barsoap
@barsoap@lemm.ee
- Comment on PROTEIN BRO 4 days ago:
I said nutrient. Beta carotene is a nutrient out of which vitamin a is produced. It does not matter to the body whether you eat beta carotene, or vitamin a directly, the end result is the same: An essential need has been fulfilled.
Fuck off, troll.
- Comment on PROTEIN BRO 4 days ago:
Are you confusing being a pedant with being smart.
- Comment on PROTEIN BRO 4 days ago:
Doesn’t occur directly in plants but can be produced by humans from beta carotene. Carrots, kale, spinach, honey melon, others, the list isn’t exactly short or expensive.
- Comment on PROTEIN BRO 5 days ago:
When talking evolution it’s not just humans, and human behaviour. The fasting metabolism, hunger hormone system etc. is shared through pretty much all of the animal kingdom. We had it before we left the seas. Fish don’t stockpile food, they store it in adipose tissue with about exactly the same mechanism as we do, there might not be much food around, that means increased competition, that means you need to be active, not lethargic, when hungry, and the level of exertion experienced during that fasting time will be taken by the body as the signal how much to bulk up, that’s why growth hormones are highly active at that time.
You can trust that I read up on the stuff or you can do it yourself or you can trust an army of gymbros to have done it.
- Comment on PROTEIN BRO 5 days ago:
There’s not a single nutrient you can’t get from plants or fungi, that wasn’t the issue. But yes it’s literally essential for vegans to know what they need as unlike the rest of us, they are way less covered by simply grabbing something from the supermarket shelf.
- Comment on PROTEIN BRO 6 days ago:
I’d argue the “eat before the workout” advise isn’t right: While you shouldn’t work out directly after eating as your body will direct energy towards digestion, working out on a fasting metabolism is beneficial as fasting comes with high levels of growth hormones. Evolutionary speaking: You’re not hunting when you have food, you’re hunting when you’re hungry. How can you have breakfast before you caught it.
You might not be able to hit peak performance at the tail end of even just an interval fast, but it is going to do all kinds of signalling to your body to put more energy into growing muscle.
- Comment on PROTEIN BRO 6 days ago:
The most infuriating discussion I had online about proteins was with a vegan, their claim was “there is no such thing as essential amino acids”. Couldn’t get it into their head that a) there are essential amino acids but b) yes, unless you eat so horribly lopsided it’s unknown of anywhere but in horribly deprived populations or among some indigenous folks (pretty much only eating manioc or such) there’s nothing to worry about, you’ll get your essentials. Kinda like Vitamin C deficiency being unheard of in the developed world because even the most gutter-rat of diets still contains enough as an antioxidant. Still not a bad idea to pair beans with rice and lentils with noodles or bread, though, IMNSHO they just taste better that way around.
Especially infuriating as it was a vegan. If you choose to have a diet that requires nutritional knowledge to get right then don’t suck at it, and call your fellow travellers out when they’re spewing BS. I really doubt vegans are keen on yet another “I stopped being vegan and it fixed my anaemia” story. Take an apple or two. Either eat them, there’s your iron, or make a sauce that works with a sour/sweet accent and prepare it in an iron skillet, there, even more iron. It’s not hard but you gotta stop pretending that vegans can get by without understanding nutrition.
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 1 week ago:
From all I know none of the systems that people have built come even close to testing the speedup: Is error correction going to get harder and harder the larger the system is, the more you ask it to compute? It might not be the case but quantum uncertainty is a thing so it’s not baseless naysaying, either.
Let me put on my tinfoil hat: Quantum physicists aren’t excited to talk about the possibility that the whole thing could be a dead end because that’s not how you get to do cool quantum experiments on VC money and it’s not like they aren’t doing valuable research, it’s just that it might be a giant money sink for the VCs which of course is also a net positive. Trying to break the limit might be the only way to test it, and that in turn might actually narrow things down in physics which is itching for experiments which can break the models because we know that they’re subtly wrong, just not how, data is needed to narrow things down.
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 1 week ago:
Elon, judging from his twitter takes, understands this stuff even less than you do.
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 1 week ago:
If brains were just very fast and powerful computers, then neuroscientist should be able to work with computers and engineers on brains.
Does not follow. Different architectures require different specialisations. One is research into something nature presents us, the other (at least the engineering part) is creating something. Completely different fields. And btw the analytical tools neuroscientists have are not exactly stellar, that’s why they can’t understand microprocessors (the paper is tongue in cheek but also serious).
But they are not equivalent.
They are. If you doubt that, you do not understand computation. You can read up on Turing equivalence yourself.
Consciousness, intelligence, memory, world modeling, motor control and input consolidation are way more complex than just faster computing.
The fuck has “fast” to do with “complex”. Also the mechanisms probably aren’t terribly complex, how the different parts mesh together to give rise to a synergistic whole creates the complexity. Also I already addressed the distinction between “make things run” and “make them run fast”. A dog-slow AGI is still an AGI.
The brain is not a Turing machine. It does not process tokens one at a time.
And neither do microprocessors. A thing does not need to be a Turing machine to be Turing complete.
Turing completeness is a technology term
Mathematical would be accurate.
it shares with Turing machines the name alone,
Nope the Turing machine is one example of a Turing complete system. That’s more than “shares a name”.
Turing’s philosophical argument was not meant to be a test or guarantee of anything. Complete misuse of the concept.
You’re probably thinking of the Turing test. That doesn’t have to do anything with Turing machines, Turing equivalence, or Turing completeness, yes. Indeed, getting the Turing test involved and confused with the other three things is probably the reason why you wrote a whole paragraph of pure nonsense.
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 1 week ago:
It stuck in popular culture, but time and time again neuroscientists and psychologists have found that it is a poor metaphor.
Notably, neither of those two disciplines are computer science. Silicon computers are Turing complete. They can (given enough time and scratch space) compute everything that’s computable. The brain cannot be more powerful than that you’d break causality itself: God can’t add 1 and 1 and get 3, and neither can god sort a list in less than O(n log n) time. Both being Turing complete also means that they can emulate each other.
Architecturally, sure, there’s massive difference in hardware. Not carbon vs. silicon but because our brains are nowhere close to being von Neumann machines. That doesn’t change anything about brains being computers, though.
There’s, big picture, two obstacles to AGI: First, figuring out how the brain does what it does and we know that current AI approaches aren’t sufficient,secondly, once understanding that, to create hardware that is even just a fraction as fast and efficient at executing erm itself as the brain is.
Neither of those two involve the question “is it even possible”. Of course it is. It’s quantum computing you should rather be sceptical about, it’s still up in the air whether asymptotic speedups to classical hardware are even physically possible (quantum states might get more fuzzy the more data you throw into a qbit, the universe might have a computational upper limit per unit volume or such).
- Comment on Acetone: A Thread 1 week ago:
The gold standard for party bongs is shitpipes. Dunno about other places but for a Euro standard one, you need, bottom to top, 1x 100mm end cap, 1x 100mm sleeve (pipe to pipe coupling), 1x 100mm adapter to 40mm (the 100mm side should fit the sleeve), some length of 40mm pipe, some means to drill two holes, and two things not available at any random hardware store: a preferably metal what’s it called in English the thing that goes into the water and some tissue to tighten that metal thing in its hole, wrap in a taper and twist in. Try to get an adapter that’s angled, there’s also ones with a flat step instead of (quite aggressively) tapering the diameter.
Completely and utterly indestructible at least when it comes to banging it up. In principle also fit to handle acetone those Euro standard pipes are polypropylene but I wouldn’t push it. Tons of water in there, definitely bottom-heavy, and very light when empty.
- Comment on The gentrified forest near me removed the bins. .. From their café/picnic area 2 weeks ago:
It’s not actually much different in Germany, there’s zero bins just randomly lining the streets. Areas with shops will have some, parks and playgrounds usually have one or two, but that’s it. “Park” here is to be understood quite broadly, it might be a footpath with nice view and some benches. Bus stops also tend to have bins.
- Comment on You better say "Thank You"! 2 weeks ago:
Those “high prices for small farms” are in the order of maybe a cent or two per egg. And producing eggs isn’t the whole equation: With distributed production you have lower transportation costs. Not to mention that the US has to have a whole cooling chain for eggs because they rather wash+chill them than adhere to proper hygiene standards.
It’s not like European supermarket eggs would be produced in backyards. Looking at German numbers: About 50m hens in 2258 companies means an average of 22k birds per company, maximum flock size is 3000 (organic) or 4000 (regular).
The US could take its 100k flock sizes and just build some dividers and generally environmental isolation and be much more resilient. But resilience costs money so nitwit MBAs are saying “let’s cut this out, statistics say I’ll have my golden parachute before shit hits the fan”.
- Comment on You better say "Thank You"! 2 weeks ago:
Yes. We usually rather give people money to buy food locally than ship sacks of rice across the world.
Occasionally, we ship some to Ireland to cause a political ruckus there. Sadly couldn’t find any pictures of the famed EU cheese, but have some rice.
- Comment on You better say "Thank You"! 2 weeks ago:
2.39 Euro, free-range, 10 piece. Organic is 3.39, barn 1.99, all incl. 7% VAT. so 12 would be 2.40. Granted, Aldi probably makes 0 profit from the barn ones but there’s only so much they can squeeze farmers. We’ve long since outlawed cages.
- Comment on You better say "Thank You"! 2 weeks ago:
We do have H5N1 here, just like everyone else it’s out there with wild birds and those fly all over the place, it’s been a thing for two decades. Difference being we have regulations and also industrial structure (not as large companies/flocks) which means even if a flock gets infected it’s a much more limited loss.
And of course the completely different hygiene standards: Eggs in the EU must be sold unwashed, which means that companies actually have to keep the barns clean. It’s similar with chicken meat: It’s not like chlorinating chicken would be a health danger to humans, it’s that the hygiene conditions that would make chlorinating necessary, seen from the other side that chlorinating enables, are absolutely unconscionable. That’s why chlorinating is outlawed in the EU.
In another line of thought, though, we should have another class of eggs: Organic barn. The usual better feed, more space etc. but keep them inside, it’s not like chickens mind being inside. Vaccinating them sadly isn’t an option at this point, like it is with salmonella.
- Comment on Anti-acknowlegements 2 weeks ago:
…the dissertation. Which means years of being at a university, though granted it’s unlikely to be 25.
Feminist Hacker Barbie is the proper meme response to that and that’s 2014/15, but chuds tend to live under rocks so that might explain it.
- Comment on Please answer. 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 4 weeks ago:
They also have warehouses in the EU which means that as a customer you don’t have to deal with duties and import VAT at all.
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 4 weeks ago:
In Germany the threshold is around 200 Euro, more precisely up to an import VAT of 10 Euros, where the state can’t even be bothered with the paperwork. 150 for import duties, though that doesn’t apply to alcohol, tobacco and perfume, unless everything is under 45 Euros and both sender and recipient are natural persons and no money has been exchanged.
You don’t want to completely abolish thresholds as you don’t want to spend more money on collecting taxes and duties than you collect. The general strategy of the financial police seems to be to make paying duties as inconvenient for private citizens as possible, they’ll hold back the parcel and you have to go to them, probably a couple of towns over, and fetch it in person. The smart thing to do when buying from alibaba or such is to choose shipping from a EU warehouse as then all the import stuff has been dealt with by the seller.
We still do have duties within the single market, btw, because different taxes on alcohol, tobacco, etc. Relevant mostly for ølvikingar.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 4 weeks ago:
My answer is invariant under whether you intended it to be a joke or not.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 4 weeks ago:
Maybe that should be a reminder to be culturally tolerant and not over-interpret figures of fucking speech. It’s an English metaphor. Have you ever been to England, they love their manicured lawns. Performative outrage, the lot of it. I could say that the AI missed the ball but then the AI would complain about quadruple amputees being insulted over not being able to play sportsball. Cut me a fucking break.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 4 weeks ago:
The GPS is definitely closer to the proper German pronunciation.
- Comment on modern psychiatry be like 4 weeks ago:
Good scissors actually work either way. Blade-wise, that is, not when it comes to moulded handles: With proper blade geometry you do not need lateral pressure from the fingers for them to cut instead of passing each other, and even the exact “wrong” type of lateral pressure works fine. Scissor blades should only ever be loose when the scissors are opened impractically far to cut with. Don’t need to be expensive, only need to be not cheap.
Those chairs should be outlawed for a whole lot of reasons, not just that they’re ignoring lefties.
Note on handwriting, btw: Ball points are a bad habit if you want to develop proper technique, it’s very easy to use too much force, cramp up, etc, even without noticing. Over here kids write with pencils until they have the dexterity to move on to fountain pens: Breaking a pencil tip and having to resharpen is just the right amount of annoying to develop good habits.
- Comment on Actually it's pretty cool 4 weeks ago:
On second thought, assuming equal spacing and same size of torus, less twists actually gives less repeated coils than more twists. An uneven number sounds bad for repeatability, though, and six might either be too much (ions don’t want to twirl that fast) or the coils get too complicated to still be amenable to proper mass production or something.
- Comment on Actually it's pretty cool 5 weeks ago:
Yeah I’m blind that’s four. Having fewer twists means more coils have the same shape so it’s going to be cheaper to build but of course that’s just one dimension of a massive, massive, design space. That’s practically all they’ve been working on since Wendelstein turned on and exceeded everyone’s expectations by behaving exactly as predicted. Wouldn’t make sense to build a thing that gets Q > 1 but can’t compete with at least fossil fuels, in fact that’d be rather embarrassing.
- Comment on Actually it's pretty cool 5 weeks ago:
Ions don’t move along field lines they want to spiral around them that’s why. The shape of the magnetic containment field is actually quite simple, take a donut, squish it a bit, cut it open, twist one end a couple of times and glue it up again. Five times in this case, seems to be a popular choice. It’s the coils generating that field where the geometry gets Lovecraftian.
This is the Proxima Fusion stuff, they’re planning on running the first surplus energy reactor early 30s and commercialise in that decade, the whole thing is designed for mass production with economics (build cost vs. maintenance vs. electricity price etc) in mind from the get-go. And yes they’ll pull it off it’s a spinoff of the Max Planck institute, not some garage tinkerers or VC fund techbros.
- Comment on Germany right now 5 weeks ago:
Are we subscribed to the same sub. Dach talks about literally nothing else but politics right now so don’t tell me ich_iel only having like 1/3rd political posts today is some kind of smoking gun.
- Comment on James Cameron will reportedly open Avatar 3 with a title card saying no generative AI was used to make the movie 5 weeks ago:
All Turing-complete modes of computation are isomorphic so binary or not is irrelevant. Both silicon computers and human brains are Turing-complete, both can compute all computable functions (given enough time and scratch paper).
If non-determinism even exists in the real world (it clashes with cause and effect in a rather fundamental manner) then the architecture of brains, nay the life we know in general, actively works towards minimising its impact. Like, copying the genome has a quite high error rate at first, then error correction is applied which bring the error rate to practically zero, then randomness is introduced in strategic places, influenced by environmental factors. When the finch genome sees that an individual does not get enough food it throws dice at the beak shape, not mitochondrial DNA.
It’s actually quite obvious in AI models: The reason we can quantise them, essentially rounding every weight of the model to be able to run them with lower-precision maths so they run faster and with less memory, is because the architecture is ludicrously resistant to noise, and rounding every number is equivalent to adding noise from the perspective of the weights. It’s just very conveniently chosen noise.