TranquilTurbulence
@TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Scifi question about time travel: 3 days ago:
I don’t see that as a problem. Every possibility co-exists, and every reality is equally real. Every moment and decision forks the universe in infinite ways, but you get to choose the one where you go.
You can save a drowning person, or let them die, but in the big picture, it won’t matter. That person will drown infinitely many ways anyway, but there are also infinitely many universes where they get saved. Don’t worry about the big picture. What matters, is how you act and how the world acts on you in this universe.
- Comment on Scifi question about time travel: 3 days ago:
I think the idea of parallel universes solves time travel paradoxes in a pretty clean way.
- Comment on How does AI use so much power? 4 days ago:
Machine learning always felt like a very wasteful way to utilize data. Even with ridiculous quantities of it, and the results are still kinda meh. So just dump in even more data, and you get something that can work.
- Comment on Grok praises Hitler, gives credit to Musk for removing “woke filters” 5 days ago:
Yeah. Gotta say, black holes are way cooler—in more than one way.
- Comment on Grok praises Hitler, gives credit to Musk for removing “woke filters” 5 days ago:
Today I realized the logo looks like a black hole. Pretty much on brand actually, because they both suck.
- Comment on In languages which use complex written characters (such as Chinese's logographs), is there an equivalent to English's "text speak" shorthand? 6 days ago:
Ok, so it seems like the need to shorten messages is an English problem.
On the other hand, there are languages that use conjugations, prefixes and suffixes extensively, and that changes everything. Suddenly, you can just add a few letters to include the equivalent of a few words.
- Comment on What's up with the sudden increase in AI slop? 1 week ago:
Haven’t seen a difference, but I also focus almost exclusively on the communities I’ve subscribed to. Checking the all or local feed has been annoying and useless since day one, so nothing has changed.
- Comment on How do you all keep the area around the toilet paper dust-free? 1 week ago:
Sounds like the kind of thing that could get you a Darwin Award.
- Comment on How do you all keep the area around the toilet paper dust-free? 1 week ago:
Please elaborate. What does the clean up process look like if you use no paper at all?
- Comment on Does vibe coding sort of work at all? 1 week ago:
Something very similar is also true with humans. People just love to have answers even if they aren’t entirely reliable or even true. Having just some answer seems to be more appealing than not having any answers at all. Why do you think people had weird beliefs about stars, rainbows, thunder etc.
The way LLMs hallucinate is also a little weird. If you ask about quantum physics things, they actually can tell you that modern science doesn’t have a conclusive answer to your question. I guess that’s because other people have written articles about the very same question, and have pointed out that it’s still a topic of ongoing debate.
If you ask about robot waitresses used in a particular restaurant, it will happily give you the wrong answer. Obviously, there’s not much data about that restaurant, let alone any academic debate, so I guess that’s also reflected in the answer.
- Comment on Does vibe coding sort of work at all? 1 week ago:
I prefer to think of vibe coding like the relationship some famous artists had with apprentices and assistants. The master artist tells the apprentice to take care of the simple and boring stuff, like background and less significant figures. Meanwhile the master artist would take care of all the parts that require actual skill and talent. Raphael and Rembrandt would be a good examples of that sort of workflow.
- Comment on Does vibe coding sort of work at all? 1 week ago:
I’ve used LLMs for data visualization and found them helpful for simple tasks, but they will always make serious mistakes with more complex prompts. While they understand syntax and functions well, they usually produce errors that require manual debugging. Vibe coding with LLMs works best if you’re an expert in your project and could write all of the code yourself but just can’t be bothered. Prepare to spend some time fixing the bugs, but it should still be faster than writing all of it yourself.
If you’re not proficient in using a specific function the LLM generated, vibe coding becomes less effective because debugging can be time consuming. Relying on an LLM to troubleshoot its own code tends to lead to “fixes” that only spawn more errors. The key is to catch these situations early and avoid getting sucked into any of the rabbit holes it provides.
- Comment on What are the differences between 1) probabillities, 2) possibillities, and 3) plausabillities? 2 weeks ago:
A common dice has 6 possible outcomes. Unless it’s a special D6, it’s impossible to get a zero or some other value outside the usual range of 1-6.
Normally, each side has a probability of 1/6. If it’s a loaded dice, one value will have a higher probability, while the other sides will have a lower probability.
Let’s say you have two dice, you roll them, and hope to get 6 on both of them. It’s possible to get that on the first try, but it’s much more plausible that you have to roll them many times before that happens.
- Comment on Why are ghosts never racist? 3 weeks ago:
Maybe the ghost eventually turns into a faceless violent poltergeist that just wants to injure and murder everyone. Watching 200 years of history wreck your dreams can be hard to deal with.
- Comment on Are foldable phones as good/bad as they say? 4 weeks ago:
Many years ago, I used to have huge phablet that I could only carry in the largest pockets of my jacket. It was also ridiculously thin, and made of glass, which made it very fragile. As s result, I was so worried about bending it or breaking it, that those ideas started to sneak into my dreams! Getting rid of it was a relief.
- Comment on What would happen if the Earth was sucked into a black hole? 4 weeks ago:
E=mc^2 should cover it, proper physicists can give you a better answer. Either way, it’s a big boom. Wolfram says, it’s about 90 PJ, which is firmly in the nuclear weapons territory.
- Comment on What would happen if the Earth was sucked into a black hole? 4 weeks ago:
If you press the universal terminal button, type in the command for spawning a black hole, set the mass to 1 kg, you get something very spicy. It’s so small, that it evaporates pretty much instantly, which means that all of that energy gets released as hawking radiation and the end result resembles an explosion.
- Comment on Are most people who avoid turn signals do it to feel more normal? (Imitating their parents, avoiding perceived stupidity of using turn signals when it seems useless, etc) 4 weeks ago:
Why would anyone use them when you can keep your opponents on their toes? Driving is essentially a full-contact sport, and you don’t win by playing it safe with turn signals. It’s all about the element of surprise!
- Comment on If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better? 5 weeks ago:
There’s plenty of variety within that term. Also, recycling some of them requires very precise conditions.
- Comment on If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better? 5 weeks ago:
In the beginning, things would suck, because low prices come from economies of scale, and the petrochemical industry certainly has scale. Once you’ve ramped up glass, paper and metal packaging factories, it should be tolerable.
There are also new materials such as biodegradable plastic and even mycelia. That would be useful.
If we also ramp up various carbon capture technologies, you could technically turn that carbon into plastics, so you won’t need any more oil. Obviously, that wouldn’t solve the climate crisis. You need CCS for that. Probably not going to happen within the next century, but it’s technically possible.
- Comment on Are some people too stupid to feel depressed? 5 weeks ago:
I’m going to ignore clinical depression for now, and focus more on milder symptoms like doomscrolling induced sadness, hopelessness and mild anxiety. Some people are resistant to these effects because they practice some form of optimism or stoicism. Other people just close their eyes and ignore the horrors around them. Either way, neither of these approaches tells you anything about intelligence.
- Comment on Would AI replacing humans in every workplace eventually make it easier for an advanced civilization from outer space to colonize us? 1 month ago:
I’ve thought about the way an excavator moves huge rocks and ant hills like they’re nothing. The driver doesn’t care about the ants, because he is focused on the construction site and staying on schedule. Maybe humans on Earth will one day be nothing more than an ant hill in the bucket of an excavator.
If super advanced aliens can carry out galaxy wide construction projects, one planet won’t matter at all.
- Comment on what's the word for a leg elbow? 1 month ago:
To which the answer is: “As high as a kite… No, wait. Higher. A GPS satellite? No. Even higher. Voyager 1 should be about right.”
- Comment on what's the word for a leg elbow? 1 month ago:
Those orange and brown stripes remind me this Minecraft cat. Such a beautiful color.
- Comment on What are the ethics behind purchasing a book from an author you don't agree with? 1 month ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Kelvin Farad, a unit for measuring something exotic related to capacitance and absolute temperature…. Sounds like something you could use to measure the performance of a hyper-space jump gate in a sci-fi story.
Either that, or simply potassium fluoride. Seriously toxic stuff BTW.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Millionaires own land, commercial buildings, palaces, stocks, bonds, Lamborghinis and yachts that can pledged as collateral. Banks love to mitigate risks with assets that are easy to liquidate.
- Comment on Would racism in the USA still exist if humans had automated robots in the 1800s? 1 month ago:
See what’s going on in European countries that haven’t used significant numbers of African slaves. You know, it’s possible to enslave your own population too. Anyway, there’s definitely racism in Europe, even though the history with regard to using African slaves is completely different. Nowadays, racists hate all foreigners regardless of skin color.
Actually, people seem to gravitate towards this weird sort of tribalism when the in-group and out-group are pretty arbitrary concepts. It doesn’t even have to be based on skin color, language or religion. People just hate other people because they were born in the wrong town.
If America never used any African slaves at all, normal human tribalism would still be there to mess things up. There would be groups based on arbitrary things that slang, facial features, dietary preferences, fashion choices etc. Racism wouldn’t disappear. It would just be aimed at some other group.
- Comment on Fortnite now lets you chat with Darth Vader using generative AI speech [Eurogamer] 1 month ago:
There could be a game where the lag is expected. Let’s say you’re heading for Mars, but you have to fix your ship, because there was an unexpected asteroid impact. You ask home base for instructions, but you’re already so far away, that the text takes a minute to travel all the way.
- Comment on Why don't these code-writing AIs just output straight up machine code? 1 month ago:
Debugging AI generated code is essential. Never run the code before reading it yourself and making a whole bunch of necessary adjustments and fixes.
If you jump straight to binary, you can’t fix anything. You can just tell the AI it screwed up, roll the dice and hope it figures out what went wrong. Maybe one day you can trust the AI can actually write functional code, but that day isn’t here yet.
Then there’s also security and privacy. What if the AI adds something you didn’t want it to add? How would you know, if it’s all in binary?
