merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on robot slurs 2 days ago:
- Gasbags: Even when doing nothing else, humans are constantly sucking in and pushing out air.
- Slow rotting meat: As opposed to steaks which rot in a day, humans take a few decades to rot, but to a robot which might live for millennia, it’s about the same
- Wet Brains: Unlike a robot, our brains are wet, mushy things.
- Sleepers: How weird must it be to see a lifeform that spends 1/3 of its short existence unconscious.
But, I can also imagine words of admiration from robots for things humans can do that they can’t, for example:
- self-fixers: When a robot part breaks it needs to be repaired. With a lot of injuries, humans just have to wait and the body repairs itself. That would seem pretty magical.
- puzzlers: Humans are capable of lateral thinking in a way robots aren’t. Humans can use analogies to things they do understand, and can reason about things in the physical world.
- stinkers: Could be an insult because of humans pooping, pissing, sweating, etc. But it could also be a play on “instinct”, somehow magically making a good guess about what to do in a new situation that’s outside their “programming”.
- leaders: Robots are good at responding to inputs, but they don’t actually have any motivation themselves. If eventually there’s a robot that’s capable of thinking and wondering, it might wonder what it’s like to do something, not because someone asked, but because you wanted to do it.
- Comment on robot slurs 2 days ago:
Most mechanical equipment doesn’t work well unless it is well oiled, so a properly maintained robot would be oily too. Computers aren’t too oily, but they don’t have very many moving parts anymore. But, a robot would have plenty.
- Comment on I just shitpost🙃 6 days ago:
I’ll bear with you, but I don’t want to get naked with you.
- Comment on I just shitpost🙃 6 days ago:
If you just wanted to follow a topic, you could follow Wikipedia RSS feeds.
If you’re reading and responding to comments, you’re engaging in social media.
- Comment on I 🖤 LaTeX 6 days ago:
Yeah, but I prefer to pronounce latex properly, just like the rubber.
- Comment on I 🖤 LaTeX 6 days ago:
Except that it’s spelled “Latex” with all letters from the English alphabet and there is already an existing word with that spelling, therefore it is pronounced the same way as that word. You don’t pronounce “Laser” as “Lah Seer” even though the “A” comes from “Amplification” and the “E” from “Emission”. Once it became a word, it was pronounced using standard English pronunciation rules.
Latex, like the rubber stuff.
- Comment on You don’t see articles like this about moms with three two jobs who still manage to take care of their kids. 6 days ago:
Hour to hour and day to day that’s probably true. But, nVidia is actually an example of a company where their leadership made some smart decisions decades ago by understanding their market extremely well and correctly predicting what was going to be happening in the industry 5-10 years down the line. For example, he went all in on CUDA almost a decade before the AI went mainstream, and because of that decision, nVidia is the biggest company in the world today.
I would bet that if a major decision came up and you had to decide whether or not to go all in on X, you couldn’t actually do his job.
- Comment on You don’t see articles like this about moms with three two jobs who still manage to take care of their kids. 6 days ago:
It’s also proof that there wouldn’t be major negatives from a wealth tax. These guys love working, it’s not about the money, they all say it. So, let them keep working, but give their earnings to people who need it.
- Comment on You don’t see articles like this about moms with three two jobs who still manage to take care of their kids. 6 days ago:
Also, having no work-life balance is different if you own a significant fraction of the company vs. if you’re on salary.
Like, if Jensen Huang spends 12 hours over the weekend working on something for nVidia and increases the share price by 0.01% (with a $4.165 trillion market cap, this means it goes up $416 million), his personal net worth will go up by $14.7m. Not bad for a little weekend work.
Let’s assume that someone who is on salary is on something absurd like $1m per year and gets a 500% bonus for working overtime. Their 12 hours of weekend work is going to net them $28k. That’s certainly nice, but it’s about 1/500th of what Huang gets. And, your average engineer probably doesn’t get overtime at all, and if they did it would be closer to $3k not $30k.
If someone who owns a business wants to have a bad work-life balance, that’s one thing. But, it should never be expected of anybody who’s just on salary.
- Comment on I 🖤 LaTeX 6 days ago:
Meh, it’s pronounced Latex. I’ve chosen my hill to die on. Pretending it’s a “k” or “ch” sound is dumb.
- Comment on I 🖤 LaTeX 1 week ago:
I had no idea that a software typesetting system was that old. Is that what Homer used to typeset the Odyssey?
- Comment on I 🖤 LaTeX 1 week ago:
The greek χ should be a “ch” sound like “Bach” or “Loch”. And if you copy that last character from the project page or anything it’s definitely an X, not a χ.
- Comment on I 🖤 LaTeX 1 week ago:
English is stupid, but how does “latex” get a “k” ending? I have heard people arguing for years that it’s supposed to be pronounced that way, but never any justification for why.
- Comment on Would you rather unionize or buy some videogames? 1 week ago:
If you think they’ll just roll over and let employees join a union, you have a screw loose. Take a bet on that and you’ll lose.
- Comment on kingdom come 1 week ago:
Like, a big knob of ginger? Or just ginger shavings?
- Comment on kingdom come 1 week ago:
Some sweet potatoes can be very sweet
Yeah, there are sweet tubers. But, you can’t put a raw piece of sweet potato in a fruit salad. If you cooked it to bring out the sweetness it would be as sweet as the fruit in the salad, but it would stand out for being very mushy.
Pulses are incredibly variable too in their usage.
I haven’t heard the term “pulse” before, I’ve heard “legumes”. But, yeah, that group has a lot of variety. Red beans are frequently used as a sweet filling in east Asian cooking, chickpeas as crunchy snacks, etc.
- Comment on kingdom come 1 week ago:
Yeah, that seems likely to me too. Especially because some fruits are designed to appeal to animals who will eat the fruit and then poop out the seeds somewhere, and different fruits will appeal to different animals. A fruit “designed” to be spread by birds will be different to one “designed” to be spread by a hippo.
- Comment on kingdom come 1 week ago:
It is a bit weird that we use some fruits as “vegetables”, like tomatoes and cucumbers. But, other fruits like mango or raspberry are so different from your typical “culinary vegetable” that you have to be very careful in how you use it in a savoury dish. There isn’t the same crossover for other edible plants. For example, I can’t think of any tuber that could sneak into a fruit salad unnoticed.
I guess it comes down to there being a lot more variety among fruits than other edible plant parts. Plus, humans have been tweaking edible plants for millennia. So, who knows, maybe the original cucumber was more “fruity”, but has been tuned over the years to be more “saladey”.
- Comment on salty child 1 week ago:
Na: I will BURN you! You put me in water, I WILL DESTROY THE WATER.
Cl: You can’t even be near me! I will get into your lungs and DESTROY them!
NaCl: I will make your food taste better unless you use TOO MUCH OF ME AND THEN IT WILL TASTE BAD AND YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE WILL GO UP A BIT!
- Comment on Gallium 1 week ago:
What’s weird is that when these videos first started popping up is that every one of them talked about “Astronomer CEO”. I couldn’t understand how they knew he was a CEO or why he was an astronomer. It turns out that Astronomer is a “DataOps platform built on Apache Airflow”. That’s even an area I know a fair amount about, and I’d never even heard of them. It’s strange that it wasn’t just “cheating couple caught on kiss cam”, but instead immediately it was “Astronomer CEO”.
- Comment on Painful moment Coldplay’s Chris Martin accidentally catches tech CEO Andy Byron ‘cheating’ as he cuddles staffer at gig 1 week ago:
Other places I’ve seen this story they were talking about “Astronomer CEO”. I couldn’t figure how how people knew the CEO was an astronomer, and why that mattered. When I found out it was the name of his company, it made me wonder why everyone seemed to know this company except me.
- Comment on Deserved? Poll inside 2 weeks ago:
It’s one of those things that works in movies because it’s something you can get away with if you’re incredibly attractive. There’s a whole stock images category involving girls licking their fingers, mostly in a seductive style. But, in the real world, it’s something you do with your husband or long-term partner, not a random cow-orker.
- Comment on Deserved? Poll inside 2 weeks ago:
“Touching his food” can run the gamut between:
Take one of his potato chips and eat it
to
Stick my thumb in his soup
If a friend or family member took one of my potato chips and ate it, I’d probably be fine with it. At worst I’d be a little annoyed. If an acquaintance or cow-orker did that it would be a little more strange, but not the end of the world. But, the other end of the spectrum is much weirder.
Grabbing a potato chip, if done carefully, will mean not touching anything else. Any dirt or germs on the toucher’s hands aren’t going to get spread around the rest of the food, but touching a liquid or something with sauce on it is different. IMO, touching someone’s pasta is definitely on the germ-spreading end of the scale.
- Comment on USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA 2 weeks ago:
Yeah man, they’re completely nuts!
- Comment on USA 🇺🇸 USA 🇺🇸 USA 2 weeks ago:
From Mr. Lovenstein whose website unfortunately doesn’t seem to work, except to redirect you to Meta-owned socials. Ugh.
- Comment on Pop it in your calendars 2 weeks ago:
Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I’m using calendars wrong, but mine aren’t filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I’m willing to learn. What date should I put “Don’t Buy Subnautica 2” on?
- Comment on Pop it in your calendars 2 weeks ago:
Seeing the underwater world was so much fun. I got it to play in VR and only did that a couple of times, but I completed the original and Below Zero because the exploration and underwater scenes were just so good.
- Comment on we are creators 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on we are creators 2 weeks ago:
The top speed of Columbus’ ships was about 8 knots, and the average speed was about 4 knots, or 7.5 km/h to 15 km/h. Typical jogging speed is about 6 km/h to 10 km/h. So, they were a bit faster than typical running speed. But, those were the cargo ships.
Ships designed for speed were much faster. In 1852 the fastest ship was the Sovereign of the Seas which topped out at 41 km/h.
Probably for a long time the fastest transportation would have been a horse. Or, if you want a “vehicle” or some kind, a chariot. But, for at least a century a fast sailboat was probably the fastest thing around.
- Comment on we are creators 2 weeks ago:
I can be anywhere on the planet within 48 hours
Challenge accepted.
