agressivelyPassive
@agressivelyPassive@feddit.de
- Comment on Self-balancing commuter pods ride old railway lines on demand 3 days ago:
I could see those as an option for rural areas without much traffic. A full train might not be economical, but a small pod is. It could transport people to the closest proper train station where they can hop off.
But that would mean you’d have to maintain a ton of tracks for a handful of people.
- Comment on Girl power 3 days ago:
Come to Germany then.
German uses generic masculine grammatical gender and the state of Bavaria just banned the practice of “Gendern”, meaning use both forms (male and female).
So you’d have to be referred to as male pretty much always.
- Comment on The cloud is over-engineered and overpriced 5 days ago:
How many companies need such a scale, but are not able to provide it inhouse for less money?
Everyone wants to be Netflix, but 99% of companies don’t even need close to that amount of scalability. I’d argue, a significant part of projects could be run on a raspberry pi, if they’d be engineered properly.
- Comment on be more like dogs 5 days ago:
From what I’ve heard, dogs have problems seeing the relatively low contrasts in darker faces and that freaks them out.
… Or they’re just absolutely racist.
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 1 week ago:
It’s not, and it’s disingenuous to imply that this is what I wrote.
You’re building a straw man.
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 1 week ago:
Then introduce a refund system. Has been proven to work in Germany for over 20 years.
And as I wrote in another comment already: these regulations are a distraction so that the real problems can be ignored. They are actively harmful.
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 1 week ago:
Ask yourself these simple questions: where is micro plastic coming from? And what would be a good lever to reduce that? Bottle caps are not the answer for any of that.
So the result is barely any change in the amount of plastic introduced in the environment, the real big sources (for example the plastic wrapper around the bottles, and around the pallets of bottles) are untouched, but people (like you) become complacent, because we added those cap straps after all!
Yes, reducing even a bit is helpful, but it’s far from being free, because this exact bullshit makes people ignore the real problem. Your view is far too myopic.
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 1 week ago:
It was implemented as a symbol. I described it above.
The entire idea, similar to the carbon footprint, are attempts by the fossil industry to shift responsibility away from them and towards consumers. We from BP and BASF would love to stop pollution, but you guys keep throwing away the bottle caps! So they lobby the European Parliament to enact such regulations, the Parliament can act like they actually did something and the industry can keep producing plastics.
Yes, other solutions would cost more money. But these solutions would have at least a realistic chance to change something.
Remember the straight cucumber regulation? That was demanded by the retail industry. So it’s not like the EU doesn’t enact regulations for some lobby groups.
And if you think these caps are doing anything, the fossil industry fooled you successfully.
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 1 week ago:
And even that is dubious.
How many of the caps are actually reaching the ocean and is that actually a way to reduce that?
I mean, how about a European refund system? Works perfectly fine in Germany and actually makes recycling a bit easier?
These caps are empty gestures as I described above.
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 1 week ago:
…then it scratches my cheek.
Why is it so hard to understand that a useless piece of plastic in your face might be unpopular?
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 1 week ago:
Maybe your bottles are different, but the bottles here in Germany have a very short “leash” and are often connected to the right in two places, so it constantly pushes in your face when drinking.
If an actual problem would have been solved, I’d be fine with it, but it’s just a pointless law which only exists to create the illusion of progress and shift blame onto consumers.
- Comment on The one your friend, Dick, borrows 1 week ago:
Aren’t the PS symbols copyrighted/branded? I read somewhere that there’s some IP involved, so you can’t use the standard symbols.
- Comment on Ok, $23. Final offer. 1 week ago:
Or sellers obviously don’t know, what their stuff is actually worth.
Some want to sell used goods for more than the new price and three times what other offers are.
- Comment on Voyager 1 2 weeks ago:
Say that to corporate. I’m perfectly willing (eager, even) to write actually good software, but I’m forced to work within a budget and on top of the pile of despair we call “tech stack”. Everything is about 20 orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be, nobody has time to do anything properly and everything is always kind of burning.
- Comment on Funding 2 weeks ago:
The Datenelch (data moose) was actually a pretty good meme around 37c3.
- Comment on [Serious] Why do so many people seem to hate veganism? 2 weeks ago:
And I have yet to encounter a single smug vegan. Not online, not offline.
But I’ve seen countless people like you fighting the just fight against vegan windmills (awesome Rügenwalder double reference for the German people here).
So where exactly are those vegans? Are they in the room with us right now? Or are you defining every mere mentioning of veganism as an attack because you deep down are afraid of actually having to confront the cognitive dissonance you’re living under?
- Comment on War 2 weeks ago:
God those guys are stupid. I’ve seen one literally having an aphid on its head and ignoring it.
But seeing them “hunting” is actually kind of scary, I almost feel bad for the aphids.
- Comment on Physics 3 weeks ago:
In the sense, medicine is applied physics, just as everything else.
Thing is, you always break down a problem into just enough details to solve the problem. Not more. No physicist studying, say, airflow over the Atlantic will take quantum effects or relativistic effects into account. Magnetic fields are also ignored. Even clouds are surprisingly “low res” in most simulations.
- Comment on Carnivores 3 weeks ago:
So you’re telling me, they kill beings because they are bad at proper due diligence while soil scouting?
- Comment on Physics 3 weeks ago:
Maybe having halfspheres at the top and bottom? So more like a gas tank, less like a piece of sausage.
- Comment on Physics 3 weeks ago:
Now, how exactly is a penguin toroidal?
- Comment on Physics 3 weeks ago:
That’s pretty much the same in most fields, especially in the engineering direction. Idealized gases are idealized, steel beams are assumed to have a certain stiffness just by convention, and your entire existence is represented by a bunch of form fields stored in a database somewhere.
- Comment on Physics 3 weeks ago:
Yep. All models are wrong, some are useful.
- Comment on Evolution isn't linear. 3 weeks ago:
That’s actually what it’s called in German. Never thought about the implications of the “X evolved to Y” screens.
- Comment on Generative AI is still a solution in search of a problem 3 weeks ago:
And what is the result? Either you have to check the sources if they really mean what the agent says they do, or you don’t check them meaning the whole thing is useless since they might come up with garbage anyway.
I think you’re arguing on a different level than I am. I’m not interested in mitigations or workarounds. That’s fine for a specific use case, but I’m talking about the usage in principle. You inherently cannot trust an AI. It does hallucinate. And unless we get the “shroominess” down to an extremely low level, we can’t trust the system with anything important. It will always be just a small tool that needs professional supervision.
- Comment on Generative AI is still a solution in search of a problem 3 weeks ago:
Even agents suffer from the same problem stated above: you can’t trust them.
Compare it to a traditional SQL database. If the DB says, that it saved a row or that there are 40 rows in the table, then that’s true. They do have bugs, obviously, but in general you can trust them.
AI agents don’t have that level of reliability. They’ll happily tell you that the empty database has all the 509 entries you expect them to have. Sure, you can improve reliability, but you won’t get anywhere near the DB example.
And I think that’s what makes it so hard to extrapolate progress. AI fails miserably at absolute basic tasks and doesn’t even see that it failed. Success seems more chance than science. That’s the opposite of how every technology before worked. Simple problems first, if that’s solved, you push towards the next challenge. AI in contrast is remarkably good at some highly complex tasks, but then fails at basic reasoning a minute later.
- Comment on Generative AI is still a solution in search of a problem 3 weeks ago:
The problem I see is mainly the divergence between hype and reality now, and a lack of a clear path forward.
Currently, AI is almost completely unable to work unsupervised. It fucks up constantly and is like a junior employee who sometimes shows up on acid. That’s cool and all, but has relatively little practical use. However, I also don’t see how this will improve over time. With computers or smartphones, you could see relatively early on, what the potential is and the progression was steady and could be somewhat reliably extrapolated. With AI that’s not possible. We have no idea, if the current architectures could hit a wall tomorrow and don’t improve anymore. It could become an asymptotic process, where we need massive increases for marginal gains.
Those two things combined mean, we currently only have toys, and we don’t know if these will turn into tools anytime soon.
- Comment on ⭐ rockstar developers ⭐ 3 weeks ago:
I’m currently in the “Elvis getting fat” phase.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Again, that’s not my point.
But again anyway, it’s also silly to assume they’re not right in the head. You don’t know their situation. And it’s even sillier to assume that I implied helping them would be wrong. Helping them while endangering yourself and making the situation for the other guy even worse is just stupid.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
That’s not the question here. It’s about intention, not your reaction.
Anyway, the equivalent here would be rather jumping after the guy to rescue him 2min after he jumped. You may endanger yourself and you might rescue a half-braindead shell of a person.
Don’t kid yourself, besides talking him out of jumping, nobody would do anything.