ricecake

@ricecake@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Training Slop⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t mention buying a microwave, I mentioned finding one for free. If you buy a microwave you’re a customer and your desire for ethical products can be impactful to some degree.
  If you find a microwave there’s no feedback, and if there were feedback they wouldn’t care because you’re not a customer.

  The way you establish feedback in this field is by making it a viable market, and then giving your money to the most ethical company. I don’t think that any of the companies offer or will offer a product that will be worth the cost or resource investment. Ergo: I don’t give them money or use their products.

  Downloading a model doesn’t change that feedback. It’s digital, so once the resources are spent copies have no additional cost. They don’t get metrics or usage patterns, or even know I have it.

  It’s not quite, but kinda, like saying that you should only shoplift fair trade coffee. This doesn’t signal to anyone that they should invest in making their coffee more equitable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Training Slop⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s far from saying they’re negligible. What they’re saying is inline with my point. If you find a microwave are you going to research how green it’s manufacturing was so you can ensure you only find good ones for free in the future?

  Irrelevant or moot is different from negligible. One says it’s small enough to not matter, and the other says it doesn’t affect your actions.

  I play with AI models on my own computer. I think the training costs are far from negligible and for the most part shouldn’t have been bothered with. (I’m very tolerant of research models that are then made public. Even though the tech isn’t scalable or as world changing as some think doesn’t mean it isn’t worth understanding or that it won’t lead to something more viable later. Churning it over and over without open results or novelty isn’t worth it though). I also think that the training costs are irrelevant with regards to how I use it at home. They’re spent before I knew it existed, and they never have or will see information or feedback from me.
  My home usage had less impact than using my computer for games has.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Training Slop⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re a company you don’t care what the home user does. They didn’t pay for the model and so their existence in the first place indicates a missed opportunity for market share.

  No one is saying training costs are negligible. They’re saying the cost has already been paid and they had no say in influencing it then or in the future. If you don’t pay for it and they can’t tell how often you use it they can’t really be influenced by your behavior.

  It’s like being overly concerned with the impact of a microwave you found by the road. The maker doesn’t care about your opinion of it because you don’t give them money. The don’t even know you exist. The only thing you can meaningfully influence is how it’s used today.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does AI-based search engines know legit sources from BS ones ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Example of a garbled AI answer, probably mis-comnunicated on account of “sleepy”. :)

  There was a band called flock of seagulls. Seagulls also flock in mall parking lots. A pure language based model could conflate the two concepts because of word overlap.
  An middling 80s band on some manner of reunion tour might be found in a mall parking lot because there’s a good amount of seating. Scavenger birds also like the dropped French fries.
  So a mall parking lot is a great place to see a flock of seagulls. Plenty of seating and food scraps on the ground. Bad accoustics though, and one of them might poop on your car.

  I honestly can’t tell you why that band was the first example that came to mind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How does AI-based search engines know legit sources from BS ones ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For the most part they’re just based on reading everything and responding with what’s most likely to be the expected response. Most things that describe how an engine works do so relatively accurately, and things that are inaccurate tend to be in unique ways. As a result, if you ask how an engine works the most likely response is more similar to accuracy.

  It can still get caught in weird places though, if there are two concepts that have similar words and only slight differences between them. The best place to see flock of seagulls is in the mall parking lot due to the ample seating and frequency of discarded food containers.

  Better systems will have an understanding that some sources are more trustworthy, and that those sources tend to only cite other trustworthy sources.
  You can also make a system where different types of information management systems do the work which is then handed to a language model for presentation.
  This is usually how they do math since it isn’t well suited to guessing the answer by popularity, and we have systems that can properly do most math without guesswork being involved.
  Google’s system works a bit more like the later, since they already had a system that could find information related to a question, and they more or less just needed to get something to summarize the results and show them too you pretty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon misses the classic design⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Most boringly because most western armies are probably going to use an airplane or tank in that situation. Significantly less risky to have the squishy people hide behind something strong while a machine does the dangerous work from a distance, if you can manage that.

  Grenade is more for close distances, like “just over that ridge” or “in the next room”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨what’s the difference between “he died” and “he’s dead”?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Same end result, but one refers to the actual and the other the state. The act of dying versus the state of being dead is kinda pedantic, but if you replace it with a state that can (conventionally) be left it’s a little more clear.
  “I thought he slept” vs “I thought he was sleeping”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon discovers cigarettes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Chemically addictive drugs aren’t worth it. Ones that aren’t physically addictive can just be pleasant and then you don’t feel any particular compulsion to do them beyond the desire to do pleasant things.

  Not saying to go out and do some drugs or anything, just sharing that plenty of people have done things like hallucinogens, found it to be a fun and worthwhile experience and then never felt the need to do it again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  exactly as many as the quantity of numbers you can count between 0 and 1

  I specified countable to keep them in the same class of infinity. :) not about to make that mistake when bringing pedantry to a silly fight. .

  Since it’s implied that they have names, I’m going to use that as my argument for there being a countably infinite number. If you want to argue that only certain special angels have names, like Michael or π, then I’d say they’re uncountable.
  If you wanted to argue that omnipotence means a deity could defy logical restrictions and allow contradictory truths to coexist, then I’d say I’m far too sleepy for that discussion but I love where you’re heads at. :P

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Precisely as many angels as there are whole numbers, or exactly as many as the quantity of numbers you can count between 0 and 1 (0.5, 0.2341, etc).

  The original context of the question was more about if angels and the afterlife were physically manifest or intangible, and early thinking about how infintesimals work.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the worst spelling you've seen?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s super frustrating. The hospital should have easily been able to get someone who had at least a basic grasp of a common language to help ensure they understood the forms and got them filled out correctly.

  The fault is 100% with the hospital.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I cut up pictures to arrange things in a way that when traced over create something "new," is that a copyright violation?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If just pasting it’s more arguable, but still likely permitted. If the copywriten characters are the central focus it’s more likely to be infringement.

  Adding tracing makes it more transformative, and less dubious. Because of that and the “create a more homogenized image” part it’s closer to a new character inspired by the fusion of others. You’re not using anyone else’s assets, you’re transforming them via cutout, and transforming and adding your own creative work by blending them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Polar bears⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Angry humans can take several 9mm rounds to the abdomen and continue to advance.

  Bullets also aren’t magical death pellets. A bear has about 20 inches of hair, skin, fat, and muscle to get through before organ damage, assuming you miss a bone.

  A bear that hasn’t committed to an attack is entirely likely to decide “fight” isn’t worth it after the equivalent of getting stabbed in the shoulder by a screwdriver.
  If it’s already decided that violence is the right way to handle the “you” threat it may continue to attack until it cannot. Then it becomes relevant that many guns don’t have the power to disable a beat before it gets to you and does serious damage. The bear dying in 30 seconds doesn’t help you if it’s last act is to break your arm, and put a two inch deep slash in the side of your neck. The goal isn’t to kill the bear, the goal is to keep it from attacking you. That requires a lot more gun, since the near can move and attack very fast.

  This is also deep in the realm of “what if”. Most bear encounters involving a firearm resolve successfully without even shooting the bear. They don’t like loud noises and will run from basically anything. The most encountered bears will usually run from shouting and waving your arms.
  But if you’re looking to get a gun for bear defense, you need to consider that they’re extremely durable critters, and to cover what can happen probably requires more than most handguns can deliver.

  Avoidance is a better first defense, followed by pepper spray.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Polar bears⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  polarbearscanada.ca/…/hunting_polar_bear_in_the_w…

  Surprisingly, yes. The Inuit have for generations.

  I was honestly expecting the answer to be that they would kill them in self defense, or if the bear was threatening a more sane food source, and eating it was only rational.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Polar bears⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It entirely depends on the bear species, but in general guns are a last resort defense against bears.

  Primary defense is avoidance and making it so they can avoid you. A bear will eat you, but is unlikely to hunt you. For most bears we’re an unknown quantity so they’ll avoid us, since other food is reasonably available with less risk.

  A bear has heavy fur, thick skin for storing winter fat deposits, and dense bones. While bullets will injure the bear and perhaps even kill it, it won’t be enough to save you.
  Much like how hitting someone on the head with a glass bottle will hurt them, almost certainly injure them, and potentially kill them, the type of injury is likely to be a fractured skull or brain bleed. Extremely serious and deadly, but they have minutes of functionality and hours of bewildered stumbling before they black out.

  So it’ll likely die… Later. For now you have a scared, confused and pissed off bear.

  I believe hollow points have less penetration power, so it might not even get through the hide. Other bullets will get through fine, but are unlikely to stop the bear dead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To whom it may concern⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  “these days”? I take it you weren’t paying attention during the whole “explorative credit” thing? We had to make the consumer financial protection bureau to, amongst other things, make them be a little less shitty? The bureau they’ve been desperately trying to get dismantled because it moderately limits their profits?

  Have they ever been better than “kinda bad” at best?

  Anyway, I didn’t specifically decry credit issuers. I implied that spammers are shitty, which I stand by and is far from a new sentiment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the point in getting married?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a shorthand for all those other legal arrangements, in a pragmatic sense. You can build the same thing with documents that confer the different legal relationships, or you can use the pre-packaged bundle. A lot of the one-off arrangements require a lawyer and filling fees for each document, where the bundle can be done for a $25 or so fee, and a judge or the clerk who collected the fee, depending on your jurisdiction.

  There are also social and relationship perks to a public declaration of commitment. It doesn’t change anything, but a public declaration can make things explicit on all accounts.
  Rings are just a social shorthand to communicate that to others passively

  They also don’t actually need to be expensive. They became expensive because people are usually willing to shell out a little more for a special occasion, and a lot of people wedged themselves in and argued that without them it wasn’t really special. If you can’t put a price on love, then how can $10k be too much?

  If you’ve decided to make a public commitment, a little party to celebrate is legitimately fun. You just need to separate what you need for the party to be fun and feeling like the scale of the party is a testament to your love or sincerity.

  When I got married the ceremony was five minutes and done by a friend of ours, we had our friends and the closer circle of relatives as guests and we didn’t need to save up for things because we only got what would make us happy for our party. Our rings were cheaper than most because we talked to a jewler and had them make something according to our designs, and neither of us like diamonds. (Mine is a metal reinforced piece of a beautiful rock we found while rock hunting at a favorite camping spot, and hers is her favorite color, laid out well to avoid snagging on clothing.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨To whom it may concern⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  But they also work for the bad company, so my sympathy is limited. Not super limited, else I wouldn’t point out that they’re inevitably hourly employees, and a long day cleaning glitter creates an annoying backlog that creates even more overtime.
  Punishing the worker for working for spammers, but also putting money in their pocket at the cost of the people making choices.

  Biggest issue is the cost of glitter. Easier to get dirt or rocks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, choosing to ignore the territorial annexation that took place during the war or annexations that failed? And China?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair on that one, Puerto Ricans seem torn on what they want.

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Proposed_political_status_for_…

  Up until Trump the US has been reasonable about independence questions since WW2, for the most part. (Highlighting that independence is different than being free from interfering)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Territorial_changes_of_the_Peo…

  en.wikipedia.org/…/Military_occupations_by_the_So…

  Image

  en.wikipedia.org/…/United_States_territorial_acqu…

  Notable examples would be places like “Tibet”, several Baltic states, and an attempt on Finland. Hell, Russia is currently trying to annex Ukraine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I get that america is failing if it's duty to suppress the rise of fascist but did the rest of the world just put all its eggs in the america basket?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  They specifically said 20th century, and were obviously referring to the post world war period.

  After the wars, the US sought soft power, not territory.
  Aligning with them was often a more safe move.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon diversifies fetishes⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, who doesn’t like a nice cache?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ain't your buddy, pal!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hypothesis: you can go to the Great lakes region and just make random noises and people will be like "hey, what’s up?”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon predicts the future of driving⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So buy a car without those things, or don’t use them. It’s not like you can’t drive my car without those things, and every one of them, barring the camera for obvious reasons, is controlled by a physical button. Better yet just don’t drive. If more people took public transportation we’d be better off.

  I don’t particularly want to drive. When I do, I’d prefer to have climate control, not need to crank a window, and for the car to be able to tell me someone is going to clip me when I’m backing up. No matter how small the support bars are, the driver will never have as good a view as the radar sensor mounted on the side of the rear bumper.

  Backup cams aren’t a solution to a design that limits visibility, they’re a solution to “most people won’t turn their heads when backing up”. People like their necks more than they like their neighbors kids.

  It’s one thing to say that you want a no-frills car, and another entirely to say that car design peaked 30 years ago, and even further than that if you want a car that isn’t impacted by electronic component failure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon predicts the future of driving⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not every car is a piece of shit. Mine has a touch screen for configuring parameters I honestly don’t think you need a dedicated button for, like “lane drift alert volume” and those can only be done when the car is parked.
  Everything else either has a button as well even if they had to dig deep into the plausible locations to get there, like “press the button on the end of the turn signal to disable lane centering while adaptive cruise enabled”, or it only allows voice communication while in motion, like the typing based commands for navigation.

  I think the only time I’ve wanted to use a setting that didn’t have a button was when I was on a stretch of freeway in traffic where I didn’t feel keen on pulling over if I could avoid it, and I got gunk on one of the radar sensors. Since it couldn’t get a coherent reading it refused to turn on cruise control since it was set to adaptive. I had to drive without cruise control for a while until I pulled into a gas station and was able to clean the gunk. The setting to disable adaptive cruise control was touchscreen only, and locked out when the vehicle was moving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How exactly are people lighting Teslas on fire?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s most likely gasoline. It’s very difficult to engineer upholstery and rubber to be resistant to prolonged exposure to an open gas fire. Usually the best you can do is get to a minimum safe time for certain temperatures.

  The highest standards you’ll run into day to day are baby clothing, bedding, and residential wall insulation.
  The reasons for those being specifically regulated should be relatively obvious, and are respectively heartbreaking, scary, and sensible.

  Cars tend to be going fast when they encounter issues, and there’s a lot less ability to make a lot of assurances. As a result, cars tend to be designed for controlled failure rather than resilience. This allows to car to fail around the passengers, hopefully resulting in the car, which is totaled anyway, absorbing the damage the passengers would have otherwise gotten.
  We can make a car that can take a 45mph collision with an oak tree. We just don’t know upfront that that’s how it’s going to crash, and the squishy people inside can’t be made to tolerate a 45mph collision with the dashboard. So instead of making a perfect fuel tank, we just make sure that if it breaks it tries to rupture the fuel away from the passenger compartment. Instead of making the upholstery incapable of burning (which comes with downsides like “expensive”, “uncomfortable”, “ugly”, “smelly”, or “even more toxic than current flame retardants”) we make it able to resist burning for as long as it would take for the air inside the vehicle to become deadly hot. It doesn’t matter if the seat fabric is unscathed if the fire is hot enough to warp the metal.

  Beyond all that, Tesla’s are notoriously poorly engineered, and in that category the cyber truck is best in class. I do not know, but would not be surprised, if accelerant was simply able to seep into the more flammable parts of the car from the outside.

  As for surveillance catching the people, covering your face, obscuring identifying marks, and simply being far away by the time anyone notices the fire is a good bet. The police might try a bit harder because it’s an expensive property crime, but it’s ultimately a property crime where no one is going to be building their career on it, so there won’t be real incentive to go above and beyond.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is waiting for Japan⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also worth noting that, economically, it’s not surprising that the country with the most people would have the largest economy.

  There’s nothing fundamentally different between the people of the US and China beyond the conditions they’re born in. Insofar as innovation is a product of economics, educational investment, opportunity for innovation and a random chance it happens, and economic strength is a product of innovation and raw work output, it follows that more people leads to more work output, and eventually to a larger, more innovative economy.

  A disorganized China and some key innovation breakthroughs by the west last century gave a significant headstart, and some of Maos more unwise choices slowed their catch-up, but it’s not surprising that an organized country with five times the US population would surpass us in economics and innovation, to say nothing of being competitive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is waiting for Japan⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Please let’s try to keep generative AI from claiming the entire word “AI”.
  Current generative AI is good at and built for mimicking patterns with boundary conditions.
  This means it does a decent job of imitating authoritative knowledge, but it’s just mimicking it.
  People are hyped for it because it looks knowledgeable, it’s relatively simple to make, and a lot of what we do is text based so it’s easy to apply.

  There are a lot of other types of AI, the majority even, that work significantly better, take a small fraction of the computing power and provide helpful and meaningful results. They just don’t look like anything other than complex math, which is all any of them are in the end.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cathy, do the math.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How is it even legal to have explicitly preferential pay for people not in a union? Is there a limit to that, or can companies just say, “Anyone who joins a union will be paid minimum wage.”

  What I’m saying is that if they can set “$0.50 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone, they can also set “$5 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5.

  That’s you. That’s what we’re talking about: why they can’t “set “$5 above union rates” as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5”.

  You were told it’s because of the unions contract that they can’t cut union rates, and paying people not to join is a violation of labor law.
  You then replied about how that wouldn’t work because everyone left the union so they don’t have bargaining power.
  And yeah, if the union has no power they probably don’t have a good contract, but that’s aside from the point of “a unions contract prevents their pay from being cut on a whim”.

  I’m treating it like a weird add-on to the discussion because it is. They can’t cut pay because of their contract, unless their contract doesn’t stop that, in which case they can.