lvxferre

@lvxferre@mander.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Protons have mass⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  If protons are catholic, does it mean electrons are anolic?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mammals that chose ants and termites as food almost never go back - Ars Technica⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thank you! Although, to be fair, 90% of that is Lemmy’s markdown being really good - rich enough to feel resourceful, but not complex enough to feel overwhelming. (Also, in-comment images are a godsend.)

  If interested, click on the “view source” button, and you’ll see how I formatted it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mammals that chose ants and termites as food almost never go back - Ars Technica⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  One possibility is that it is exceptionally difficult to re-evolve baseline feeding features once you become heavily specialized. It could also be that betting on ants and termites tends to pay off

  I’m betting a mix of both. I think myrmecophagy is an evolutionary strategy bound to appear when other niches are unavailable due to competition, and to restrict them further.

  I’ll use the order Pilosa for the sake of example. Consider the following two maps:
  Image Image
  The first one shows the suborder Vermilingua (anteaters), the second one Folivora (sloths). Here are their diets and ranges:

  Clade	Diet	Areas
  Vermilingua (anteaters)	ant/termite eaters	jungle (Amazon), savanna (Cerrado), swamps (Pantanal)
  Folivora / genus Bradypus (three-toed sloths)	picky leaf eaters, koala/panda style	jungle (Amazon), savanna (Cerrado)
  Folivora / genus Choloepus (two-toed sloths)	omnivores	jungle (Amazon)

  I’m simplifying the ranges, mind you. Regarding Choloepus’ omnivory, TL;DR they eat whatever won’t outrun a sloth (eh) - berries, carrion, a few insects, even a lizard or two.

  Note all three can be found in the jungle, but only the specialised eaters can be found in the savanna. I don’t think this is a coincidence: the plant life in Amazon is so abundant that monkeys and birds can’t call dibs on all energy sources there, but the same does not apply to Cerrado. This makes Choloepus’ omnivory viable in the former, but not the later - in Cerrado you won’t outcompete birds and monkeys, so the specialised diets pay off there.

  But let’s say some Vermilingua species developed a mutation enabling a wider diet; they can eat berries, although it’s a rather small part of their diet. That mutation would likely make them worse at ant/termite-eating, and put them into direct competition with other species - it’s a gambit that simply doesn’t pay off.

  So they’re mostly “stuck” with myrmecophagy. And there’s selective pressure against diversification, at least in environments where food is a primary concern (instead of predation).

  I think this reasoning can be extended into other clades that are eating ants and termites, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨nooo my genderinos⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  sqrt(-1) = ±i. The negative answer is also valid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Zuckerberg's Huge AI Push Is Already Crumbling Into Chaos⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m predicting the whole AI industry is crumbling into chaos. Not now, but soon; let’s say, in two or three years. It’ll be like the dotcom bubble, except way worse, and it might blow up even organically useful parts of the industry.

  When it reaches that point, you’ll see corporations rebranding themselves every bloody where - because even “they used to invest in AI” will be seen as brand damage.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After Disastrous GPT-5, Sam Altman Pivots to Hyping Up GPT-6⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not exactly sure, but perhaps people are a wee bit less eager to swallow bullshit from someone who has been shown bullshitting before? Just a thought. ¬¬

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mmm...⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  >be me
  >working since midnight (4AM now)
  >see this
  >“oh I got half a Berlin ball in the fridge!”

  The fun part is, it works even if you’re aware of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🚨 PLATYPUS PSA 🚨⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Painful but not deadly. Wikipedia mentions someone complaining about the pain a month after.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Estudo: Social media probably can’t be fixed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Talvez a estrutura descentralizada do Fediverso proveja o “redesenho fundamental brilhante”, mencionado no texto, e necessário para evitar algumas das pragas da mídia social. Digo isto porque grupos excessivamente combativos, prones a desinformação, etc. são desfederados pelos outros, reduzindo o alcance das suas vozes.

  Entretanto, não acho que o redesenho seja suficiente; parece-me haver mais passos necessários para reduzir hostilidades, caças às bruxas, câmaras de eco, “tchurminhas do çuponhu”, e a busca incessante ao personagem principal do dia (estilo Twitter). Caso contrário, Lemmy/PieFed/MBin seriam um paraíso, e sabemos que não são.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We hate AI because it's everything we hate⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally what I hate is not the tech developments being labelled “AI”. It’s the industry behind it, and how much it filths itself with deception.

  This sort of neural network is good for small and menial tasks, where accuracy is not too important but volume is. For that you don’t need large models, you need smaller ones, that take a fraction of the data and energy to process (“train”). Then you’d advertise them for what they are - a bunch of useful tools.

  But we’re talking about an industry led by con artists, billionaires, liars and vulture capital. Their eyes get bloody in rage, if they don’t see smoke and mirrors; they don’t care about truth, but appearances. It needs to look “grandiose”, it needs “hype”, it needs “marketability”. It needs all that “AGI SOON!”.

  So the models get bigger, bigger, and bigger. But not necessarily better; more sycophant, more assumptive, more energy-demanding.

  Then you plug everything wrote in the article as a consequence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Tried Every Todo App and Ended Up With a .txt File⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty much what I do. Except that I created a keyboard shortcut that launches pluma /path/to/todolist.txt for convenience.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is feeling romantic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember a comm about this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is feeling romantic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So her claim to fame is that she is more gay than the rest of ancient Greece?

  This too. She was so gay her whole island became synonymous with women being gay. (She was from Lesbos.)

  IDK man, let’s see the poems men wrote about those soldiers and their glistening biceps before making a call here, shall we?

  Perhaps Achilles loved Patroclus a bit too much… waitaminute…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is feeling romantic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Your comment is funny so I’ll answer it, even if I typically would ignore shit like this. Quotes are out of order.

  if you want to share knowledge do it kindly…

  Did I, in any moment, insult the MacN’Cheesus (the OP)? Nope. I didn’t even criticise him; I’m saying Anon (the 4chan poster) got things wrong. OP is just sharing it.

  I’m not even assuming ignorance from OP’s part, note how I outright said “if you’re joking” (implied: “you might know this, and you might be saying what you say just for the sake of a joke, dunno, I’m not assuming ignorance from your part”).

  I’ll go further. OP, if you felt insulted in any moment by my comments ITT, I apologise.

  …but perhaps I’m being unkind towards Anon, in 4chan? Even if he were to read the shit I wrote (he probably won’t)… not really. I’m focusing on the matter, not the person. I didn’t even call him an incel (even this shit he’s saying is incel tier).

  So stop being a liar. Until now, I wasn’t unkind towards anyone here dammit, cut off the crap.

  And a hypocrite, too:

  Shove up your Greek knowledge up your giant ass…

  If you’re so eager to vomit “be kind!” towards the others, make sure to lick your own vomit once it hits the floor. Follow what you preach.

  but you also come across as a pedantic snobby culture bro asshole.

  “Come across”? So you aren’t accusing me of “being” an arsehole; you’re whining because of how things look like??? Pfffthahaha.

  But let’s say I am a [Ctrl+C Ctrl+V] “pedantic snobby culture bro asshole”. Still better than being a whiny, little and pathetic thing, who writes like an underage kid almost ready to cry, whose comment boils down to a huge “WAAAH, THIS HURTS MY FEE FEES”, because someone else shared stuff about an obscure topic that is related to the OP.

  Cry me a river.

  [inb4: whiner starts assuming things about my emotions. I’m not going to read it, so… who cares.]

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is feeling romantic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Pfft, you and everyone else. Get in line.

  But not the battle addicts of her times. They’d rather see a bunch of sweaty men, fighting “FOR GLORY!”, demonstrating their power. I guess nowadays you’d replace it with a car or some other status symbol? And that’s literally what they sung about, look at the Illiad. She was probably one of the first poets to say “screw all this shit, the I want to see my beloved’s face, the way she walks, she captured me like she was some goddess in an epic story.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is feeling romantic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In case you are not joking:

  This was translated from Ancient Greek. Of course it won’t rhyme; Ancient Greek poetry is based on foot and pitch, not rhymes. And even if it used rhymes the translation would butcher them.

  Calling it garbage because it doesn’t rhyme is like looking at a translation of Shakespeare into Japanese, and saying it’s garbage because Shakespeare was a functional illiterate that couldn’t count morae.

  Regardless, the poem already shows a woman talking about romantic love around 600 BCE. It’s already enough to tear apart what Anon is saying. Insert mentions of patriarchy here.

  ---

  If you’re joking: derp.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon is feeling romantic⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Anon, tell me you’ve never read Sappho without saying “I never read Sappho”:

  Some say an army of horsemen,
  some of footsoldiers, some of ships,
  is the fairest thing on the black earth,
  but I say it is what one loves.
  
  It’s very easy to make this clear
  to everyone, for Helen,
  by far surpassing mortals in beauty,
  left the best of all husbands
  
  and sailed to Troy,
  mindful of neither her child
  nor her dear parents, but
  with one glimpse she was seduced by
  
  Aphrodite. For easily bent...
  and nimbly...[missing text]...
  has reminded me now
  of Anactoria who is not here;
  
  I would much prefer to see the lovely
  way she walks and the radiant glance of her face
  than the war-chariots of the Lydians or
  their footsoldiers in arms.
  

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why it’s a mistake to ask chatbots about their mistakes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  But with AI models, this approach rarely works, and the urge to ask reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what these systems are and how they operate.

  Okay, this explanation might work for the masses, but never assume a person is an ignorant based on their behaviour. Never. Some people know it and don’t give it a fuck.

  Example of that later.

  What you’re actually doing is guiding a statistical text generator to produce outputs based on your prompts.

  Right… go on.

  Once an AI language model is trained (which is a laborious, energy-intensive process), its foundational “knowledge” about the world is baked into its neural network

  Here’s the example. By the quotation marks, odds are the author knows that those models do not have world knowledge strictu sensu. But they’re still using the idiotic analogy. Why?

  A: can’t be arsed to not use it, it’s misleading but easier than to find some idiot-friendly way to convey the same thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LLMs’ “simulated reasoning” abilities are a “brittle mirage,” researchers find⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t say.

  Imagine for a moment you had a machine that allows you to throw bricks at a certain distance. This shit is useful, specially if you’re a griefer; but even if you aren’t, there are some corner cases for that, like transporting construction material at a distance.

  And yet whoever sold you the machine calls it a “house auto-builder”. He tells you that it can help you to build your house. Mmmh.

  Can house construction be partially automated? Certainly. Perhaps even fully. But not through a brick-throwing machine.

  Of course trying to use the machine for its advertised purpose will go poorly, even if you only delegate brick placement to it (and still build the foundation, add cement etc. manually). You might economise a bit of time when the machine happens to throw a brick in the right place, but you’ll waste a lot of time cleaning broken bricks, or replacing them. But it’s still being sold as a house auto-builder.

  But the seller is really, really, really invested on this auto-construction babble. Because his investors gave him money to create auto-construction tools. And he keeps babbling on how “soon” we’re going to get fully auto house building, and how it’s an existential threat to builders and all that babble. So he tweaks the machines to include “simulated building”. All it does is to tweak the force and aim of the machine, so it’s slightly less worse at throwing bricks.

  It still does not solve the main problem: you don’t build a house by throwing bricks. You need to place them. But you still have some suckers saying “haha, but it’s a building machine lmao, can you prove it doesn’t build? lol”.

  That’s all what “reasoning” LLMs are about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨S.O.S.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Fixed - thanks!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hope you like TICKS⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Found the dialectologist focusing on rural varieties.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨S.O.S.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Alligator: U-shaped snout.
  Crocodile: V-shaped snout.

  I’m glad the Romans never had to deal with the difference though, since alligators are only found in the Americas. Otherwise this explanation would still fly over their heads. (“V? U? SIMILE SVNT, FVNGE PVTRIDE!”)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MD = oMega Dumbass⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s Lemmy, of course we’re going to see radicals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that’s not the worst of it.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  why do everybody want to make it count letters and stuff like this?

  Dunno about the others; I do it because it shows well that those models are unable to understand and follow simple procedures, such as the ones necessary to: count letters, multiply numbers (including large ones - the procedure is the same), check if a sequence of words is a valid SATOR square, etc.

  And by showing this, a few things become evident:

  • That anyone claiming we’re a step away from AGI is a goddamn liar, if not worse (a gullible pile of rubbish).
  • That all talk about “hallucinations” is a red herring analogy.
  • That the output of those models cannot be used in any situation where reliability is essential.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many r are there in strawberry?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s interesting IMO is that it got the first two and the last two digits right; and this seems rather consistent across attempts with big numbers. It doesn’t “know” how to multiply numbers, but it’s “trying” to output an answer that looks correct.

  In other words, it’s “bullshitting” - showing disregard to truth value, but trying to convince you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google search boss says AI isn’t killing search clicks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s completely off-topic, but:

  We used to have a rather sisal fibre mat at home, that Siegfrieda (my cat) used as her scratching mat. However my mum got some hate boner against that mat, and replaced it with a rug. That’s when Frieda decided she’d hop onto the sofa and chairs and scratch them.

  We bought her a scratching post - and she simply ignored it. I solved the issue by buying two smaller sisal mats, and placing them strategically in places Frieda hangs around. And then slapping her butt every time she used them, for positive behaviour reinforcement (“I’m pet when I scratch it! I should scratch it more!”)

  I’m sharing this to highlight it’s also important to recognise each individual cat has preferences, that might not apply to other cats. She wanted a horizontal surface to scratch; so no amount of scratching posts would solve it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google search boss says AI isn’t killing search clicks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  …she doesn’t actually scratch it any more, but I still use this analogy because it’s a light-hearted way to say “bullshit”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google search boss says AI isn’t killing search clicks⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And my cat says scratching furniture doesn’t damage it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨protein!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You can’t spit it out after you already swallowed it! And the ones I’m used to don’t make any sort of hard shell, they simply wiggle their way into the fruit.

  Not that it’s a big deal - if they caused any harm, I’d be dead already.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When life gives ya lemons.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder if that isn’t a protection against mould reaching the seeds.