AnarchoEngineer
@AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on GET THAT BREAD 1 day ago:
Wait didn’t Reddit have its own .onion domain? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the hypocrisy at this point lol
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 1 day ago:
I know :( the issue is I’m in ME and school is fucking expensive. Oh and I am working in a research lab getting paid for my work, not much though.
I would love nothing more than to stay in school and get like 82 different degrees in various topics. I would love to do a PhD in math, and one in physics, and one in cs, and linguistics, and psychology…
But the world forces me to specialize if I want to have enough money to live well. I chose ME because I knew it had a lot of overlap with a bunch of different fields. And yeah I’m taking grad level math and cs courses, but like you said, lots of the stuff I’m interested in is PhD level stuff.
Also Idk if you’re in America, but the money for research here is getting scarcer every day. It could likely be more effective for me to sell my soul to a defense company and then build my own personal lab with that blood money to do research I want to do than it would be to get a PhD and be a professor and simply hope the projects I want to work on will get funding.
Of course that’s assuming the country doesn’t fully collapse (or kill me) before I enter the job force. And assuming I could work for a defense company without deciding to kill myself out of guilt of building civilian killing murder machines.
Anyway, point is that you are right but I lack the financial security to justify trying to get a PhD in math right now.
- Comment on Easy choice 3 days ago:
Lead solder
Probably not good, but also why does my university have lead solder in all the design labs in the first place? Lol
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 3 days ago:
Ah I think I know what this is about now. If you come from a country like Canada where “Engineer” is a protected designation, then I can understand you thinking it’s a lie and I apologize for that misunderstanding.
In America and my state specifically, the word “professional engineer” is protected and requires certification, but “engineer” does not. There were several people in the civil engineering firm in my hometown who were called engineers and only had highschool diplomas, but that didn’t change the fact they were experienced engineers and called engineers.
In other fields of engineering, like software engineering, you’ll find lots of people with the title of engineer without a degree.
I’m sorry that you felt mislead by me calling myself an engineer despite the fact I’m still in school and only an engineer by title for my research. But that was not an intentional deception, simply a discrepancy between our cultural definitions of the term/title.
Also, I have made it far and will likely continue to push on in academia (though I’d like to get out of this country before starting a PhD so that complicates things).
Anyway, I’m sorry that I’ve offended you and that my attempts to explain/defend myself have come off as petulant. I’ll stop engaging with your comments and you should feel free to block me if you don’t want to come across my posts and comments again.
I’m sorry I wasn’t able to explain things more clearly/calmly sooner and for what it’s worth I’ll try to avoid calling myself an “engineer” without a qualifier stating I’m a student or researcher now that I know some places are more strict about the term.
- Comment on Intelligent Design 3 days ago:
Necrobumping this because @chloroken@lemmy.ml linked to it with a misleading description.
TL;DR: @chloroken@lemmy.ml purposefully misrepresented the argument in his link. I didn’t lie nor did he ever prove me wrong, nor was I talking out of my ass in this thread or the other. I share science I think is cool and I find all sorts of science cool even if the research is outside my main field of study. I’ll even admit when my claims are proven wrong or are less certain than I thought (which you can see if you read this full comment section about liver vitamin A).
I’m not “talking out of my ass” in this thread. (Read it btw I mention interesting science) I was doing the research, just like I said, for a personal project on trying to structure a Spiking Neural Net more similarly to human vision, just like I said. This lead me to look into visual processing in the brain and to the structure of the eye since the initial pre-processing of vision actually might start within the retina.
I never mentioned “cuttlefish” but I guess that’s the only cephalopod he thinks of because this was the initial theory of @chloroken@lemmy.ml.
Did you just see that other post about Cephalopod eye anatomy and write this?
I ask because you have a poor grasp of how evolution actually is when you say “evolution makes a mistake”. The truth is that our eyes are one of many layouts in the animal kingdom, it’s not some binary thing like you’re making it out to be.
This was in response to my casual comment about how evolution fucked up our eyes. Obviously evolution can’t really make mistakes because it isn’t conscious but it is the general consensus that our eyes are “inverted” because by the time it became an issue, the system was too complex to easily flip back around (the recurrent laryngeal nerve is another good example of this kind of “fuck up”).
Also obviously there are more kinds of eyes, I never said there weren’t nor did I mean to imply (or think I even accidentally implied) this was binary. Idk why chloroken got the impression that’s what I was saying…?
Anyway, I actually am (and was) doing graduate level research despite being an undergrad. And guess what: you don’t need to have a degree to learn things or read research papers.
I do not write bullshit for people to “be dazzled by the academic tone” (in fact I’ve heard I write to casually in my papers), I “write bullshit” because science is cool and I want to share what I’ve learned with others. Who cares what field of science it’s in, it’s fascinating no matter what.
Do science. Share what you learn. Tell people like @chloroken who just want to be mad at you to fuck off instead of engaging them like I have lol
Oh and to defend myself (and actually brag a little haha) as of now I’ve officially prototyped a real, novel, mechatronics system for use in prosthetics and augmented reality systems, and there’s now a paper in the works with my name first. Point is I don’t think it’s wrong to call myself an engineer. Especially to strangers on the internet who don’t need to know whether I’m a grad researcher or working for a company.
Also I’d go into more detail about my research (the federally funded ones not the hobby ones) but @chloroken@lemmy.ml seems like the kind of person who’d stalk/doxx me. So I really should be more careful about what I say about my personal life.
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 3 days ago:
I haven’t intentionally misrepresented myself in this comment section or the previous one or any others as far as I can think of.
I also have not lied.
So, what is the real reason for the aggression mate?
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 3 days ago:
Ah yes my wildest fantasy: to find out that the ideas I think are new and original have been studied well beyond my level of understanding by other people lol
I hope you’ve never worked in academia. You sound like you really like discouraging people from enjoying science unless they meet your arbitrary education standards.
Anyone can do science. Sure, sometimes people who don’t know a lot learn a little and think they know a lot, but you shouldn’t just shut them down. If someone has a passion for exploration you should encourage them to keep going, catch their mistakes sure, help them question their thought process, but remind them that making mistakes or thinking an idea is novel when it isn’t is something everyone does and they shouldn’t be ashamed for it.
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 4 days ago:
You’re right, we build on the backs of giants. The issue is, typically, anything I discover myself is typically very far below the level where new science can be done OR it is far enough above my current knowledge that I just don’t even know where I’d begin.
Bi intuitionistic logic is the latter category. I was expecting truth tables and instead had to add a ton of words to my vocabulary like “Heyting Algebra” and “Kripke Frame” etc. just to understand what the paper was saying (not that I do fully understand what the papers are saying lol)
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 4 days ago:
First, I said the “new things” were already discovered by dead guys. They’re new to me, not to the world. That’s the point of the comment.
Secondly, I am an engineering undergrad and I don’t think I ever claimed to be working with “ocular algorithms.” I had been experimenting with spiking neural networks and was replicating a research paper on using a two layer inhibition structure to recognize MNIST numbers.
That lead me to question how images were processed in the brain which lead me to read up on the structure of the eye (which you tried to call me out on previously) as well as the structure of the neocortex and the supposed function of each of the visual processing areas of the neocortex.
I’m sorry if I’m coming off as condescending or as “an intellectual giant” I’m a kid with ADHD and curiosity. I like explaining the cool things I’ve recently learned.
As for “what would happen if a professor for an undergrad lab you work at saw the way you write” they definitely already know. In fact my supervisor is pretty supportive of my random tangents into other kinds of science (so long as it doesn’t distract from the work I need to get done). Oh and remember how I said there might be an application for spiking neural nets in one of the grad students projects? My supervisor thinks so too! (though it’s not the one I was thinking of lol)
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 4 days ago:
Yeah I am an undergrad in engineering not math or physics or bio or anything like that. I just get curious and end up going down rabbit holes of niche science.
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 4 days ago:
Nothing kills my motivation more than discovering something new in math and then finding out some dead guy beat me to the punch by several centuries lol
Then again sometimes it’s worse when I expect there to be literature on a topic and then discovering there isn’t even a wiki page for it.
Hell, most recently it was bi-intuitionistic logic. Originally studied in the 40s by one German guy who took bad notes. Main body of work done by a single math grad in the 70s (Rauszer) culminating in her PhD. Turns out there were errors discovered in her proofs and it was proven inconsistent in 2001. Only for two relatively young mathematicians to clear up that there are two separate versions of bi-intuitionistic logic which are consistent. This discovery and proof are found a paper that was published only this fucking year.
I asked a simple question about dealing with uncertainty in a logical system and instead of finding a well studied foundation of knowledge I was yeeted to the bleeding edge of mathematics.
- Comment on Louvre security vs CVS 1 week ago:
Isn’t that the Walgreens w on the wall? Stop gaslighting us! /s
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
I wasn’t meaning that it’s just an evolutionary advantage for neurodivergents. I mean hell I know several neurodivergents with the opposite problem of being unable to keep themselves from eating.
I meant people in general might have the ability to tune out senses while being on a hunt or escaping danger etc. Being able to prioritize focus for the largest danger or the bigger stressor. Since we’re always stressed now days and the danger of starving isn’t likely to be as immediately detrimental as it used to be, some people’s bodies naturally tune down those urges to eat and drink.
And yeah I used to hike and camp a lot and when I did, I tended to feel hunger and thirst more often. Tend to feel calmer in general too. That seems to support my theory that it’s the constant stress of needing to be productive (and the stress of seeing the news and seeing the government drag people from their homes) that contributes to the dulling of our urges to eat or drink.
Out on fire camps in Nevada and California, 113F days will wreck you fast if you’re not downing water and Gatorade constantly. Good news, when in your in the middle of nowhere, only needing to do manual labor, there’s not much else to think about besides how beautiful the land is (before you get sick of it lol), not much to distract you from your body’s indicators.
Anyway, I doubt it has much to do with “drinking coke and other crap” Sure, if you get thirsty and the closest drink is always a Monster Energy, you’re likely not going to drink much else. But that’s not really the fault of the Monster Energy is it?
Hell, I don’t really drink soda at all, but both my sister and her husband drink energy drinks multiple times a day and eat much more snack/junk food than me and still I’d be willing to bet they remember to drink more water than I do.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Lots of neurodivergent people don’t have as clear signals as neurotypical people do. Some ADHD people, like me, don’t get the urge to eat. Even before getting diagnosed and medicated, I only really know it’s time to eat if I start feeling shaky.
I also don’t typically feel thirsty, but eventually my mouth will get dry or I’ll see my water bottle and think “ah yeah I should probably drink something”
I’d imagine lots of people have varying degrees of how strong their bodily urges are and how easily they can ignore them.
It also seems like it’d be evolutionarily advantageous for our ancestors to be able to tune out hunger and thirst when focused on a task. Since there’s always shit going on in the world and we’re always stressed to be “productive” constantly due to capitalism, I don’t think it’s all that surprising that many people (even those who are otherwise neurotypical) are distracted from the urge to eat or drink.
- Comment on Mid Career Marine Biology 3 weeks ago:
And now, introducing Mushu the educated whale who thinks he’s BETTER than you!
- Comment on mandela effect 5 weeks ago:
Fake: clearly the image is wrong because I remember the one on the left being correct
Gay: “mandildo effect” is definitely a Freudian slip
- Comment on How often do guys have a haircut? 1 month ago:
My hair grows fast enough that if I wanted it to stay a specific style it’d need cut probably more than once a month. However, I typically just change the way I part it as it grows. It doesn’t look too bad at any stage, though I basically just slowly transition from looking like a fed to looking like the guys in the fourth Harry Potter movie lol.
It takes about 3-4 months for it to go from 2in on top to being annoyingly long. Probably closer to 5 for it to be like getting in my mouth when the wind blows.
And hey you can have long hair and still look “groomed” btw, just got to figure out how to style it right
- Comment on How Saturday night ended 1 month ago:
The real question is should you? And the answer is obviously yes
- Comment on 🤔🤔🤔 1 month ago:
Why an AI slop image when any number of readily available meme images would work?
- Comment on Anon goes to a steakhouse 1 month ago:
Fake: girl is interested in anon Gay: dude likes “eating meat” lol
- Comment on Use this science wisely. 1 month ago:
If you ask Walter Freeman he’d tell you to go through the eye
- Comment on I saw what you did there 1 month ago:
I don’t think the second bucket would be all that useful.
If the blade is cutting down into the wood like it’s supposed to, most likely the blood would go down into the primary bucket or go all the way around and start turn the walls and ceiling of the garage into a Jackson Pollock painting.
- Comment on Intelligent Design 1 month ago:
I’m an engineer with a CS minor and ADHD; this kind of research is what I do with my freetime lol.
To be fair this is kind of a shared hobby project/topic between me and my friend (who is a biophysics major now in med school).
Anyway, point is that you don’t need to have a real “purpose” in order to be curious. I work in a robotics/medical lab at my university and my friends is trying to be a surgeon, yet we’re constantly in debates about astro and quantum physics to the point we’ve gotten career physicists to weigh in on our arguments.
No relevance to our majors or our work, but super fucking interesting and full of gaps where there are more theories than facts. Plenty of room for new perspectives.
Normalize doing research for fun!
- Comment on Intelligent Design 2 months ago:
SNNs more closely resemble the function of biological neurons and are perfect for temporally changing inputs. I decided to teach myself rust at the same time I learned about these so I built one from scratch trying to mimic the results of this paper (or rather a follow up paper in which they change the inhibition pattern leading to behavior similar to a self organizing map; I can’t find the link to said paper right now…).
After building that net I had some ideas about how to improve symbol recognition. This lead me down a massive rabbit hole about how vision is processed in the brain and eventually spiraled out to the function and structure of the hippocampus and now back to the neocortex where I’m currently focusing now on mimicking the behavior and structure of cortical minicolumns.
The main benefit of SNNs over ANNs is also a detriment: the neurons are meant to run in parallel. This means it’s blazing fast if you have neuromorphic hardware, but it’s incredibly slow and computationally intense if you try to simulate it on a typical machine with von Neumann architecture.
- Comment on Intelligent Design 2 months ago:
I actually came across this for the first time when I was doing research into the visual pathway for the purpose of trying to structure a spiking neural net more closely to human visual processing.
The Wikipedia page mentions cephalopod eyes specifically when talking about the inverted retina of vertebrates.
The vertebrate retina is inverted in the sense that the light-sensing cells are in the back of the retina, so that light has to pass through layers of neurons and capillaries before it reaches the photosensitive sections of the rods and cones.[5] The ganglion cells, whose axons form the optic nerve, are at the front of the retina; therefore, the optic nerve must cross through the retina en route to the brain. No photoreceptors are in this region, giving rise to the blind spot.[6] In contrast, in the cephalopod retina, the photoreceptors are in front, with processing neurons and capillaries behind them. Because of this, cephalopods do not have a blind spot.
The Wikipedia page goes on to explain that our inverted retinas could be the result of evolution trying to protect color receptors by limiting their light intake, as it does appear that our glial cells do facilitate concentrating light.
However, the “positive” effects of the glial cells coming before the receptors could almost certainly be implemented in a non-inverted retina. So that’s the evolutionary duct tape I was mentioning.
It would be difficult to flip the retina back around (in fact since it originates as part of the brain we’d kind of have to grow completely different eyes), so that’s not an option for evolution.
However, slight changes to the glial cells and vasculature of the eyes is definitely more possible. So those mutations happen and evolution optimizes them as best it can.
Evolution did well to optimize a poorly structured organ but it’s still a poorly structured organ.
- Comment on Intelligent Design 2 months ago:
Honestly, it was pretty hard for me to find a source which has made me a little skeptical of my own statements.
I was able to find two case studies in which patients with liver damage that caused them to have low levels of vitamin A exhibited night blindness. Both were treated for vitamin A deficiency and saw symptoms improve.
The strongest evidence of my original claim is the fact that one of the patients had otherwise healthy eyes and vision, only having extreme trouble seeing at night. After receiving treatment for vitamin A deficiency, her night vision improved. This suggests that dark adaptation is dependent on vitamin A in the blood which is regulated by the liver.
However, I’m now somewhat skeptical and curious myself considering these two studies were almost all I could find on this topic. If I have more time I’ll try digging deeper. For now though, I’ve edited my comment with links to the studies.
- Comment on Intelligent Design 2 months ago:
I was able to find two case studies showing direct links from vitamin A levels (and liver damage) to night blindness. I’ve edited my initial comment with the links to them.
- Comment on Intelligent Design 2 months ago:
Bro myopia is the least stupid part of our eye design problems. Our retinas are built entirely backwards for no other reason besides evolution making a mistake and then duct taping over it too much to fix it later.
If your retina was the right way around (like cephalopod eyes) you would have:
- No blind spots
- Higher fidelity vision even with the same number of receptors since the nerves and blood vessels wouldn’t interfere like they do now
- much lower likelihood of retinal detachment since you could attach it for real in the first place
- possibility for better brightness/darkness resolution since blood supply could be greater without affecting light passage
- possibility for better resolution because ganglion nerves can be packed more densely without affecting light passage
- The ability to regenerate cones and rods because you could, again, ACTUALLY HAVE SUPPORT CELLS WITHOUT BLOCKING LIGHT TO THE RETINA
Our eyes are built in the stupidest way possible.
Another fun fact: retinol is regenerated by your liver. Not your eyes, not some part of your brain, not some organ near your head like your thalamus which could probably get the job done if it tried, your fucking liver. Your eyes taking a while to adjust to the dark has basically nothing to do with your eyes; it’s because of the delay in adjustment by your fucking liver to produce more retinal, dump it into your vascular system and wait for it to hopefully reach your eyes. Why are we built like this?!
- Comment on I fast-forward through the songs... 2 months ago:
Futurama had a couple bangers both Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back and, of course, The Devils Hands Are Idle Playthings
Destiny has cheated me by forcing me to decide upon
The woman that I idolize, or the hands of an automaton
Without these hands I can’t complete the opera that was captivating her
But if I keep them, and she marries him, he probably won’t want me dating her
- Comment on Kakapos 3 months ago:
I do love that Aotearoa has incredible avian diversity.
On one hand, we have Kea parrots who are smarter than most of the human tourists they like pranking and stealing from.
And on the other side of the spectrum we have the kakapo: literally the dumbest bird in existence.
Such amazing biodiversity lol