evranch
@evranch@lemmy.ca
- Comment on the ologies don't like to talk about theo 2 weeks ago:
This would make a good explanation for the bizarre biblical angels, especially having parts of their “body” that aren’t connected to each other. They only appear disconnected in the 3D projection we see, and are actually parts of a 4D organism.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
I draw the line at “overpopulated” when our resource consumption is unsustainable to the point where we are becoming the sole consumer of the planet.
It’s commonly stated that we would need 2 planets the same size to sustain our current population in a way that doesn’t result in eventual collapse.
We’ve cleared vast land areas and scoured the sea of fish in our quest for calories. Eating bugs will not be the solution that makes us sustainable.
It’s been proven our population increases every time we increase our carrying capacity, such as through the invention of nitrogen fertilizer, mechanized agriculture etc. And there has never been a time that there were not people starving somewhere.
If we carry on this path we will be eating bugs and people will still be starving while ecosystems continue to collapse. It sounds like there is no net gain, IMO.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
Valid point. When I grew up fishing for shrimp as a kid I was quite terrified of them until I was taught how to eat them.
I can assume they taste bad, because otherwise we would all be eating them already. Humans eat just about everything on the planet if it’s tasty, even if it’s really weird.
Personally I don’t see the need for it when we have plenty of plant sources of protein like pulses, and we can raise ruminants on otherwise useless land (like my hilly, rocky farm).
It seems to me just an excuse to continue overpopulating the planet. Sure, we could develop new protein sources to feed 10 billion - but if we had kept our population to the 4 billion it was in the 1970s we could all be eating thick beef steaks and salmon without worrying about straining the carrying capacity of the planet.
Maybe we should focus on getting our population down to a sustainable level before we worry about new and exotic foods.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
I still think that, environmentally consciously, we should all switch to a mostly plant based diet and explore meat alternatives without fear.
I don’t have an issue with this statement, in fact I have friends who grow beans and lentils and I cook and eat dry beans every day in addition to my lamb. Plant proteins are healthy and delicious, and they easily stand alongside other standard dishes on our plates. Everyone I know eats a lot of beans.
My issue with the bugs is the same as I have with soy protein. Soy protein has been snuck into all manner of processed foods to boost protein numbers while replacing the higher quality proteins that you would expect in those foods (i.e. many cheap chicken breasts are injected with a solution of salt water and soy protein to plump them up and make you think you got more “chicken”)
I feel like using insects this way just is another step in adulterating our food supply, separating those like you and me who know what we are eating from the “commoners” who will not.
I have no problem with explicitly eating bugs outright if you choose to, I just don’t want to have them snuck into my hamburger at a restaurant.
Interestingly my ex-wife was from Taiwan and had never eaten insects except as a novelty - so it must be a different part of Asia where it’s common. Taiwan tends to like fish, pork and chicken as well as tofu and black beans.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
That’s the problem, it isn’t delicious. That’s why they keep coming up with schemes to use them as a protein additive, like “cricket flour”.
I raise lamb free range on pasture, no inputs other than grass, and that’s what I’ll be eating for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you, that’s delicious.
I would encourage anyone else concerned about factory farming to find a small producer, most of us will gladly even give you a tour and let you see our herds, we love to show off healthy animals on green grass. And we’re often cheaper than the supermarket these days, no greedy middlemen to mark it up.
- Comment on shrimp is bugs 3 weeks ago:
The difference is that shrimp are delicious? Last time you got a bug in your mouth what was your instinctive response?
The great reset is bogus but there’s definitely a “conspiracy” to get us to eat bugs… A boring, capitalist conspiracy. Just the next step in the race to the bottom, another cheap and low quality food that the unwashed masses can afford to keep them alive and trudging off to work.
I will eat bugs when I see the billionaires have them on their plates.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
I bet I know what sort of socks you wear
- Comment on So sweet 4 weeks ago:
Only if I’m truly in the middle of something that’s time or focus critical. Otherwise I’m always glad to hear from my friends.
I have a FWB who I text with 99% of the time but awhile ago she texts “Can I call you? I really need someone to talk to.” Of course! It was a joy to talk to her, she lives in the city, I’m out on the farm. Told her she should call more often.
Like the other comment I despise voicemails though. If I don’t pick up, text me. That’s even my voicemail message now… And still people leave voicemails 🤬
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
I think you’re misreading the point I’m trying to make. I’m not arguing that LLM is AGI or that it can understand anything.
I’m just questioning what the true use case of AGI would be that can’t be achieved by existing expert systems, real humans, or a combination of both.
Sure Deepseek or Copilot won’t answer your legal questions. But neither will a real programmer. Nor will a lawyer be any good at writing code.
However when the appropriate LLMs with the appropriate augmentations can be used to write code or legal contracts under human supervision, isn’t that good enough? Do we really need to develop a true human level intelligence when we already have 8 billion of those looking for something to do?
AGI is a fun theoretical concept, but I really don’t see the practical need for a “next step” past the point of expanding and refining our current deep learning models, or how it would improve our world.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
And it still can’t understand; its still just sleight of hand.
Yes, thus “passable imitation of understanding”.
The average consumer doesn’t understand tensors, weights and backprop. They haven’t even heard of such things. They ask it a question, like it was a sentient AGI. It gives them an answer.
Passable imitation.
You don’t need a data center except for training, either. There’s no exponential term as the models are executed sequentially. You can even flush the huge LLM off your GPU when you don’t actively need it.
I’ve already run basically this entire stack locally and integrated it with my home automation system, on a system with a 12GB Radeon and 32GB RAM. Just to see how well it would work and to impress my friends.
You yell out “$wakeword, it’s cold in here. Turn up the furnace” and it can bicker with you in near-realtime about energy costs before turning it up the requested amount.
- Comment on Life? What do you mean? This ain't life, it's surviving 5 weeks ago:
Nibbler: “What is one life, compared to the entire universe?”
Fry: “But it was my life!”
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
We may not even “need” AGI. The future of machine learning and robotics may well involve multiple wildly varying models working together.
LLMs are already very good at what they do (generating and parsing text and making a passable imitation of understanding it).
We already use them with other models, for example Whisper is a model that recognizes speech. You feed the output to an LLM to interpret it, use the LLM’s JSON output with a traditional parser to feed a motion control system, then back to an LLM to output text to feed to one of the many TTS models so it can “tell you what it’s going to do”.
Put it in a humanoid shell or a Spot dog and you have a helpful robot that looks a lot like AGI to the user. Nobody needs to know that it’s just 4 different machine learning algorithms in a trenchcoat.
- Comment on this one goes out to the arts & humanities 5 weeks ago:
Most claim they can code, but if they were coders they would be coding
I dislike techbros as much as you, but this isn’t really a valid statement.
I can code, but I can’t sell a crypto scam to millions of rubes.
If I could, why would I waste my time writing code?
Many techbros are likely “good enough” coders who have better marketing skills and used their tech knowledge to leverage into business instead.
- Comment on What will happen to large companies once poor people have no more money to use? 5 weeks ago:
All the tradesmen in here to bootfuck this guy with our steel toes
- Comment on High quality channel 5 weeks ago:
Here in Canada “chew” refers almost exclusively to snuff (which is what you guys call dip. Real snuff is called “sniffing snuff” and is super rare lol)
If you want a real chew it’s just called Red Man or “Red Man style” and it pretty much has to be smuggled from the US. The market is almost entirely dominated here by Copenhagen.
I’ve been away from nicotine for years but on the rare chance that someone offers me a chew of Red Man I’ll go for it. That stuff is pretty good
- Comment on Germans: what genocide? 5 weeks ago:
I don’t get this WW3 talk that seems to only be here on Lemmy. Like, does anyone actually expect any countries with significant global influence to line up behind Hamas?
The closest I can think of is Iran, and they’re a regional power at best, and they prefer to work behind the scenes.
No, this will be a nasty little “tempest in a teacup” as always, with lots of onlookers wagging fingers but doing nothing. This is what all neighbouring nations are already doing - in fact they love the fact that Israel’s disproportionate response is damaging their reputation. They’re more than happy to stand by and watch, as they’re the ones who set Gaza up as a punching bag in the first place.
Ukraine is far more likely to evolve into a global conflict, especially with Ukraine’s position weakening and Poland chomping at the bit to jump in.
- Comment on C O L O N I Z E 1 month ago:
Fungus can consume nearly anything organic, but it has to be damp. Even “dry rot” is only dry when you see it, it was once wet for the mycelium to spread through it.
I grew up in a wet climate where we feared mold and fungus, now I live in a dry one where we run humidifiers. You won’t ever see mildew or black mold here without a constant moisture source.
- Comment on Quest 1 becomes near-E-waste Apr 30 1 month ago:
My quest 2 exists to have VD on it
Sounds a lot like a girl I knew back in college. Do you also share it with all your friends and people you barely met?
- Comment on Pierogi were good though 1 month ago:
Among others, Poland runs one of the biggest, dirtiest, least efficient coal plants in the world. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bełchatów_Power_Station
The plant releases more carbon dioxide each year than the entirety of Switzerland.
- Comment on Denuvo Unveils New Tech That Will Make It Easier for Devs to Track Down Leakers 1 month ago:
As a farmer Monsanto has done a lot of sketchy stuff, but I’d like to point out that “terminator crops” actually have a legitimate usage case. There’s few worse weeds than volunteer herbicide-resistant canola, and if it just didn’t come up next year it would be great.
Almost all modern crops are hybrids anyways which don’t breed true. Nobody is saving seed except in very specific cases and even small farmers aren’t even planting bin-run wheat as modern genetics outperform it so greatly.
If you want to save seed there are plenty of open-pollinated varieties out there but unfortunately most of them perform poorly compared to their modern hybrid counterparts, from field crops to garden vegetables.
- Comment on I'm guilty, lol 1 month ago:
I use emojis when talking to specific people, lol with others and some I don’t use any text slang at all.
Strangely because I grew up with lots of phpBB forums, the few of them that I still engage with for things like classic cars and farm talk I always use the emojis because that’s what we always did :mrgreen:
- Comment on Plastic tea bags 2 months ago:
These microplastics are digestible by your immune system, though, which makes them ultimately harmless. PLA is used for drug delivery for this reason.
Being concerned about incomplete PLA degradation is like being concerned about a piece of wood breaking down into micro-woods. Yet even if you get a dangerous shard of micro-wood embedded in your skin, your body can deal with this cellose polymer just fine.
Ultimately it will break down completely someday and in the meantime, nothing will be harmed.
- Comment on What even is the point of delivery anymore 4 months ago:
Super easy, we don’t even blanch. We grow like 20lbs of bush beans, cut tips and tails and chunk to an inch or so long, freeze in bags. Toss straight into a soup or stir fry from frozen. Same for beet tops when we harvest the beets, rinse and chop the tops into packable size, dump into just about anything and they are like fresh.
Some vegetables just do not freeze though, no salads of course, only the kinds that you cook.
I rarely buy fresh fruits except for apples these days as they are always poor quality here, and frozen are excellent and far cheaper. Especially berry type fruit like cherries, blueberries, strawberries etc as they go straight from the field to the freezer plant when they are ripe unlike the supermarket crap.
We keep our own apples in the fridge and cellar, same with carrots, beets, potatoes. Onions hang in the basement. Crabapples we have a huge bounty of and core and quarter and freeze, they are great in a fruit smoothie, pie, applesauce etc.
I would highly recommend an upright freezer over a chest aside from secondary bulk meat storage. I have both, the upright you can select your food much better instead of just eating what’s on top. Everyone says they will dig in the chest, NOBODY DOES. Modern uprights have similar efficiency and power failure performance, and nothing ends up freezer burnt at the bottom.
- Comment on Friendly Reminder 4 months ago:
I love how you still have to defeat them with an axe.
However if the trees get you this hard I would love to know what you thought of the game’s true terrifying jump scare enemy. I’m not mentioning them just in case you haven’t run across them yet… But I’m sure you have, right?
- Comment on What even is the point of delivery anymore 4 months ago:
Questionable whether it’s actually better for the environment as the truck runs every day.
I would say it’s better to have a large deep freeze as the energy it consumes yearly likely wouldn’t even get you to the store and back once.
I go to the city about once a month and go to Costco, which is really a central location that they truck all of the groceries to, and fill my vehicle completely full of the things I can’t grow and store way out here in the middle of nowhere.
I run 2 freezers actually, one I fill with meat when we butcher in the fall, the other with vegetables and fruit from the summer, as well as carbs like perogies, tortillas, breads and buns etc.
I know that obviously most people can’t do this to my extent but you can buy a 1/4 beef from a farmer, 1/2 pork, frozen fruit and veg from Costco, sausage from a butcher and so on. Then you barely have to shop at all.
The convenience sounds great but I would say that’s the main purpose, not environmental reasons. Also, I would be in for the free beer!
- Comment on Eminem concert 4 months ago:
I’ve ignored Fortnite for years but am suddenly paying attention to after these 2 comments. No building? Rocket League arcade racing? I might actually want to play this, at least to try it out
- Comment on The four houses dads belong to. 4 months ago:
I used to be ride or die for Makita as an electrician, but they’ve gone downhill lately and their battery prices are insane! Used to be a Makita could fall off a ladder onto the chuck and bounce. Last year my crew had two drills newly bought that year CATCH FIRE and one strip the gearbox. Embarassing performance.
I’ve pivoted to Ridgid with their dirt cheap batteries with lifetime warranty. And I have a couple Ridgid->Makita adapters to use my new collection of Ridgid batteries with my tough old Makita tools. Battery adapters will free you from that lock-in.
Honestly I’ve been impressed with the Ridgid tools though, same manufacturer as Milwaukee and Ridgid has always been a big brand with plumbers. The brushless tools I’ve bought have been powerful and robust so far. No regrets
- Comment on Poor doggo 5 months ago:
A regular badger is bad enough!
- Comment on Bread 5 months ago:
In days of old, my father ate the bread ends.
Now that I have a daughter, I am the one who eats the bread ends
We do this not because we enjoy them, but because it is our duty as fathers.
That or because otherwise my wife will just throw them to the dog. What a waste of perfectly good bread!
- Comment on Jragon 5 months ago:
code regarding time difference variables
Ugh, I HATE the pointless code required by the stupid time locales, DST, and how many languages force you to play along with it all when all you really wanted was an emulated hardware RTC so you could schedule a task to run 10 minutes from now.