mkwt
@mkwt@lemmy.world
- Comment on I wish I was as bold as these authors. 2 days ago:
This paper should cite On Bullshit.
- Comment on Sci-fi racing platformer Distance gets a surprise update with Steam Deck improvements 3 days ago:
My understanding is that the second Distance campaign is mostly recycled Nitronic Rush levels.
- Comment on How does generative AI create convincing lighting in images? 1 week ago:
The deal with LLMs is that it’s very difficult to say which piece of training material went into which output. Everything gets chopped up and mixed, and it’s computationally difficult to run backwards.
My understanding of the image generators is that they operate one pixel at a time too, looking only at neighboring pixels. So in that sense, it’s not correct to say they understand the context of anything.
- Comment on Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed? 1 week ago:
Like, there’s lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn’t mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie
The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.
- Comment on the truth 1 week ago:
T stands for “terminal count”.
- Comment on American Truck Simulator is heading to Iowa in a future DLC 1 week ago:
Dude, all the work is in the maps, and they generally sell them proportional to the amount of map content. There are two benefits:
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Studio doesn’t have to staff up to do all the content at once, but they still get paid periodically for what they do produce. This keeps the staff employed longer in a more stable position.
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You can pick and choose which areas you want to get. If you want a big bundle, those still show up on Steam too at various levels of discount. But you’re not locked into having to deal with Ohio too.
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- Comment on How do you get people to wash their vegetables when you're at their house and you don't wanna seem rude? 1 week ago:
If you add the fat first, the mushrooms are going to release so much liquid that you just have to boil that off anyway.
- Comment on American Airlines flight attendants say their pay is so low, they fight for airplane meals to save money and sleep in their cars—and they're ready to strike 2 weeks ago:
Flight attendants are covered by the Railway Labor Act. They can’t actually strike. The President can forcibly prevent them from striking. There are serious penalties to be had for any kind of illegal strike.
So what’s been going on instead is an “unorganized” definitely-not-a-job-action where some individual flight attendants do a bad job on service while still fulfilling all of their safety duties.
- Comment on Glad I was too dumb to finish college... 4 weeks ago:
I’ve met a lot of people who don’t seem to understand this important concept from epistemology, which is the philosophy of knowledge.
To demonstrate the concept of “non-falsifiability” I will now produce a short fictitious dialog between a made up Scientist, S, and a Religionist, R.
Topic: how old is the earth? Is it 6,000 years old or more than 4 billion years old?
S: The earth must be more than 4 billion years old, because I found these rocks. These rocks have isotopes in them and they definitely look like they’ve been around for more than 4 billion years. If the rocks are really old, then the earth must be really old too.
R: No. The is only 6,000 years old, because the holy Bible has a list of human descendants from Adam, the first man, to Jesus, who we know was born in 4 BC. If you count it all up, you can find the exact year that the earth was created, as described in Genesis 1, and it’s about 6,000 years.
S: But these rocks… They’re really old…
R: God must have created those rocks with the isotopes already set up in the correct ratios to look like they are 4 billion years old, when He separated the firmament from the heavens 6,000 years ago.
S: But how could God create rocks with different isotopes? When minerals solidify from molten lava, lead isotopes naturally form in this ratio. (I don’t actually know how initial lead composition was established for this)
R: God is omnipotent! Any miracle is within his grasp.
S: But why would God want to make the earth appear to be much older than it really is? What purpose does it serve?
R: I do not pretend to understand the ways of God.
- Comment on Biden, Trump Die 2 Minutes Apart Holding Hands 4 weeks ago:
Here’s my recollection from civics class:
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Each state makes their own laws about whether and when a dead candidate can be replaced on the ballot. It’s entirely possible that citizens in some states would vote for dead candidates, while citizens in other states are voting for different candidates.
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Remember you’re actually voting for the electors that are listed underneath each (now presumed dead) presidential candidate. States make their own laws on how strictly the electors actually have to vote for the guy they pledged to. In many states, there’s no penalty for being a “faithless” elector, and so in this scenario I would imagine that many electors in this situation would exercise their prerogative to vote for a living person who is eligible to hold the office. Perhaps even a re-nominee from their party.
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Electors meet in their state capitols to sign and transmit the real ballots to Congress. However they decide to vote based on the above, I think it’s important to the constitution that this happens by a deadline (December 18?), and if that is missed, we may be in real constitutional crisis territory.
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After meeting, swearing in new members, and electing a house speaker (I really hope they can elect a speaker), Congress meets in a joint session to count the real ballots from step 3. This process is in the constitution. This is the process that was interrupted by a mob on Jan. 6, 2021. Under the constitution, Congress can only go against what the ballots say if there’s a tie, in which case the house votes for president on a one state, one vote basis.
4a. As seen in 2021, Congress could conceivably engage in a deliberative process to determine whether ballots that are presented are real, legitimate ballots or not. The constitution doesn’t actually allow them to do this. This is a real weakness in the system. If Congress isn’t allowed to adjudicate ballot legitimacy, then who is? Apparently no one.
4b. There’s also no alternate process if the majority of elector ballots have elected a dead person. Presumably Congress is required to declare that person President.
- Constitution also says the next president’s term starts on Jan. 20, 2025, at noon eastern, period. No ifs, ands, or buts. If Biden dies in office, his VP Kamala Harris will assume the duties. But that term ends on this date, and the fact that she ascended would have no direct bearing on whether she appears on any presidential ballot.
5a. This turnover deadline literally has no exceptions. If it is missed for any reason, we’re probably in real serious constitutional crisis territory.
5b. If, per 4b, Congress declared that a dead person was elected president, I imagine that person would have a hard time showing up to inauguration on Jan 20. In this case I think that once the turnover has occurred, the normal line succession, which is 17 people deep*, can be used to swear in the next president.
5b1. In this scenario, next up would be the vice president-elect from the elector ballots, probably sworn into the vice presidency first. Third in line is the speaker of the house (I really, really hope they can elect a speaker). Then President Pro Tempore of the senate (the longest serving senator), then cabinet secretaries.
*Most of the 17 are cabinet secretaries. These do not expire automatically when the presidential term expires on Jan. 20. This means that all of the old president’s secretaries are still in the line of succession (unless they foolishly submitted resignation letters) until a president is sworn in and either fires them or makes them resign.
**The presidential term starts at a precise date and time, but a president must swear the oath of office. Both things are in the constitution, so what happens when the time arrives, but the new president isn’t sworn in?
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- Comment on Why has no one thought of this before?! 5 weeks ago:
I believe the project in that episode was actually Atlantropa, a dam across the strait of Gibraltar to drain the entire Mediterranean sea.
The idea was proposed in the 1920s and somewhat entertained by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
- Comment on What year is it? 5 weeks ago:
In the Roman empire it was also common to identify years by the names of the two consuls, because the consuls served one year terms.
Consuls continued to be elected through most of the empire period.
- Comment on Anon wants to ride a zeppelin 1 month ago:
So MRI helium is scarce because the required purity is very high to get the 4 Kelvin superfluid behavior. Helium for filling balloons (of the party type) is a lot, lot cheaper. I don’t know exactly how that translates into airship envelope helium, but you can’t take balloon-grade helium and put it in your MRI machine.
- Comment on The Force should be plural 1 month ago:
The Force should be plural.
Not when you’ve got a grand unified theory.
- Comment on sweet dreams 1 month ago:
General relativity is famously difficult to understand, and I don’t claim to fully understand it, so I’m going to fall back to the famous rubber sheet model.
Imagine the Earth in empty space. The mass of the Earth causes spacetime curvature that extends outward away from the Earth. However, if you look a single little patch of spacetime at some distance, say, 1000 km away, that little patch doesn’t know that it has to be curved because the Earth is 1000 km away. It doesn’t know where the Earth is. It just knows that its neighboring patch is a little bit more curved in the direction that leads to Earth, and its other neighbor is a little bit less curved going away from Earth. This essentially restates the principle of locality: all physics is local physics, and there is no spooky action at a distance.
Now imagine that the Earth moves by some small distance dx in a small time dt. Going back to our little patch of spacetime, it doesn’t know that the Earth moved. So how does it change its curvature to match the new position of the Earth? It changes when its neighbors change. When the Earth moves, the spacetime immediately near the Earth stretches and bends first, then spacetime a little further away, and so on and so on. This process doesn’t happen instantaneously; it takes time for changes to propagate to longer distances. The theory predicts that disturbances and ripples will propagate via waves, called gravitational waves, and that these waves travel at the same speed of light as electromagnetic waves.
Notice I called these spacetime waves “gravitational waves.” It is common to use the term “gravity waves” for typical water waves, of the kind you might see at the beach. Those are not the same type of wave.
Now let’s talk about energy. The Earth in the solar system has some energy, including translational and rotational kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy as it sits in the Sun’s gravity well, and of course its own thermal energy and rest mass. Waves have the ability to transport energy from one location to another without transporting matter, mass, or electric charge. Spacetime waves are not any different. Because the Earth is moving in a periodic motion, it produces a periodic spacetime wave that propagates outward away from the solar system, and that spacetime wave carries some amount of energy away from the solar system. Where does that energy come from? It comes from the Earth, mainly from the Earth’s kinetic energy.
So the story is that the gravitational waves are very, very, very slightly causing the Earth to slow down in its orbit. And following the laws of orbital mechanics, this causes the Earth to fall closer to the Sun. The result is that over the long term, the radius of the Earth’s orbit gets smaller. Alternatively, the Earth’s circular orbit is an illusion, and it’s actually spiraling inward on a very, very, tightly packed spiral. That’s what I meant by “orbital decay.”
I find it hard to overstate just how small this gravitational radiation effect is for a typical solar system situation. We have an observatory called LIGO that can detect gravitational waves. It can measure a variation in distance of a tunnel of several kilometers down to well less than a single proton diameter. (Remember, this is trying to detect disturbances in space and time itself). Even still, it is only able to detect gravitational waves from the most powerful kinds of gravitational events–mergers of black holes and the like.
Essentially: Spacetime is very “stiff” and gravity is very weak.
- Comment on the ologies don't like to talk about theo 1 month ago:
Unitarians have entered the chat.
- Comment on sweet dreams 1 month ago:
If atoms were like the solar system, all of the electron orbits would lose energy and decay by emitting electromagnetic radiation.
The same type of decay does occur in the solar system as the planets emit gravitational radiation, but the decay rate is so miniscule we can’t really detect it.
- Comment on Refreshing 1 month ago:
You can buy “Pickle Juice” brand electrolyte sports drink in stores. Tastes exactly like you would expect. Somewhat popular with distance runners.
- Comment on geoengineering 2 months ago:
Does this guy even understand what Energy is mostly about? What does he want to happen to all of this country’s nuclear infrastructure?
- Comment on The Eurobean Mind Cannot Comprehend 2 months ago:
There’s a blog/website about the logistics.
People have certainly done it. You can ship a vehicle around the Darien gap. Or potentially sell one car and buy another one (probably pay some customs duties).
- Comment on The Eurobean Mind Cannot Comprehend 2 months ago:
It’s weird that it’s not putting you on I-44 from St Louis to OKC.
- Comment on Jon Stewart On The False Promises of AI | The Daily Show 2 months ago:
It’s only a matter of time before these compankes start trying to simulate human brains.
This is why I invoked Moore’s law earlier. People have already estimated how many petaflops or exaflops we need to simulate a brain’s worth of neurons and a complete connectome. We currently don’t have enough computer power. But if the exponential growth continues, we will get there.
- Comment on Jon Stewart On The False Promises of AI | The Daily Show 2 months ago:
A better analogy would be the mass outsourcing of call center jobs to South Asia.
Well that’s where it’s at now. There’s no guarantee it will stay that way. Give Moore’s law several more cycles, and maybe we’ll have enough computing power to make drop in replacement humans.
I think people are misinformed about the current readiness of AI specifically because Silicon Valley VCs have taken a lot of the R&D funding market share from the DARPA government types.
VC funding decisions are heavily oriented around the prototype product demo. (No grant writing!). This encourages “fake it till you make it”: demo a fake product to get the funding to build the real one. This stuff does leak out to the public, and you end up with overstated capabilities.
- Comment on Waffle Squarf 5 months ago:
There’s one state, I believe Indiana, where the big chain Waffle House operates under the name Waffle Shoppe. This is because there was already a preexisting mom and pop Waffle House in the area.
- Comment on Facepalm 7 months ago:
I started Premium as Google Play Music back when. Made sense as an alternative to Spotify. In my book, it still does. Ad-free YouTube is just a bonus for a music streaming service.
- Comment on How do you get an executable from a GitHub link? 8 months ago:
From the main project page on GitHub there’s a button for “Releases”, which can be a source to get exe or zip archives.