markovs_gun
@markovs_gun@lemmy.world
- Comment on quick health tip 4 days ago:
I have tried this out because I got a bit obsessed with learning how to make every coffee drink during the pandemic. The way I did it was a double shot of espresso, a decently sized pat of good quality unsalted butter, and a little bit of hot water. The reasoning was that the butter would accentuate the naturally occurring oils of the espresso and lead to a richer crema on the resulting americano which was true. I thought it was actually pretty good that way, but I also love coffee in any form. It also wasn’t something I’d go out of my way to drink again. I also imagine this would do some bad things to your intestines if you drank this every day. If you want a delicious buttery coffee, a good quality whole fat milk is a much better option. As for health claims, I think it’s kind of insane that anyone says drinking literal butter could possibly be good for you, and even more insane that people believe it. It feels like an over-reaction to anti-fat propaganda from the sugar lobby where we went from “Maybe eating some fat in your diet isn’t a bad thing” to “YOU MUST EAT AS MUCH FAT AND OIL AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.”
- Comment on Spoon 5 days ago:
Idk what you’re on about, this very article makes fun of said satanic panic in the opening paragraph.
- Comment on Anon describes past 5 days ago:
If you want to get real nerdy about it this works because the natural logarithm of 2 is ~0.69
(1+i)^n = 2
n log (1+i) = log 2
n = log 2 / log (1+i)
For small numbers, log(1+x) ≈ x
n ≈ log 2/i
log 2 ≈ 0.69
n ≈ 0.69 / i
n ≈ 69/100i
Which is pretty close to 70/100i which is the approximation.
- Comment on Anon describes past 5 days ago:
Here’s a rule of thumb - the federal reserve has a target inflation rate that they try to meet, and that is usually around 2%. Therefore, if you want to do a quick party trick you can do the mental math that things have roughly doubled in price since the 90s. Recent covid related inflation, upcoming tariff related inflation, and 1970s inflation break the trend, but typically the value of money halves every 30-35 years.
- Comment on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 doesn't require reflexes, says player who beat the game without dodges or parries 5 days ago:
Skill issue
- Comment on Android updates: thanks I hate it. 6 days ago:
All of my family members have Samsung phones and every single one of them has been complaining about the update. Normal people, tech people, it doesn’t matter. They all hate it. It’s actually kind of insane. The only reason I have been spared so far is that my phone is too old to get the new OneUI update. I can’t imagine any of them will buy a Samsung next time they buy a phone if the UI stays like this. People who buy Android phones are people who like Android phones. You’re not going to lure iPhone users to Android by being more like an iPhone because they’re just going to buy the real deal instead. It’s just stupid. Just the battery icon discussed in the OP was the source of a lot of complaints because it is extremely hard to read especially for older people.
- Comment on Android updates: thanks I hate it. 6 days ago:
I see you’re skipping windows 7→8 which is fair because most people did
- Comment on Nintendo of America might turn your Switch into an expensive paperweight if you mod your console or install any "unauthorized" games, new policy warns 1 week ago:
Is this news? I’ve been modding consoles for over a decade and this has always been part of it. Just because Nintendo has historically been really bad at it in the past doesn’t mean this hasn’t always been the name of the game.
- Comment on Pope Joan 1 week ago:
These are all the exact same views that Francis held, almost to the word. The truth is that the Overton Window of the Roman Catholic Church is incredibly narrow. When we talk about a Cardinal being “liberal” or “conservative” that is within this context. In terms of the secular world, the Roman Catholic Church is extremely conservative, even among the most “liberal” cardinals and Popes. Catholics all believe in Catholic dogma, even if they are lenient in how it is applied.
Female deacons- catholicnewsagency.com/…/pope-francis-on-female-d…
Euthanasia and abortion- catholicnewsagency.com/…/you-don-t-play-with-life…
Death penalty (not sure why this is listed as if it’s a conservative/bad thing to be against)- americamagazine.org/…/pope-francis-closes-door-de…
"Gender ideology "- vaticannews.va/…/pope-francis-gender-ideology-is-…
Homosexuality- usccb.org/…/pope-clarifies-remarks-about-homosexu…
- Comment on ChatGPT's hallucination problem is getting worse according to OpenAI's own tests and nobody understands why 1 week ago:
You’re missing a crucial detail- the discussions of LLMs as just being probability machines ignores the fact that when we’re talking about “what is the most likely next word?” The answer to that question isn’t merely just “What, in the training corpus, was the most likely word to follow in this instance?” But rather there is a “finger on the scale” so to speak in favor of certain types of responses, and this is frequently updated. You cannot have a useful LLM without this because it will talk as if it is a human with a sense of self, display blatant prejudice just because it’s common, and say creepy things (see the Microsoft “Sydney” fiasco) because the humans who wrote the sources in the training corpus do have a sense of self, do hold prejudices, and express thoughts and feelings that are inappropriate coming from a chatbot. When done intentionally and carefully, this creates a much more useful product, but when done poorly it potentially makes things worse. It seems that at least part of that weighting is based on user interaction, which is what I was talking about with models getting dumber the more they interact with the general public.
Furthermore, the newest versions of ChatGPT attempt to include “reasoning” as an actual feature of the response. I’ve played around with them and they are definitely a lot better at logic and math problems than older models but not necessarily less prone to “hallucinations” when it comes to factual information. I haven’t read a whole lot about how the “reasoning” works because I have been a lot more interested in non-LLM methods lately but it is intended to combat the issue you described. Personally I am not convinced this will fix much of anything in its current strategy but it’s certainly interesting to see.
- Comment on ChatGPT's hallucination problem is getting worse according to OpenAI's own tests and nobody understands why 1 week ago:
Yeah the “nobody understands why” is an absurd statement when it’s pretty obvious, they’re training it on itself and keep trying to “improve” it with shit that’s making it worse. Plus, if it’s using reinforcement learning based on interactions with the general public (learning based on user responses to and ratings of bot responses) the more “like” the general public the LLM will become, aka stupid. Furthermore, I have a personal theory that LLM power users who aren’t programmers are dumber than average or at the very least less creative, and this will also skew results if user responses are given a heavy weight.
- Comment on Going back in time to see how the fishes and loaves trick was done 1 week ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
As someone who has used it for viewing legal copyright free content and nothing pirated, I will say that it definitely provides a service that regular torrents don’t- ease and speed. It makes viewing legal and copyright free content just as easy as using Netflix to the point where you don’t have to go onto various websites looking for what you want to watch, you can just get it all in one place. Further, if you have roommates or relatives who would like to view this legal and copyright free content as well, it’s easy enough for them to use as well without having to learn how to find and download said content. I have done both, and I must say that the fee is well worth it to me compared to the amount of time it saves.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
It’s a French company that you pay a small amount of money to use their service to access perfectly legal and open source content, and not anything resembling pirated movies and TV shows. If your son is using it to view pirated TV shows, that would be very bad and against their instructions for how to use their service. However, it is possible that this is what he is doing.
- Comment on Instead of Orange Man doing Tariffs would it not have been better for him to talk about shopping locally and so forth. And giving more tax breaks to companies that stay and sell in the US? 2 weeks ago:
Yes but you, like everyone I seem to talk to these days, is under the false impression that Trump isn’t a complete idiot who literally thinks tariffs are the solution to all problems. It’s more comforting to think there’s some massive conspiracy by Russia or that it’s a ploy to make money off the stock market, but I truly believe that Trump actually thinks tariffs will magically fix the economy and his reactions to the backlash are legitimate shock that so many people and the markets don’t agree. Yes Russia does stand to gain from this, but they don’t need to pull the strings when the guy in charge is innovating economic policy so stupid that a smart person would have trouble even imagining it.
Trump decisions make more sense when you realize he is actually stupid as fuck and there’s no hidden chess moves or anyone pulling the strings from the shadows. There is nobody at the wheel who is actually competent even if they’re evil. This is all just the whims of a complete moron who is probably also going a bit senile as well.
- Comment on So true 2 weeks ago:
Dude it still does. Try that shit man a big shitty sandwich and chips fucking goes hard
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 3 weeks ago:
It probably wouldn’t work though. Say you wash your hands. Okay that helps some against certain diseases but not against respiratory disease, many types of foodborne illness, the plague, etc. You’d still get all of those just as easily as everyone else without also having a backdrop of the germ theory of disease to explain other ways to prevent disease and antibiotics to cure bacterial infections.
This is the state of biology in the middle ages. This is a medieval Scottish bestiary, a book of animals, which contains many interesting facts about animals such as beavers biting their testicles off to throw away pursuers, several animals spontaneously generating from nothing, and many animals that don’t exist (my favorite is the Bonnacon, a bull that spews firey shit as a defense mechanism). Medieval scholars also didn’t accept experimentation as a valid means of gaining knowledge - they were stuck on Plato’s ideas about matter being flawed and untrustworthy and true knowledge only being able to come from Reason (and in the case of the medieval era, Divine revelation). Obviously you could show them bacteria (if you could somehow fashion a powerful enough microscope with medieval tech, which is not a trivial task) and they’d have to believe in it but how would you get them to believe that those little guys cause disease when that took us a couple hundred years in actual history?
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 3 weeks ago:
In what language? Modern English didn’t exist yet and neither did pretty much any modern language. Good luck trying to get the local nobles and priests to decipher the hundreds of codices you brought with you that are in some strange language that nobody has seen before
- Comment on If I snapped you back in time 650 years right this very second, how would you use your current knowledge to succeed? 3 weeks ago:
I would die quickly because I don’t have any wilderness survival skills and the land I live in (USA) was inhabited by hunter gatherer tribes whose language is completely unrelated to anything I know and whose customs are completely unknown to me as well. But beyond that, even if I got teleported to England where I at least know a similar enough language to where I could figure out middle English decently quickly, I think people seriously overestimate how useful just having modern knowledge is.
For example, say you want to build a gun. Do you know how to forge a gun barrel with medieval steel and make gunpowder out of bat shit and sulfur? Because I sure as hell don’t. I could probably make gunpowder but how the hell would you get the money to pay someone to make a gun barrel for you? And further, even if you had the skills yourself, basically nobody today deals with raw materials as inconsistent as what they were working with back then and therefore don’t have practice working with them. Even if you introduced something like germ theory to them why would anyone believe you? You’d probably get just as sick as everyone else even with following modern sanitation standards for yourself because nobody else would be. Same with math. Want to speedrun introducing calculus to the world? Good luck trying to prove it to medieval mathematicians without having deep knowledge of euclidean constructive proofs and philosophy to even allow for something like an infinitesimal to exist. There’s very little one person can realistically do to change the world on their own.
- Comment on Ace Attorney became a hit IP only because Capcom pushed past the “failure” of first game, according to former dev 3 weeks ago:
Is there a way to play these games on PC or at least on the Switch or something? I know obviously I could pirate them but I was wondering if a proper port had ever been made.
- Comment on What's the point in getting married? 3 weeks ago:
It greatly simplifies life from a legal standpoint. It’s basically like creating a tiny corporation of two people that can act as a single legal entity. If you’re married it simplifies buying a house together, inheritance, medical decisions, etc. As others have pointed out, these are important especially when your partner’s family don’t approve of you or the relationship especially for LGBT people.
I am going to break the mold though and say the actual ceremony is important too. Declaring your intention to stay together for life in front of your friends and family changes things. It adds a level of security and finality to the relationship- you have to put your money where your mouth is on the relationship. Although people frequently do it, I don’t know how someone can go through the wedding process without reflecting on how big of a deal it is to stand up in front of so many of your friends and family and declare your intention to stay together forever, even without the religious ritual aspect of it. I wouldn’t want to have kids with someone without having this commitment, for example. Ultimately even though marriage is a social construct, I think it’s still a useful one even in a world where women are no longer considered property of men.
- Comment on What do office workers actually do? 3 weeks ago:
I’m a chemical engineer at a plastics company. When I’m in the office I’m looking at data and making decisions based on that, like whether to stop or increase production rates, whether to shut something down for maintenance, or finding what piece of equipment is broken and causing a problem. I also design improvements to the process like finding better ways to run the machinery, new equipment that gets us more capacity, or new ways to control the equipment. I would say about 80% of my time is in the office and 20% is in the manufacturing area.
- Comment on Anon studies Buddhism 3 weeks ago:
Bible stories are the same way, we’ve just heard them a million times so they don’t seem weird
“Hey Jesus what toppings do you want for pizza?” “Plain with cheese” Later the disciples are eating pizza with Jesus "“Hey Jesus why did you say you like cheese pizza when you normally order pepperoni?” “You dumb fucks how dare you not understand my hidden meaning, I am the true pizza and you are the pepperoni, the grease is my blood” “Oh of course, sorry boss”
- Comment on Put him on the cart. 3 weeks ago:
The hammer does +1d8 radiant damage against undead
- Comment on Happy Easter from the POTUS 4 weeks ago:
Pontius Pilates sounds like a much more fun guy who teaches a class at the YMCA
- Comment on And they haven't been back since 4 weeks ago:
If you think Christianity is unique in this regard look towards Buddhism, specifically the Vajrayana branches (often associated with Tibet) and you’ll see even more gruesome imagery than any Christian symbolism. Buddhas drinking blood out of the skulls of their enemies, stomping on corpses, and having sex all at the same time, and even more shocking things. These"fearsome" or “wrathful” manifestation of Buddhist deities that display raw power and the trappings of demons to destroy said demons are relatively common.
- Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts? 4 weeks ago:
I am also curious. I’m spoiled by having access to Bluebeam at work and I have yet to find any software that comes close to the same ease of functionality for editing PDFs, even for extremely basic things like splitting, merging, and rotating pages.
- Comment on good morning bitches 4 weeks ago:
The issue is that this guy just kind of did it without going through any of the normal check steps to make sure he was doing it right or there wouldn’t be any unexpected consequences
- Comment on Anon notices 4 weeks ago:
You seriously misread that if you think it’s about Christmas trees in anything but maybe an abstract way. It’s about wooden idols. Who tf is chiseling their Christmas trees into shapes? I thought maybe this would be about Asherah poles or something at least kind of similar but this is a pretty obvious passage about idolatry.
- Comment on What TV show were you highly excited for, but ended up quickly disappointing you? 5 weeks ago:
Game of Thrones, but mostly because it was so good at the start. Controversially I think the series went to shit in Season 5, or even season 4, basically as soon as they started seriously deviating from the books. It’s extremely clear what is original for the show and what is from GRRM because everything they came up with outside of the book material is stupid as shit and nobody’s actions or motivations make any sense.