Schadrach
@Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on Nope 17 hours ago:
…which is amusing because my first thought was At the Mountains of Madness, which apparently was an inspiration for The Thing.
- Comment on Facepalm on multiple levels 17 hours ago:
Sorry, got my racist propaganda films that still show up in film school because they used revolutionary techniques in film making and are thus important pieces of cinematic history mixed up. The Birth of a Nation is the US one, Triumph of the Will is the Nazi one I was thinking of.
- Comment on Facepalm on multiple levels 18 hours ago:
(and no I am not glorifying those monsters)
You don’t have to glorify their beliefs to admit they were fantastic at propaganda and aesthetics. Birth of a Nation was used in film schools for decades afterward for a reason and that reason wasn’t that film schools were all secretly run by Nazis.
- Comment on It's why they tried to get rid of it 3 days ago:
Look at it this way. Pluto didn’t change, we just changed the definition of a planet to exclude it from the cool kids club because if we included it we’d also have to at the very least invite Eris too, and nobody likes Eris (hence the Trojan War).
- Comment on It's why they tried to get rid of it 3 days ago:
No, the opposite; it’s a classic example showing that correlation doesn’t necessitate causation.
Right, but ice cream sales and shark attacks have a shared cause, and it’s the weather. Humans both get in the ocean where they are shark-accessible more often and also buy more ice cream when it’s hot out.
Basically causation is X->Y. But there are other relationships between X and Y, and in the case of ice cream sales and shark attacks it’s W->X and W->Y (one doesn’t cause the other, but they are caused by the same thing). It’s also possible for two things to correlate without any connection whatsoever, because sometimes things just happen to move in the same directions at the same times for a while.
People have trouble dealing with that, and much magical thinking arises from X and Y happening together being believed to necessarily mean X and Y are connected in some fashion because humans are very good at building patterns even when they don’t exist.
That’s literally where the vaccines cause autism thing started from - kids start showing clear signs of autism at about the same age they get several vaccines. The guy who originally proposed it with a deeply flawed study was only specifically claiming it was the combined MMR and not all vaccines generically and produced his study in an attempt to sell a separate MMR series that could be spaced out (rather than being one shot with all three) which would allegedly prevent the effect, because he would directly profit from his vaccine series being used instead of the combined MMR.
- Comment on Horse goals 1 week ago:
and the stuff about apple seeds being dangerously poisonous is just some bullshit
The short version being that apple seeds are in fact poisonous, but you’d have to eat much more of them than you’d find in a single apple, and you’d have to break or crush the seeds in the process to release the poison. The dose makes the poison and all.
- Comment on What Refutes Science... 1 week ago:
AI’s primary use case so far is to further concentrate wealth with the wealthy,
Under capitalism, everything further concentrates wealth with the wealthy because the wealthy are best able to capitalize on anything. Wealth gives you the means to better pursue further wealth.
and to replace employees.
So what you’re saying is that we need to dismantle every piece of automation and go back to manufacturing everything by hand with the most basic hand tools possible? Because that will maximize the number of people needed to be employed to produce, well, anything. Anything else is using technology to replace employees.
Or is it just that now we’re talking about people working office jobs they thought were automation-proof getting partially automated that’s made automation a bad thing?
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 2 weeks ago:
Presuming there are still elections, this is basically calling for a general strike when it will have the most electoral weight. So, basically it comes down to whether or not you believe there will be another presidential election or if we’ll already be a fascist dictatorship by then.
- Comment on AI Traning 3 weeks ago:
In parallel to what Hawk wrote, AI image generation is similar. The idea is that through training you essentially produce an equation (really a bunch of weighted nodes, but functionally they boil down to a complicated equation) that can recognize a thing (say dogs), and can measure the likelihood any given image contains dogs.
If you run this equation backwards, it can take any image and show you how to make it look more like dogs. Do this for other categories of things. Now you ask for a dog lying in front of a doghouse chewing on a bone, it generates some white noise (think “snow” on an old TV) and ask the math to make it look maximally like a dog, doghouse, bone and chewing at the same time, possibly repeating a few times until the results don’t get much more dog, doghouse, bone or chewing on another pass, and that’s your generated image.
The reason they have trouble with things like hands is because we have pictures of all kinds of hands at all kinds of scales in all kinds of positions and the model doesn’t have actual hands to compare to, just thousands upon thousands of pictures that say they contain hands to try figure out what a hand even is from statistical analysis of examples.
LLMs do something similar, but with words. They have a huge number of examples of writing, many of them tagged with descriptors, and are essentially piecing together an equation for what language looks like from statistical analysis of examples. The technique used for LLMs will never be anything more than a sufficiently advanced Chinese Room, not without serious alterations. That however doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.
For example, one could hypothetically amass a bunch of anonymized medical imaging including confirmed diagnoses and a bunch of healthy imaging and train a machine learning model to identify signs of disease and put priority flags and notes about detected potential diseases on the images to help expedite treatment when needed. After it’s seen a few thousand times as many images as a real medical professional will see in their entire career it would even likely be more accurate than humans.
- Comment on Hulu quizzing about the ads played 4 weeks ago:
And, since it’s a subliminal process, it’s extremely difficult to make a concious decision to not buy products you’ve seen or heard ads of.
Instead, I make a conscious decision to not buy products I remember seeing or hearing ads of. If you’re using subtle product placement to subliminally manipulate me in a way I don’t notice, good for you. If it’s obvious enough I remember you doing it then I will not buy your product unless it is already the best deal available (aka the cheapest per unit or best quality per price, excepting products I have had a bad experience with).
- Comment on After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal 5 weeks ago:
Right, emulators aren’t illegal but a bunch of adjacent things can be - for example system BIOS/FW/encryption keys/ROMs if you don’t dump them yourself from your own personal hardware.
What got Yuzu in the crosshairs was announcing support for Tears of the Kingdom before it released, meaning they were testing their emulator on an unreleased game and the odds that every dev and tester had legitimately gotten a copy of the game before official release is so low that they weren’t about to fight it and go through discovery (which might have identified significant additional piracy on their part). It was easier to fold and settle, and probably saved them from an immense amount of fines for piracy used for testing.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Got banned off redit for using an alt to comment on publicfreakout which I was supposedly banned from
If you were banned from a Reddit sub you’ve never posted or commented on, you won’t receive a message informing you you’ve been banned. Mostly likely cause for being banned from a sub you’ve never used is the sub using a bot to preemptively ban people it sees as “problematic” - usually but not always these bots are configured to ban anyone who has ever commented on a list of “bad” subs determined by the mod setting up the bot, regardless of content or context. There are some others, like certain porn subs will preemptively ban any account they detect that has an OnlyFans link.
The net result is if you comment on any remotely controversial sub in any context you’ve likely been banned from one or more unrelated subs, possibly without your knowledge.
This is hypothetically against the mod rules, but not enforced in any way. Mostly because of which subs tend to do it and which subs tend to be targeted.
- Comment on I love my smart TV (From Mastodon) - Repost 1 month ago:
Sounds like an obvious spot in the market for a bullshit-free smart TV. You’d just have to get the UX right.
- Comment on Choosing pink is chaotic evil? 1 month ago:
I was just assuming it was just Power Word: Shit and would effect anyone up to however many hit dice.
- Comment on Choosing pink is chaotic evil? 1 month ago:
To be fair, the president elected two months ago is the oldest asshole to have ever won the office.
- Comment on american culture 1 month ago:
Every couple of years Chinese make a new Sun Wukong move, TV show, or videogame.
Let’s not forget that in the same way you can trace a huge amount of things you see in Western stories to the Greek epics and Gilgamesh you can trace a huge amount of things you see in anime/manga to the Journey to the West.
- Comment on These dames wanting inclusivity 1 month ago:
You’re actually demonstrating my point - I said “a common noun” for one and “a term” for the other. The whole point is that any “acceptable” language for those notions (a person of the sort who possesses female genitals and potentially has ova that she could hypothetically carry to term and identifies as a woman and a person attracted to the sort of person they might hypothetically be able to reproduce with) has to have at the very minimum an adjective if not an entire phrase attached to it.
For example, imagine someone tried to re-popularize the old English words to refer to cis folks, using wifmen for cis women in this example. That would immediately be deemed transphobic, specifically because it’s a common noun to refer specifically to cis women and not a shared category you have to use an adjective or phrase to differentiate from.
Same thing applies to orientation - we have a lot of words for sexual orientations. But a word for a person who is attracted to cis people of a given sex relative to one’s own is unacceptable - the very idea that there could be a term for it is transphobic. Despite sexual attraction being one of those rare cases where what genitals you have and whether or not they’re the original equipment is actually relevant.
Also wouldn’t “gynephile” meaning one who has an attraction to women still not be precise enough, since women includes trans women by definition, at least the feminine ones?
- Comment on These dames wanting inclusivity 1 month ago:
Let’s say yes, since we’re in a hypothetical. Breeding fetish, perhaps? Maybe just someone who’s specifically looking for a long term relationship leading into children?
- Comment on These dames wanting inclusivity 1 month ago:
Except “woman” doesn’t mean “female person” anymore, it means “anyone who identifies as a woman” because attaching any common noun at all for people based on sex rather than gender would be accused of transphobia.
It’s kind of like if someone asked what the term for the sexual orientation of someone who is interested in partners they could hypothetically reproduce with is, the answer is there isn’t one and suggesting there should be will get called transphobic.
- Comment on PEGI gives Balatro an 18+ rating for gambling imagery 2 months ago:
I mean the point of all rating systems in the US was fear of government regulation of content and having to fight that particular legal battle. It basically exists because moral busybodies were upset about Night Trap, Mortal Kombat and Doom.
- Comment on Depressing awful town 2 months ago:
Kraft singles are still cheese. They’ve just been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate.
No, if it was just cheese that’s been pasteurized and adulterated with sodium citrate it would be pasteurized process cheese. A couple other additional additives are acceptable.
When it has other additives but is at least half cheese by weight it’s pasteurized process cheese food.
When it’s pasteurized process cheese product it’s not meeting any of those standards. Often because it’s less than half cheese or an addictive outside the accepted list to meet the other definitions is being used. Milk protein concentrate is an example, but also increasing the fat content with something like vegetable oil or adding flavoring agents to make the result taste more like cheese.
The FDA caught Kraft singles not meeting the definition of pasteurized process cheese food something like 20 years ago which is why it’s labeled a pasteurized process cheese product.
For any curious, the sodium citrate is an emulsifying agents that helps the natural cheeses used melt together smoothly, and pasteurization was originally done to prolong the life of the resultant mixed cheese as the whole original point of American cheese was to reprocess ends and scraps into something homogeneous and comparatively safe for long distance overland transport before refrigerated trucks were a thing.
- Comment on Imperialism, authoritarianism and oppression is bad all around m'kay 2 months ago:
My money is on fusion before proper socialism.
Utopia is literally “no place” for a reason, and anything less than a utopia will be deemed “not proper socialism” (like literally every place that has ever tried some flavor of communism/socialism) so my money is on fusion as fusion is more likely than utopia.
- Comment on Anon meets a girl at a wedding 2 months ago:
What is a second cousin?
Someone with whom your most recent common ancestor is a great grandparent to both of you.
Like how a first cousin is someone with whom your most recent common ancestor is a grandparent to both of you (aka you both have a same grandparent but not a same parent - meaning one of each of your parents are siblings with each other).
If the most recent common ancestor isn’t the same relation for both of you, then there’s probably a “times removed” or one of you is some variety of aunt/uncle to the other.
- Comment on Reactor goes brrr 2 months ago:
…and the fancy steam engine version of solar is probably greener to build that photovoltaics, since it’s basically just a boiler and some mirrors.
- Comment on I hate when a PC game is ONLY available on Epic Games store 2 months ago:
Steam has also been hosting numerous outright neo-Nazi groups for many years (PDF) and never really stepped up effectively against them. User reports and media attention has limited effect.
As a general rule, steam discussion boards for a game are moderated by whoever the developer assigns that power to, and steam user groups are moderated by the group owner or whoever they delegate that power to and Steam doesn’t particularly care so long as you aren’t doxing, openly coordinating harassment, or doing something explicitly illegal in the US.
That’s also the general tilt they’ve taken with what’s allowed on the store since they opened the floodgates - if it’s not illegal and it’s not going to get them sued, it’s probably allowed if properly tagged. Which is why you can find Sex With Hitler side by side with Super Lesbian Animal RPG.
Worst they do is block it from specific regions if the local government requests it - see that game where you essentially play as Hamas fighting against the IDF that they recently blocked from the UK, the one where the largest part of the game description is arguing that the game isn’t antisemitic hate speech just because the enemy are Jewish. The call to block it came after a new patch that apparently added a scenario based on the Oct 7 attack.
- Comment on I hate when a PC game is ONLY available on Epic Games store 2 months ago:
Epic Game store, good: free games, bad: Epic and Tim Sweeney.
Sums up how I feel about them. I have lots of games on my Epic account. I have paid for none of them, and refuse to change that. If it’s an Epic exclusive, it will eventually either release on other platforms, become an epic store free game of the week, or be an epic store freebie on amazon prime. I have enough games in my library I can wait.
- Comment on Subscribe now for more clicks! 2 months ago:
You know what, I’d be all behind a subscription mouse so long as it includes periodic hardware upgrades and unlimited warranty replacements no questions asked so long as the subscription is paid.
Admittedly, I’d be trying to figure out the most interesting ways to actively destroy mice to make them rue the day they thought a mouse subscription was a good idea, but that’s beside the point. Why no, I can’t return the damaged mouse, it’s at the bottom of a hole in the woods no human has been down since the civil war. Just like it was none of your business how I found out that the mouse isn’t resistant to hydrofluoric acid.
- Comment on Git good, son 3 months ago:
I think nowadays they just use Facebook groups to shame men they don’t like. Are We Dating the Same Guy is the usual name for them.
- Comment on Anon takes the horsepill 3 months ago:
I wonder how the two compare in terms of repair-ability.
So long as you have at least two, horses conveniently produce additional horses which makes repair-ability less of an issue. You simply eat the broken horse, if possible.
- Comment on Anon takes the horsepill 3 months ago:
there’s a simple reason for that: You can’t leave your horse for hours on a parking spot. You can tie it up somewhere maybe, but not for a long time, there aren’t many places fit for leaving horses nowadays.
This is why you just need to move somewhere with a significant Amish population first. Like, significant enough that local infrastructure plans around them.