Sergio
@Sergio@piefed.social
- Comment on TIL smoking is good for your body 11 hours 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 1 day ago:
And yet the somehow charge more for it.
- Comment on PhD student or imperial harem? Same thing, I guess. 2 days 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? 6 days 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? 6 days 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 2 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. 4 weeks ago:
They also miss the data you give them!
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks ago:
Lunar Astronaut 1: Heaven forbids that now?
Lunar Astronaut 2: Always has.
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 5 weeks 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? 5 weeks 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! 1 month ago:
- Comment on It's true... 1 month ago:
Here on the fediverse, you’re treasured NOW, fam!
- Comment on It's true... 1 month 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 1 month ago:
Insane Clown Posse - Fuck The World.
- Comment on What flavor are marshmallows? 1 month 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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.
- Comment on What flavor are marshmallows? 1 month ago:
There’s a distinct flavor
Yeah, when I was a kid, there were like 2-3 difference places I could get soft-serve ice cream from, and at one of them the vanilla flavor was marshmallow-like and it was my favorite.
I don’t have an answer, tho. For all I know, it was just a distinctive type of vanilla.
- Comment on photopea.com now locks out users blocking ads 1 month ago:
I think you’re taking heat a little bit unfairly. This is, after all, the MILDLY infuriating community, and it can be a hassle when something stops working for you, even if it’s perfectly reasonable for it to happen.
- Comment on Sleep Guide 1 month ago:
No way, that’s the guy who said the industrial revolution and its consequences are a disaster for humans.
source
/s
- Comment on It's true 1 month ago:
or the octagon of MMA
- Comment on What is a good source to read about thought experiments? 2 months ago:
Have you taken a look at the plato.stanford.edu entry on such, specifically the bibliography?
- Comment on Shakes pear 2 months ago:
- Comment on POV: me mentoring my juniors 2 months ago:
That sounds an awful lot like “don’t do anything that might upset the Christians.”
FWIW I interpreted this as unironically uplifting, along the lines of “Where the Wild Things Are”.
- Comment on Who the fuck needs an x axis anyway 2 months ago:
This graph will live forever, in intro classes, as an example of how not to do things.
- Comment on DO IT! 2 months ago:
“Who will simp the Simpsons?” -Juvenal, probably
- Comment on Well then 2 months ago:
See, when I was in grad school I once had to calculate an agreement metric from a bunch of labels on a corpus. No problem I said, the math is easy, I can write a script in an hour or so. Fam that mfing script took me two freaking days bc there were always some little bugs or weird edge cases I hadn’t thought of. So the deal I made with myself was: I would use Matlab or a stats library or something like that, BUT I would make sure that I understood the math beforehand.
But for whatever reason, I never had to calculate a standard deviation. Thinking about it, someone else might have done that for papers I was co-author on, though.
