CarbonIceDragon

@CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Jeshus H Christ. Why do they put delicious biscuits in these surprise cans?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem I have with those isn’t the pop (though that was startling at first), its that every single one ive tried has entirely the wrong taste and texture for biscuits. Especially the taste, those always seem to taste so sweet at to be almost like cake, when, to me at least, biscuits should not be sweet at all unless jam or honey has been put on them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do people claim they know of but really don't?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ive seen that said a lot, but the issue Ive long had with it is, people that bring up “freedom of speech” are not always referring to the legal concept that garuntees it, be that the first amendment or some equivalent thing from outside the US. They might be, but they might also be using the term to express a philosophical or ideological position that they believe people ought to be able to say anything without negative consequences, which the person bringing it up can still hold without necessarily believing the law agrees.

  Now, there’s a lot of problems one can point out with that kind of position, I have a few objections myself, paradox of tolerance and all that, but if someone objects that a given action is “against free speech”, and the response is “this isnt illegal that law doesn’t work that way”, that response isn’t actually bringing up one of those problems. The result is that, if the “free speech guy” didn’t happen to literally be under the impression that a crime was just committed and was instead expressing that they believe that it is unethical to prevent them from saying whatever they feel like via any medium they feel like, both people involved are simply talking past one another, possibly in increasing frustration that the other person seemingly just won’t get what they are saying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You ignore lemmy for a couple hours and...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Theres been a few non food ones yeah, like I think the moth memes circulated once here, and the three days no pooping thing. And increasingly absurd trolley problems last election season that occasionally still reemerge. But food seems to be a recurring meme topic

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You ignore lemmy for a couple hours and...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Between this, the beans, the beef stroganoff, the beans, and the beans again, I’m beginning to think lemmy just likes food

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why do reverse thrusters work on an airplane, but a fan on a sailboat doesn't work?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It can be, as long as the sail is set up in such a way that incoming air is deflected backwards to some degree rather than at a right angle to the fan (such as with a curved sail). Consider a still boat in still air (thus with no net acceleration in any direction to start). You push some air forwards towards the sail, then the sail deflects that stream of air outwards and slightly backwards. This means the combined fan-sail system (the ship taken as a whole) is taking in initially still air, and that air ends up with a net momentum backwards, so there must be push forwards. This is very inefficient compared to doing away with the sail and pointing the fan the other way, so theres no reason to do it in practice, but it doesn’t violate conservation of momentum or anything because the ship isn’t a closed system.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Shit posting from the toillet⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  With how many people out there are lactose intolerant, you’d think they’d have found a way to make cheese substitutes actually taste like cheese, or at least good, by now. Been trying to cut cheese from my diet recently for other reasons and have yet to find fake cheese that doesn’t have a terrible taste and worse texture.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨strassen's algorithm kinda hot tho⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect it would be since it would contain the same information, however, unless I was misinformed last time I looked into that (for scifi worldbuilding, so not terribly serious a search admittedly), the computational requirements to run a full physics simulation of a brain at that detailed of a resolution are probably just too high to ever be practical.

  That being said, I really doubt you need to simulate one to the subatomic level, since the basic unit of a brain appears to be the nerve cells, and stuff more fundamental than that just provides the physical basis for those cells to work. Simulate the behavior of neurons accurately enough, and arrange them in the right way, and I’d personally be willing to bet theyd be sentient even if the simulation doesnt model every subatomic interaction within each neuron and just simulates something with the same output for a given input as an average neuron of the relevant type. The difficulty of that shouldn’t be understated, I would not be surprised if theres important but subtle behaviors in biological neurons that we’ve not discovered yet, and even if there arent, we’d want to be sure of it, and more importantly, “arranging them in the right way” is not (I would bet at least) a trivial problem, your brain is after all more detailed than just a lump of identical neurons that form connections at random, it has distinct structures that do distinct things, and that makes me think that the stuff we care about, like consciousness, is probably something resulting from arranging neurons in a specific kind of way, rather than just “thing that happens if you connect a large enough of them together”, else thered be no pressure for those structures to evolve.

  On the other hand, I dont see any particular reason to assume that our brains are the most efficient or only way to do sentience. They exist because of a process of evolution acting on random mutation, not directed design, and while that can make some pretty efficient things, it wont find every solution, because every intermediate step has to be evolutionarily favorable as well and some things wont be that helpful half-made. As such, brains surely must represent at least an upper ceiling on the minimum resources required for sentience. A sentient thing using the amount of energy and matter that a human brain uses is definitely possible, because we observe them, but we have no indication that one smaller or more energy efficient cant exist. Maybe there are some processes that neurons do that have affects on their output, but which arent big enough to have an impact on sentience and can be abstracted away, for example. Im not sure exactly how that translates into the amount of compute you’d need, because brains are of course not digital computers, and simulating one with a digital computer is an extra step over just making a structure that directly does the stuff brains do.

  Im not an neuroscientist or an AI or computer science expert and I imagine the intersection of those fields is where youd find the kind of person that could really give a useful answer. My gut feeling is that, given that humans dont need such massive amounts of energy to run or all the world’s information to train our minds, that our current way of doing AI is fundamentally extremely inefficient, and if some way can be found to create sentience with the technology we have, theres probably also a lot of room for making it more efficient too, to the point that I would be unsurprised if we dont have the compute needed already and just dont yet know how to actually use it to create that result. I kind of hope that its not figured out for awhile though- not because I think that a sentient AI would take over the world or something but just that, well, an actual sentient AI would hypothetically be a person, by many standards, and I see no way that, being created by corporations seeking a return on investment and with no legal rights whatsoever, it wouldnt just be a very high tech slave with all the ethical issues that poses and more. So, I hope that it takes long enough to figure that all out for the system that develops that technology to be replaced with something different, and hopefully more thoughtful for the ethics of it all. Thats probably wishful thinking on my part, but its something thats worried me about the whole AI boom. I dont think that what’s currently being sold is really as smart or capable as the marketing makes it out to be, but also that if it was, it wouldnt be ethical to use it as just a tool, and either way that doesnt paint the AI industry in a good light. Not that I really need to convince lemmy that theres something rotten there given its general sentiment towards AI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨strassen's algorithm kinda hot tho⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Any intelligent system that exists within our physical universe is going to ultimately be some material object that behaves in a manner that can be described with math, but that does not mean that any math that can be used to create human-readable text represents a humanlike intelligence, its gotta be the right kinds of math to get the specific set of emergent properties that result in our consciousness, and when we dont even entirely understand how it all works and what all you need for it in humans, replicating our internal experience at this point in time would require our attempted approximations to hit upon all the right answers for it more or less by accident, which seems unlikely. (I know you were being sarcastic but on the surface “brains are also just thing doing stuff” isnt an absurd response to this kind of meme so I thought it could use a reply anyway.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Awwwwww yiiiiiissssssss⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At some level I think, both are true, the frog’s part is pretty obvious, but I do think there are a great many things that I would not have known, or even known enough to be curious about, without the internet, along with people, to include a number that I now know in person and am very close to, that I never would have met. Humans are biased to notice the bad side in something more than the good, and it’s easy to take the benefits of the internet for granted as part of the “default” way things are, while noticing the harms it brings because, well, they hurt.

  More to the point though, I think now that anything that does the blue part, will also get you the green part. The trouble is that the world is simply too big to comprehend. There are too many things to know, going on in too many places, to be well informed about more than a fraction, and too many people to know or feel kinship with all of them. Therefore, increasing information available and the number of people one can talk to will, and inheritly must, change you in a way that leads to a different sort of division.

  Every faraway or global problem you become aware of and come to care about takes up time and attention from some other thing you would have done or learned or cared about instead. Every person you come to know takes up slots in Dunbar’s number that otherwise would have been filled with someone else, and the fact that you get some choice over what slice of the world you come to know means that those people you associate with are likely to care about the same problems and ideas as you, and those who dont will seem almost alien by comparison, caring for strange and seemingly irrelevant or problematic things while seemingly being unable to understand that which you find so obviously important. You probably seem the same to them.

  I don’t even think anymore that this is necessarily a bad thing. The same happens without online connection after all, it’s just defined by geographic region more than by the people themselves. Existing in a “forced” space with no alternatives can be problematic for those people who do not fit in well with their family or neighbors, who nowadays at least can find community with others like them, and when people from different “tribes” do have to work together due to physical proximity, the diversity of knowledge available in that group is greater than if they all shared one perspective.

  There are of course genuine problems to be addressed with attention driven algorithm or with platform owners manipulating social consensus with their power, but doing so wont suddenly make humans not tribalistic, or suddenly all informed about everything, or even everything you, or me, or any other individual person finds important. They are worth solving, but realistically the benefits of doing so aren’t creating a single global community whose members understand everything that it’d be beneficial for them to understand. Humans just don’t have the bandwidth and time to facilitate that.

  Aand now after typing on my phone for half an hour Ive noticed this is the shitposting community and I’m way overthinking it. Oh well, that’s what I get for never bothering to pay attention to what community things are on I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I love English food⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The US south gets it’s revenge by putting ice and an unhinged amount of sugar into tea.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is being an "Incel" a new thing or new terminology? If so what were they in like the 70's or 80's?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Goober? Ive usually only seen that one used as a sort of endearing tease between friends accusing the other of being silly, never seen it used to describe either a person’s love life or their politics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can one individual get Nestle, Amazon, Google, Apple, Disney, and Blackrock to go out of business?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Be the richest person ever, buy them, and then shut them down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨*Throws grenade and runs*⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It, if it is imagined as using a similar underlying technology, would also be an example of that technology that is both far more mature and understood (at least until the writers want to use it as an excuse for whatever shenanigans of the day) than current AI tech, and more capable, and also not shoved into everything in an attempt to force people to use it so that it’s owners can extract more of everyone else’s shrinking supply of money, and also not part of an economic house of cards that people are told will eventually impoverish masses of people when it inevitability collapses.

  It’s like saying that in the 21st century we have decorative plants and everyone loves those, to a dutch person from the 1630s who has complaints about the tulip industry.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When will we learn⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  • design a thing with a reward system that trains it to take a certain action *

  • get upset at your creation because you didn’t want it to do what your design led it to do *

  Sounds kind of like what some of those AI company people do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Far and No Further⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think its a satire on AI company people saying we’re close to a technological singularity, given the “we’re asking for a pause” is a phrase commonly associated with that

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Congrats on your big win!!!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Abstract concepts dont tend to have the capacity for surrender, after all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Contrast⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I wonder what growing the pumpkin in a space station would do, the fruit wouldn’t have to be able to support its own weight at that point

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are we at a point in human history where we can get robotic limbs and other things to better our day to day lives? Like a robotic arm where I can pick up 100lbs with one arm and so forth?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So, robotic limbs kind of exist to a degree in the prototype stage, but like, a robot arm by itself isnt going to let you casually lift 100lbs regardless of how advanced the arm itself is, unless you also have a spine, legs and attachment for that arm capable of handling that lifting too, or some kind of wearable exoskeleton to take the weight off those areas

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tasty!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Tried this once after townsends (cooking yt channel that makes old timey food) said that it was really easy and good. Was easy. Was also terrible, do not recommend. Can bake a potato for exactly the same effort and get something 10 times better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe that’s why alien ships in star trek often have such dim lighting- that’s how ships normally are and human ships are an exception slowly reverting to the mean

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cookies policy⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Like the one sub I still miss from reddit

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨onions⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Can confirm. Didn’t like onions as a kid, always thought they were useless and added no flavor to a dish. Got older, learned a bit more about how to cook them and now I like putting onions in things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Drop your unpopular opinions here because c/unpopularopinions is filled with popular opinions⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That “modern” architectural style where you get houses that often have flat roofs, blocky structures, large glass walls and the rest usually white plaster or unpainted wood (idk the name but I think most people have seen it and I see people hating on it more often than not. I dont mean brutalism since what im talking about doesn’t usually have unpainted concrete everywhere but it looks maybe related) looks pretty good actually. Not every example sure, but in general I find the aesthetic pleasantly futuristic looking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I met a traveller from an antique land...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ive sometimes had the thought that an alternate reading of that story could be that Ozymandias’s works really were so great as to cause the almighty to despair, so much as to be motivated to destroy them out of spite.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We Are A Different Breed⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  People tell their family and bosses what their “main” social media handle is?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CMV⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Who designs robots with dicks? Sex-tox companies in a society that has relatively cheap consumer robots, presumably.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tbf, aren’t the argonians in lore basically magically bioengineered by some intelligent trees in order to have a means to keep tabs on and defend themselves from the world outside their forest? It’s not really absurd for them to have some mammalian traits if they’re intentionally designed to interact with mammals and not naturally evolved. (actually, is anything naturally evolved in that setting, rather than being directly designed by deities?)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wrote the thing you replied to before I learned about the DDOS thing

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Im inclined to believe that there were death-threats. I dont agree with what this person did here, but it should be considered that there is a certain segment of the population that has sufficiently poor consideration for others or emotional regulation that they will send death threats to people that make them angry, and, importantly, while this segment may be more or less common in some groups, that tendency in itself does not force a person to hold or not hold a given view (even ideologies or ethical systems that condemn death threats, because plenty of people out there are hypocritical). As such, these people can be expected to exist in any sufficiently large group, to include whatever groups you, I, or anyone else consider to be an “in-group”. The tesseract dev got a lot of people mad, so, it would honestly surprise me if they didnt get a few such threats just given the sheer number of chances for one of the angry people to be of the sort to send them. If anything, Id expect a shittier person to be slightly more likely to get them just because people like that tend to do more things that make people mad at them, though this should not be taken as saying that people that get death threats are necessarily shitty people or that they’re deserved.

  That stuff aside, Ive had mixed feelings about this whole affair. I do agree that the hidden blacklist thing was way out of line, but I find that most of the criticism Ive seen doesnt really give the right reason (in my point of view) for why it was out of line. (Namely, Ive seen a lot of it framed as “this is censorship, its wrong to make software that intentionally does not display posts from specific people/places”. I dont think I really like this argument, because I think a lot of the people making it havent really considered the implications of it thoroughly. Its generally considered acceptable for users to block other users for example, for moderators to ban users from a community, and for instances to defederate from other instances if they feel the need, and these things also prevent one seeing the posts of affected users, they just happen at a different layer than tesseract did. It is censorship, yes, but one cant expect to be entitled to the attention of others, theres simply too many people that have things to say, even important things, for it to be otherwise, nobody can possibly pay attention to everyone, nor is it healthy to try, so there must be systems in place that allow one to ignore those one doesnt want to see in favor of those one does.

  The problem in my view is one of consent: if tesseract had made it known upfront that using it without disabling some default setting also opted the user into its developer’s personal blocklist, then, well, it wouldnt be much different than when people on microblog platforms share blocklists with others, or when people choose an instance based on that instance’s federation decisions. I would not personally have wanted to use it, as I have different ideas of what I want to block and not block, but I dont think that in theory it would have been unethical for it to exist in that state. However, while the dev themself seems to have thought that they had done enough to make this feature known, based on one of their responses to the controversy at least, they clearly did not, else the public response to the list’s exposure would not have been outrage so much as “well yeah, thats what that program does, dont use it”.

  Part of this I think is that while moderation decisions are expected of an instance, they dont tend to be expected from alternate UI software, so, what would have qualified as “making it known upfront” would necessarily have to have been been very blatant. As it was, they certainly didnt meet that bar, and it was very plausible for a new user to find tesseract and end up using this guy’s list without knowing about it. This isnt something Ive seen come up in the angry response nearly as often as just “he’s blacklisted people that I dont think ought to have been, doesnt he know blocking people is bad, what an authoritarian!”. Though of course, I havent seen every post about this whole deal so its possible that I simply have missed that criticism and just seen the angry memes.)

  While Ill agree that self-reflection in their part would have been the most desirable outcome, I dont think it was ever really a realistic one. I doubt that any but a small fraction of the population would really be capable of anything but defensiveness when they have managed to anger thousands of strangers into yelling at them, its not a situation that humans are really well adapted for or handle well, given that the conditions we arose in would not have allowed for it nearly as easily as those of today do. As such, I think that just leaving in frustration, while not a satisfying resolution or a perfect one, is probably the best ending that could reasonably hoped for here. The other likely outcome would have been doubling down further and keeping the anger going, and by leaving there’s at least a chance that they might reflect on what happened once emotions have a chance to die down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are we really doing this again?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Could be worse, we could be on the three day challenge again