using these platforms, the solution is to hold these platforms accountable for their behavior and put regulations in to ban intentionally manipulative design. Adults are just as much victims of having their brains cooked by this shit, and it’s had larger scale societal consequences that we need to take seriously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's how the world works.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Probably not, ammonia production isn’t exactly a huge portion of natural gas usage, it’ll just have to compete on price with other demands, other things with lower value will get priced out of the market long before nitrogen fertilizer. The price for it will probably go up, already has on futures markets, but not by a huge amount, not even the biggest blip in the past decade. And nitrogen fertilizer is a fairly small portion of overall costs for most agriculture, so it won’t be a significant increase in price.

  The places it might have an impact are on products with really narrow profit margins already, like commodity corn in the US (actually a lot of commodity corn breaks even or even is grown at a slight loss because reasons ) and a lot of that goes in to non-food uses like ethanol(for gas), chemical production, or even for use in construction materials.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And then you have E bike companies producing lead bricks that are non-functional without the motor doing 90% of the work. Or with the massive motorcycle seats that make pedaling actually impossible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Bros Wanted Trump. Now They Learn What Happens When You Tell Him No.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Anthropic is just trying to cover their ass from liability.

  Ether the user who put the bot in a position to do something illegal is liable, or the person who made the bot that did something illegal is liable. But 90% of the reason hegseth want to use the bots is to avoid liability when doing illegal stuff, and if anthropic is saying “hey it’s not our fault if you break the law using our product, we told you not to use it like that” then they’re basically denying the main use case for hegseth, who really really wants a get out of jail free card for breaking the law.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Block ditches 4,000 staff, because AI can do their jobs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Any job that can be done by an LLM wasn’t a job that needed to get done In the first place.

  any manager who tries to replace an actually useful job with an LLM is going to get bit in the ass as productivity slows to a crawl. Other people will hav to step in to clean up the mess and basically do the work that should have been done by the person replaced. Most of the jobs being “replaced by AI” are actually just routine layoffs or companies correcting from over hiring.

  I’ve read a story the other day from someone who said they left Amazon due to what a mess it was becoming internally. How increasingly managers were hiring people they didn’t need so their team would be bigger and they would seem more important. This is a well known phenomenon. I suspect a lot of people who did this and created a mess are using the excuse of “embracing AI” to give them selves an off ramp from the mess they created by bloating their departments.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No More Neutral ⚛⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Everything would get slightly heavier. Then a lot of compounds would break and a lot of new compounds would form.

  Also a lot of lightning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Relieving oneself over the edge of the ship⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yah there is a lot of nonsensical compression artifacts, and they’re of wildly varying scales.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen and paper instead⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  On the one hand, I’m skeptical of the assertions that pen and paper is inherently a better way to take notes and learn.

  But I do agree with the general aversion to a lot of ed tech. So much effort to shove kids faces in front of softwear and hardware that was sold to administrators by marketing teams from big tech companies. So many opportunities for those tech companies to exploit local school districts, ether to extract unreasonable profits, or for access to a mailable locked in user base.

  If a school is going to go all in teaching with computers, they need to be carefully choosing what they use and not just adopting a premade package from some tech company.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The world’s oldest known vertebrates had two pairs of eyes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It seems likely that its external sensing function faded before the development of “hot blood” (endothermy) as it’s vestigial even in very basal reptiles like the tuatara, so likely it was already disappearing as a sensory organ fairly early in quadruped evolution. Snakes, crocodiles and turtles (all exothermic) all lost it completely as an external feature, snakes are particularly notable as they’re in the same branch as tuataras and lizards, many of whole still have it as a vestigial external structure. It also appeared in some extinct branches of therapsids(many appear to have been endothermic) in some form, but is completely absent in mammals, the only surviving branch of therapsids.

  It does function as a sensing organ in many amphibians, suggesting that it became vestigial for sensing some where in the early evolution of amniotes, but stuck around as an external structure across multiple branches but many have since convergently evolved to loose it as an external structure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Smart Homes Are Terrible⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So many extra moving parts, so many additional points of failure. But for what benefit? So I can turn on various washing machines on remotely… after loading them manually anyways? Why not have a washing machine that doubles as a cabinet so I don’t need to load it and unload it?

  So I can have a lawn watering system that automatically waters when the soil moisture gets too low? To have a lawn mower roomba that automatically deploys when some sensor sees the grass get a bit to long? I’d rather not have a lawn, or at least some sort of native plant lawn that doesn’t need watering and constant mowing.

  I don’t hate clever gadgets, I hate brain dead gadgets, automation of pointless systems. Why automate something that could be avoided entirely with better design. You have perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dutch students create modular electric car "you can repair yourself"⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I to have a modular electric vehicle but, mine already has a massive variety of after market options to modify and upgrade it to me needs with.

  It’s called… my bicycle that I put a motor on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Journalists convinced a AI Vending Machine Things to give them free stuff like a PS5⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  it’s so amazing, the absolute brain rot it takes to think that a LLM is a better way to operate a vending machine than simple if-then logic. “If the value of money inserted is equal to the price, then dispense the item”.

  Like, why? What is even the point? It doesn’t need to negotiate the price, it doesn’t need have a conversation about your day, the vending machine just needs to dispense something when payed the right amount.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia plans heavy cuts to GPU supply in early 2026 [OC3D]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “ Shit, we need more cash to keep the bubble inflated, quick squeeze customers for more revenue! “

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ford ends F-150 Lightning production, starts battery storage business⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  they’re gradually reducing the amount of vehicles sold while increasing the margin per vehicle. They’re approaching the limit of 1 vehicle sold at infinite margin.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Fewer people are playing Call of Duty this year than they have been before" Why has Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 seemingly sold below expectations? Is it simply not good enough? [Eurogamer]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That all, and they raised the price when the core demographic has less disposable income than ever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cherry Flavour!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a growth medium for culturing cells. It’s a mix of sugars, salts, and amino acids, often with other nutrients.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cherry Flavour!⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Forbidden sports drink.