barsoap
@barsoap@lemm.ee
- Comment on Please answer. 1 day ago:
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 1 day 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 1 day 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 2 days 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 2 days 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 2 days ago:
The GPS is definitely closer to the proper German pronunciation.
- Comment on modern psychiatry be like 3 days 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 6 days 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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.
- Comment on What interesting can I do with a dedicated GPU? 1 week ago:
Go download ComfyUI and Blender.
- Comment on German thermostat company Tado locks previously free app behind fake paywall, claiming it's "marketing tests" 1 week ago:
Contact your data protection officer, they collected data that did not need to be collected.
- Comment on ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled 2 weeks ago:
Both are in there, and neither of those are wrong. Generative AI does have serious limitations when it comes to detail control, and it’s also used a lot by people (not necessarily executives) who don’t respect or understand art – even to create things that they then consider art.
The thing is that we’ve had the same discussion back when photography became a thing. Ultimately what it did was free the art of painting from the shackles of having to do portraits.
One additional thing is that I recommend extremely against trying to try and develop art skills by generating AI. Buy pencil and paper, buy a graphics tablet, open Krita or Blender, go through a couple of tutorials for a few days you’ll have learned more about what you need to know to judge AI output than what hitting generate could teach you in a year. How do I know that the eyes in that AI painting have an off-kilter perspective? Because, for the life of me, I can’t draw them straight either, but put enough hours into drawing to look at both the big picture and minute detail. One of the reasons I switched to sculpting.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
A paternalistic, technocratic, party not shying away from authoritarian measures getting re-elected and re-elected does not a dictatorship make. Bavaria does the same but replace technocratic with wiley and corrupt.
- Comment on Leo knew it was a joke and laughed because it was just a joke 2 weeks ago:
ok change 18 to 20, same argument
Not really, one is “I don’t want to go to prison”, the other is “these are too young for me”. Anyway:
don’t tell me there aren’t any single 40yo women interested in him lol
How many of those 40yolds are jealous, and what what kind of social narrative could they be pushing to make him stop dating that young. Also, how many of them would themselves have dated him with a 30 year age gap.
- Comment on Leo knew it was a joke and laughed because it was just a joke 2 weeks ago:
Maybe, instead of not asking those questions, he answers them in a way that you do not agree with? Maybe even based on factors that you overlook?
I’m not quite as old as Leo but that frontal cortex thing is a very hard cutoff. You seem to be very focussed on the “18” thing, that’s not how human development and attraction works. According to the chart he has not dated an 18yold since he was 26.
- Comment on Leo knew it was a joke and laughed because it was just a joke 2 weeks ago:
So you’re not blaming the women, you’re not saying that they don’t know what they’re getting into, either, everyone knows what Leo is up to, so you’re calling Leo creepy for – not questioning decisions the women make?
There’s also a weird characterisation of agency, here. You’re only characterising Leo as an active participant, not the women, you’re saying what Leo does is use things that he has, passively (fame, wealth), to actively “get” women. I’d be much more convinced if you said he’s a good flirt. Are women such passive creatures that when they see someone rich and famous, they just cannot help themselves but spread their legs? I find it hard to reconcile such a narrative with feminism, it’s absolutely regressive.
- Comment on Leo knew it was a joke and laughed because it was just a joke 2 weeks ago:
The frontal cortex matures from roughly 14 to the early 20s, characteristic of that age is to be both impulsive and confused, while the cortex is already fully functional you’re still figuring out what to actually use it for.
That is: In the early 20s you become fully adult. Not in the legal sense (that’s usually 18), but biologically. You’re a grown-up. To argue that they can’t make their own decisions is highly infantilising.
- Comment on Liquid Death Quietly Adds Stevia to Tea Drinks 2 weeks ago:
Liquorice (there’s also an actual root, not just the confectionery) is tummy-friendly, actually recognised as a herbal remedy over here for (mild) gastritis because antiinflammatory and antispasmodic (alongside helping with coughs and having some antibacterial properties) but too much will fuck with your blood pressure. There’s some medicinal teas over here which pretty much only contain it to taste better (otherwise makes no sense in combination with e.g. valerian). The stuff is actually sweet and pleasant, not a neutral but woody sweetness, not to be confused with North European liquorice confectionery where the predominant flavour is Salammoniac. Which are also very good… hey I grew up with the stuff, don’t look at me like that.
- Comment on ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled 2 weeks ago:
It’s incredibly intentional in an entirely distinct but fundamentally related way, since you lack control over so many aspects of it- the things you can choose become all the more significant, personal and meaningful. I remember people comparing generative art and photography and it’s really… Aggravating, honestly.
And that’s not precisely the same for AI… why? Why are the limited choices in photography significant, personal, and meaningful, but not the limited choices people make when generating pictures?
A lot of generative art has very similar lighting and positioning because it’s drawing on stock photographs which have a very standardized format.
Yes. Because the majority of stuff that’s generated by people without much intentionality, by amateurs, or both – but so are most pictures, they just don’t ever even get analysed in the context of being art or not because their purpose is to be external memory, not art. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t control lightning, or that someone who does have a sufficiently deep understanding both of the medium of pictures in general, as well as the tool that is AI, would not, at some point, look at what’s on the screen and ask themselves “Do I want different lightning”. Maybe you do, Maybe you don’t. Like, there’s a reason there’s standard lightning setups, not every work has to be intentional about that particular aspect.
And maybe you want different lighting but the model you use doesn’t provide that kind of flexibility – when you say “still life” it insists on three-point lighting because it thinks one implies the other just as “mug” implies “handle”. You can then go ahead and teach it about different lighting setups, “this is an example of backlight, this of frontlight, this is three-point”, and, with some skill and effort, voila, now “still life with backlighting” works. There absolutely is intent in that. Speaking of models that can do that, here’s usage instructions for one that does.
- Comment on ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled 2 weeks ago:
In principle all samplers are deterministic because they use PRNGs, any and all actual non-determinism you see is due to GPUs, underlying acceleration libraries playing fast+loose with numerical accuracy.
- Comment on ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled 2 weeks ago:
Why not “AI readymades”?
- Comment on ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled 2 weeks ago:
A LLM prompt can’t convey that level of intentionality, because if it did, you would just be writing it directly.
Photography, as opposed to painting, can’t either. Part of the art of photography is dealing with the fact that you cannot control certain things. And yes a complete noob can get absolutely lucky and generate something absolutely stunning and meaningful by accident.
Personally I vibe much more with definitions of art that revolve around author intentionality on the one side, and impact on the human mind on the other and AIs, so far, don’t have intentionality neither can they appreciate human psychology or perception so there’s really no such thing as “AI art” it’s “Humans employing AI as a tool, just as they employ brushes and cameras”, and the question of whether a piece created with help of AI is art or craft or slop or any combination of those is up to the human factor, no different than if you used some other tool.
- Comment on Not the same 2 weeks ago:
It does somewhat resemble offset printing artifacts those commonly occur in manga, but this is supposed to be cross-hatched otherwise the fringes wouldn’t be lines.
- Comment on Not the same 2 weeks ago:
The top right one is definitely not drawn by a human, it’s right out hexagons. Noone cross-hatches like that because you can’t cross-hatch like that there’s no lines going straight through.
The rest could be artistic choice, compression artifacts, or other stuff though. Well, some minor stuff, the topmost book on the left pile on the desk on the right is sus, and there’s way too many sponges at the base of the chalkboard. But none of them are dead tells like the hexagons.
- Comment on Crisps. 3 weeks ago:
I will not be taking lexicographical flak from the colony of our colony appropriating the name “Saxon” for itself. You can have “Anglo”, the Angles left wholesale.
- Comment on Crisps. 3 weeks ago:
Chipsfrish Peperoni definitely have more heat, they’re saying they’re using 10000 Scoville powder (though not how much of it). Generally speaking if order something to be hot in Germany you’re getting Turkish hot, which is about “able to eat pure Sriracha without breathing fire” kind of tolerance level.
But, granted, Pringles is American, I should have guessed.
- Comment on Crisps. 3 weeks ago:
If I read this article right, and I think their picture shows their Pringles stacked same-side up as mine, mine have the flavouring on the other side.
Which side is up in the can was never a question for me, they simply fit my mouth, and presumably mouths in general, better if the long concave side cups the tongue. It could be that they’re simply seasoned on the wrong side over here it’s not like they import them from the US, they’re produced in Poland.
In any case the store brand has seasoning placement down, but as this is Germany you’re limited to paprika and sour cream and onion. Which I will be sticking with in the future.