barsoap
@barsoap@lemm.ee
- Comment on Transitioning in STEM 1 day ago:
In that specific case it might’ve been an answer to “Do you look at me differently now”, brains like to short-circuit like that, and not everybody is comfortable speaking for the tribe. “Does the tribe like me?” – “Well I do” – “Does the tribe?” – “I’m not the tribe”.
- Comment on Hollywood Is Cranking Out Original Movies. Audiences Aren’t Showing Up. 1 week ago:
Cinemas absolutely should be going semi-arthouse at this point in time. You don’t have to cater to a high-brow crowd to not constantly swim with the latest big-studio mainstream, plenty of people who’d totally go to a screening of Reservoir Dogs and you could actually make money off the tickets. Play it again, Sam.
That said I’m totally a fan of shoddily produced local ads. Like a (back in the day) 9mm recording of the interior of a local hair stylist and some cheesy dialogue so bad it could be from porn. Replace 9mm with a phone camera, same thing.
Also, throw in some student project short films. Do list the proper starting time, with a different starting time for the pre-show, “you won’t be bored if you come early and won’t miss anything when not”, avoids everyone rushing to their seats at the same time.
- Comment on Hollywood Is Cranking Out Original Movies. Audiences Aren’t Showing Up. 1 week ago:
The lemmygrad account I’m replying to is not going to see this comment: I’m permabanned from lemmygrad for fielding ideas that are scary to them. Like it being a bad thing that Russia invaded Ukraine.
- Comment on Torrenting is not allowed on Windscribe 1 week ago:
Yep if you run a seedbox you shouldn’t be surprised if consumer-grade offerings don’t want you on their service, they provision their capacities, whole business model, for a certain average usage.
There’s a huge difference between “I downloaded that ISO because I needed it and am going to seed it 24/7 because I’m too lazy to turn off my PC in the evening” and “I grab every fresh release and mirror it”.
OP you gotta pro up. You don’t want a VPN you want rackspace at a datacentre or IXP. If all you’re seeding really is linux ISOs talking to the right people even might get you free access to overcapacity, as in free transit into whatever your location doesn’t pay transit for, and whatever minute-by-minute capacity doesn’t cost them anything on the upstream (those links are billed by max bandwidth used, not transfer volume, so if there’s a lull in their traffic you can soak it up and all it costs is electricity).
- Comment on PUT. HIM. BACK. 2 weeks ago:
Likely schizotypal, definitely severe social anxiety, a fuckton of phobias, upbringing and class context which was racist AF but still he managed to have good “salt of the earth” black characters in his stories. That is, he imagined black people, with agency and everything, he was not terrified of, that’s not being a piece of shit that’s conscience and hope shining through more existential terror than you can imagine. Hard enough to find rapport with people when you’re schizotypal in the first place (you inevitably, in search for actual connection, start talking to their subconsciousness which often ends in a barrage of projection), doubly and triply so when you’re caught up in upper-class ritual.
So, kindly, fuck off with your normie judgements building the exact barriers that cause the problem you’re judging.
- Comment on SPIRIT WEAPON 2 weeks ago:
You need >700C to decarburise iron you don’t need much for that but coal and a fan, i.e. a bloomery. Pretty much defines the beginning of the iron age. Getting very low-carbon iron is quite easy, you just need enough fuel and air, the trick is then adding the right amount of carbon back. Also, getting rid of impurities, slag inclusions, etc, long story short: Lots of hammering and folding different carbon grades together, though some work can be saved by building very large bloomeries and processing very large batches producing quite slag-free low-carbon iron which then can be case-hardened.
The way out of that is crucible steel, melting your ingredients in an air-tight crucible, but that requires advanced furnace technology that somehow noone came up with before industrialisation, with the exception of India. The banding btw is due to alloy not production method (though you need to follow specific steps to bring out the banding).
- Comment on PROTEIN BRO 3 weeks 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 3 weeks ago:
Are you confusing being a pedant with being smart.
- Comment on PROTEIN BRO 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 [deleted] 4 weeks 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 [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Elon, judging from his twitter takes, understands this stuff even less than you do.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks 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 [deleted] 4 weeks 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 5 weeks 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 5 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"! 5 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"! 5 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"! 5 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"! 5 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 5 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. 1 month ago:
- Comment on Tried to order a part before the tariffs 1 month 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 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month ago:
The GPS is definitely closer to the proper German pronunciation.