Sergio
@Sergio@piefed.social
- Comment on at what point in life it's too late to go back to school? 3 days ago:
Was gonna say this. Some jobs will help pay for classes (max 1 at a time) and some will even let you take the classes “on company time.” With Distance Education this is easier than ever. I took classes while working for a couple years, then was gonna take a semester off work and finish a Master’s Degree. (but ended up doing a PhD instead.)
- Comment on My culture also loves music, dancing and telling stories 4 days ago:
Traditional German food is supposed to make you sated so you can go back to the fields and work! And the go to the army and fight! And then go to the ruins and rebuild!
This is frickin awesome. Ima tell this to my German-American relative. They come from a family of farmers, come to think of it.
- Comment on I'm definitely 1 lol. 5 days ago:
I’m a number 1 but plain black t-shirt and a button-up long-sleeved shirt that I only ever button if I have to fly somewhere.
- Comment on Fun science fact 5 days ago:
It all makes sense now… You leave snacks out so when the Santa-maggots hatch in the darkness of their chimneys, they can crawl out and be fed. Also why lil kids must never wait and watch, lest the kids themselves be eaten.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
AbFab S3E3: “Patsy persuades Edina to host an orgy. Saffy and her friends plan a genetics lecture.” Guest starring Idris Elba. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb1SEzFCex4
- Comment on Make me feel like a man 1 week ago:
- Comment on Thoughts and prayers. 1 week ago:
There’s a 1957 romantic comedy movie with a subplot about reference librarians feeling threatened that a computer will take over their jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_Set
- Comment on Its all over 2 weeks ago:
On October 11, 1991, during a break from rehearsals for The Royal Family, [Redd] Foxx suffered a heart attack on the set.
…
Foxx did his scripted part of the scene (walking across the back of a chair) while being livid, then immediately fell to the floor. Reese said that nobody initially suspected that anything was wrong, as Foxx was famous for Fred Sanford’s fake heart attacks on Sanford and Son and was particularly skilled at pratfalls. When he did not immediately rise, Reese went to the floor[38] and heard him say “get my wife” twice.[39] Reese called for paramedics.[39] According to Joshua Rich at Entertainment Weekly: “It was an end so ironic that for a brief moment castmates figured Foxx–whose 1970s TV character often faked coronaries–was kidding when he grabbed a chair and fell to the floor."[40] - Comment on Authentism 2 weeks ago:
The tenure commitee was on the fence until they learned that he authored this package.
source
idk I make it up.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
Team Rocket would!
- Comment on TIL smoking is good for your body 3 weeks ago:
bawk
Dang, I didn’t even notice. I’ma spell it that way from now on. I won’t bawk at doing so!
- Comment on We've done it, boys 3 weeks ago:
And yet the somehow charge more for it.
- Comment on PhD student or imperial harem? Same thing, I guess. 3 weeks ago:
I call dibs on being that strategist guy. (I only saw the first season tho, I hope he didn’t get weird in the second season.)
- Comment on Is lemmy dying? 3 weeks ago:
I think all piefed instances rely on cloudflare, tho the recent downtime made em start thinking of how to do otherwise. I keep my old lemmy accounts around in case I need them. e.g. lemmy on slrpnk.net worked OK bc they don’t use cloudflare.
- Comment on Is lemmy dying? 3 weeks ago:
Check out this feed of communities NOT focused on politics, tech, or memes: https://piefed.social/f/highsignal
And here’s a feed of meme/humor-oriented communities NOT focused on politics or tech: https://piefed.social/f/highmemecontent
There are plenty of others, those are just the ones I like.
@uri@infosec.pub
- Comment on Try again 5 weeks ago:
That’s how Peter Watts plays it in Blindsight:
A Brief Primer on Vampire Biology
I’m hardly the first author to take a stab at rationalising vampirism in purely biological terms. Richard Matheson did it before I was born, and if the grapevine’s right that damn Butler woman’s latest novel will be all over the same territory before you even read this. I bet I’m the first to come up with the Crucifix Glitch to explain the aversion to crosses, though— and once struck by that bit of inspiration, everything else followed.
Vampires were accidentally rediscovered when a form of experimental gene therapy went curiously awry, kick-starting long-dormant genes in an autistic child and provoking a series of (ultimately fatal) physical and neurological changes. The company responsible for this discovery presented its findings after extensive follow-up studies on inmates of the Texas penal system; a recording of that talk, complete with visual aids, is available online1; curious readers with half an hour to kill are refered there for details not only on vampire biology, but on the research, funding, and “ethical and political concerns” regarding vampire domestication (not to mention the ill-fated “Taming Yesterday’s Nightmares For A Brighter Tomorrow” campaign). The following (much briefer) synopsis restricts itself to a few biological characteristics of the ancestral organism:
Homo sapiens vampiris was a short-lived Human subspecies which diverged from the ancestral line between 800,000 and 500,000 year BP. More gracile than either neandertal or sapiens, gross physical divergence from sapiens included slight elongation of canines, mandibles, and long bones in service of an increasingly predatory lifestyle. Due to the relatively brief lifespan of this lineage, these changes were not extensive and overlapped considerably with conspecific allometries; differences become diagnostically significant only at large sample sizes (N>130).
However, while virtually identical to modern humans in terms of gross physical morphology, vampiris was radically divergent from sapiens on the biochemical, neurological, and soft-tissue levels. The GI tract was foreshortened and secreted a distinct range of enzymes more suited to a carnivorous diet. Since cannibalism carries with it a high risk of prionic infection2, the vampire immune system displayed great resistance to prion diseases3, as well as to a variety of helminth and anasakid parasites. Vampiris hearing and vision were superior to that of sapiens; vampire retinas were quadrochromatic (containing four types of cones, compared to only three among baseline humans); the fourth cone type, common to nocturnal predators ranging from cats to snakes, was tuned to near-infrared. Vampire grey matter was “underconnected” compared to Human norms due to a relative lack of interstitial white matter; this forced isolated cortical modules to become self-contained and hypereffective, leading to omnisavantic pattern-matching and analytical skills4.
Virtually all of these adaptations are cascade effects that— while resulting from a variety of proximate causes— can ultimately be traced back to a paracentric inversion mutation on the Xq21.3 block of the X-chromosome5. This resulted in functional changes to genes coding for protocadherins (proteins that play a critical role in brain and central nervous system development). While this provoked radical neurological and behavioral changes, significant physical changes were limited to soft tissue and microstructures that do not fossilise. This, coupled with extremely low numbers of vampire even at peak population levels (existing as they did at the tip of the trophic pyramid) explains their virtual absence from the fossil record.
Significant deleterious effects also resulted from this cascade. For example, vampires lost the ability to code for -Protocadherin Y, whose genes are found exclusively on the hominid Y chromosome6. Unable to synthesise this vital protein themselves, vampires had to obtain it from their food. Human prey thus comprised an essential component of their diet, but a relatively slow-breeding one (a unique situation, since prey usually outproduce their predators by at least an order of magnitude). Normally this dynamic would be utterly unsustainable: vampires would predate humans to extinction, and then die off themselves for lack of essential nutrients.
Extended periods of lungfish-like dormancy7 (the so-called “undead” state)—and the consequent drastic reduction in vampire energetic needs— developed as a means of redressing this imbalance. To this end vampires produced elevated levels of endogenous Ala-(D) Leuenkephalin (a mammalian hibernation-inducing peptide8) and dobutamine, which strengthens the heart muscle during periods on inactivity9.
Another deleterious cascade effect was the so-called “Crucifix Glitch"— a cross-wiring of normally-distinct receptor arrays in the visual cortex10, resulting in grand mal-like feedback siezures whenever the arrays processing vertical and horizontal stimuli fired simultaneously across a sufficiently large arc of the visual field. Since intersecting right angles are virtually nonexistent in nature, natural selection did not weed out the Glitch until H. sapiens sapiens developed Euclidean architecture; by then, the trait had become fixed across H. sapiens vampiris via genetic drift, and—suddenly denied access to its prey—the entire subspecies went extinct shortly after the dawn of recorded history.
- Comment on Be that as it may, your bikes still suck. 1 month ago:
They also miss the data you give them!
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 1 month ago:
Right, but I think that’s a good thing, from an LLM-designers’ point of view. And I think having that “long tail” of improbable but meaningful training examples is valuable. Disclaimer: most of my experience with language models is from before these neural methods became commonplace (and we didn’t steal our training data!)
p.s. I kinda liked seeing the thorns, fwiw.
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 1 month ago:
We should use it until it becomes popular then stop using it bc it’s not cool any more.
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 1 month ago:
Harsh! I thought it was just someone with a non-English keyboard that wasn’t configured correctly.
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 1 month ago:
Lunar Astronaut 1: Heaven forbids that now?
Lunar Astronaut 2: Always has.
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 1 month ago:
That’s very interesting. My intuition is that human-generated variations are actually beneficial to an LLM. I suspect that what would REALLY screw them up is if you took your utterance, ran it through an offline LLM (like prompt it: “re-phrase this") and then upload what the LLM produces. But then you’d be looking at, and exposing people to, LLM output all day.
- Comment on Do Americans expect the NK protest to achieve anything? 1 month ago:
Politicians keep track of public sentiment, because it affects their jobs.
People generally don’t want to protest, they just want to get on with their lives. If large numbers get up and start protesting, that means there’s a lot of energy there which politicians can use for campaign phonebanking and canvassing and donations.
- Comment on She's a pain in my rear but she keeps me straight! 2 months ago:
- Comment on It's true... 2 months ago:
Here on the fediverse, you’re treasured NOW, fam!
- Comment on It's true... 2 months ago:
My BFF went to school to be a funeral director, where they learned how to embalm on donated cadavers. So when my BFF was dying, they arranged to have their body donated to a local medical university, kindof as a way of “giving back”. The program didn’t disclose exactly what the bodies would be used for, but they said many of them were used for medical training. Anyway, in both cases (embalming training and medical training) apparently “unusual” bodies are still useful. Also, it greatly reduced funeral expenses because the program provided free cremation afterwards.
So, people should still consider donating their bodies after death, someone will probably find some value in it.
- Comment on Happy Weekend Murica 2 months ago:
Insane Clown Posse - Fuck The World.
- Comment on What flavor are marshmallows? 2 months ago:
I’m glad to hear that. Otherwise we’d be confronted with the possibility of vast factory farms of mature beavers having their “castor sacs” milked daily.
- Comment on What flavor are marshmallows? 2 months ago:
Possibly. But there are several different types of vanilla. Also:
An estimated 95% of “vanilla” products are artificially flavored with vanillin derived from lignin instead of vanilla fruits.
and
However, vanillin is only one of 171 identified aromatic components of real vanilla fruits.
Also you may be amused to know:
In the United States, castoreum, the exudate from the castor sacs of mature beavers, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a food additive,[54] often referenced simply as a “natural flavoring” in the product’s list of ingredients. It is used in both food and beverages,[55] especially as vanilla and raspberry flavoring, with a total annual U.S. production of less than 300 pounds.[55][56] It is also used to flavor some cigarettes and in perfume-making, and is used by fur trappers as a scent lure.
- Comment on What flavor are marshmallows? 2 months ago:
OK, I’ll look at the ingredients.
CORN SYRUP, SUGAR, DEXTROSE, MODIFIED CORNSTARCH, WATER, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF GELATIN, TETRASODIUM PYROPHOSPHATE (WHIPPING AID), NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, BLUE 1.
https://www.kraftheinz.com/jetpuffed/products/00600699003285-marshmallows
Looks like there is some kind of “natural and artificial flavor” besides sugar and corn syrup. Wat are those? Dunno. Apparently it’s legal to have secret ingredients that are not disclosed unless a Non-Disclosure Agreement is signed.
