GamingChairModel
@GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
- Comment on Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term? 1 day ago:
I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here’s a list of major legislation.
- Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
- The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
- The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
- Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
- School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
- Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
- Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.
That’s a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.
Plus that doesn’t include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).
- Comment on What is a good eli5 analogy for GenAI not "knowing" what they say? 2 days ago:
The idea that these models are just stochastic parrots that only probabilisticly repeat their training data isn’t correct
I would argue that it is quite obviously correct, but that the interesting question is whether humans are in the same category (I would argue yes).
- Comment on What is a good eli5 analogy for GenAI not "knowing" what they say? 2 days ago:
Harry Frankfurt’s influential 2005 book (based on his influential 1986 essay), On Bullshit, offered a description of what bullshit is.
When we say a speaker tells the truth, that speaker says something true that they know is true.
When we say a speaker tells a lie, that speaker says something false that they know is false.
But bullshit is when the speaker says something to persuade, not caring whether the underlying statement is true or false. The goal is to persuade the listener of that underlying fact.
The current generation of AI chat bots are basically optimized for bullshit. The underlying algorithms reward the models for sounding convincing, not necessarily for being right.
- Comment on Doesn't the need for a permit fundamentally contradict the US's ideals of free speech? 2 weeks ago:
Two important concepts:
- The First Amendment allows government to impose “time, place, and manner” restrictions on protected speech. So if you give a speech protected by the First Amendment, the government can still regulate your use of sound amplification, including things like regulating noise levels at night or in residential areas. If you assemble in an assembly protected by the First Amendment, the government may still enforce fire code restrictions like occupancy limits in a building or weight limits on a platform, or even permitting requirements for all of the above.
- The First Amendment also distinguishes between public forum, limited public forums, and nonpublic forums. The government must allow people to use things like theaters and stages for First Amendment speech and expression, but doesn’t have to do things like let protestors onto restricted military bases to protest.
Permitting is one way to regulate time, place, and manner. Also, it’s a way to prevent double booking. A city-run community theater might allow for one church to hold services on Sunday, and a first come first serve policy might cause the city to deny access to another church that wants to use the exact same place at the exact same time.
So a specific lawn on a public university campus might require permitting in a way that complies with the First Amendment, if the permitting is used to:
- Prevent overcrowding beyond safe limits
- Prevent excessive wear and tear on the grass/landscaping
- Prevent multiple groups holding incompatible activities in the same space
- Prevent interference with actual governmental functions (e.g., not disrupting classes being held)
- Keep the First Amendment protected activity within the actual zones where that is permitted
People can and do engage in First Amendment protected activity outside of those lines, of course. Sometimes the point of a protest is to break the law: civil rights sit ins, marches on specific streets, etc. But the organizers and the governmental authority generally need to work at defining those lines clearly, so that any decision to break the law is conscious and planned.
- Comment on Parents with genuinely good looking sons but mostly daughters. How do you make sure they don't build their whole personality around looks? 3 weeks ago:
A big part of parenting is simply modeling your own values. If I think it’s important for people to be beautiful, and treat beautiful people better, then the kids will pick up on that and internalize those values. Regardless of what they look like themselves.
I’d like to think my values are different from that, where I value other characteristics (intelligence, knowledge, humor, compassion, empathy) in the people around me, and tend to try to build friendships and spend quality time with those people rather than the most beautiful people I can find. And for strangers and one-off interactions (as a customer or whatever), there’s no reason to be more deferential or more kind to the beautiful people.
- Comment on Parents with genuinely good looking sons but mostly daughters. How do you make sure they don't build their whole personality around looks? 3 weeks ago:
Yup, this is exactly it. When I praise their appearance, it’s always something my kids actively did: picked out an outfit, styled their hair, etc., or even grooming and hygiene choices.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
My kids have a book called “solitary animals,” explicitly framed as introverts in nature, and from what I remember of it, it mentions pumas, octopuses, sloths, and eagles.
- Comment on Why do Americans measure everything in cups? 5 weeks ago:
Precise measurements are still helpful for learning. When I first started baking bread I had to measure by weight to get 60, 65, or 70% hydration, but at this point I can figure it out by look and feel, at least for the specific flours I’m familiar with.
- Comment on Why do Americans measure everything in cups? 5 weeks ago:
Imperial measurements were based on arbitrary things, metric has specific scientific definitions for their weights.
What do you mean? A pound is legally defined as 0.45359237 kilograms.
And the kilogram is defined:
The kilogram, symbol kg, is the SI unit of mass. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.62607015×10^−34 when expressed in the unit J⋅s, which is equal to kg⋅m^2 ⋅s^−1, where the metre and the second are defined in terms of c and ΔνCs.
These are all currently defined off of the same universal constants, just with different multipliers, which are all arbitrary numbers: 6.62607015 is just about as arbitrary as 0.45359237. Hell, the number 10 is arbitrary, too, so we still use a system for time based on dividing the Earth’s day into 24 and 60.
Like, I get that there’s some elegance in the historical water-based definitions derived from the arbitrary definition of length, but the definition of “meter” started from about as arbitrary a definition as “foot” (and the meter was generally more difficult to derive in the time of its adoption based on the Earth’s dimensions).
- Comment on With public key cryptography, why can't someone decrypt a message using the public key? 5 weeks ago:
Look at the Diffie Helman scheme, with the example used in the Wikipedia page.
- Alice and Bob agree in public, for everyone to see, that they’re gonna start with p=23 and g=5.
- Alice has a secret key 4, and doesn’t tell anyone (not even Bob). She plugs her secret into the formula g^secret mod p, or 5^4 mod 23. 5^4 is 625, and dividing 625 into 23 gives a remainder of 4. So she tells Bob in public that she derived the number 4 from her secret.
- Bob has a secret key of 3, does the same thing, and calculates 5^3 mod 23, which results in the number of 10, tells Alice.
The magic of this scheme is that taking each side’s result and applying the same secret gets to the same final result. 10^4 mod 23 turns out to be the exact same number as 4^3 mod 23. So both sides get to the secret shared key 18, without disclosing that their secret numbers were 4 and 3, respectively.
But if you try to drive the secret key from the information publicly exchanged, you’ll basically have to try each number until you get to the right one. It’s inefficient, and basically impossible to do once you’re using very large integers (300+ digits long).
- Comment on If hot air rises, why is it colder at the top of a mountain? 5 weeks ago:
To add to this, the force of gravity at the top of Mt Everest is about 99.7% as strong as sea level. So you’re right that it’s not about the strength of gravity itself at that particular point, but about the weight of all the air above that point.
- Comment on Please Stop 2 months ago:
This makes them perfect for ledgers or transaction networks.
It doesn’t scale well, so it generally works best for ledgers of relatively small scale. Anything that might need to go beyond that small scale will run into technical/performance issues.
- Comment on I'm at a roulette table. I only bet on red. When I lose I triple my bet, when I win I restart. Is this a roulette strategy? 3 months ago:
It’s 3^n, not n^3. n^3 is actually way slower.
- Comment on Why are batteries in phones always measured in mAh instead of Wh like for example notebooks? 8 months ago:
I spent billions of nanodollars on lunch today
- Comment on Why are batteries in phones always measured in mAh instead of Wh like for example notebooks? 8 months ago:
five thousand mAh
Isn’t that just 5 Ah though