ignirtoq

As far as I’ve ever been paying attention, conservatives only argue in bad faith. It’s always been about elevating their own speech and suppressing speech that counters theirs. They just couch it in terms that sound vaguely reasonable or logical in the moment if you don’t know their history and don’t think about it more deeply than very surface-level.

Before, platforms were suppressing their speech, so they were promoters of free speech. Now platforms are not suppressing speech counter to them, so it’s all about content moderation to protect the children, or whatever. But their policies always belie their true motive: they never implement what research shows supports their claimed position of the moment. They always create policies that hurt their out-groups and may sometimes help their in-groups (helping people is optional).

They had the goodwill of the community when they decided to develop an open source browser engine to keep the likes of Microsoft from taking over the Internet and dictating the rules

That’s some revisionist history if I’ve ever read any. From what I can find, the first version of Chrome was released in 2008. In the 4 years from 2004 to 2008, Internet Explorer market share dropped from 90% to 70%, with Firefox making up most of that difference at 20% market share and still rising. Microsoft dominance was already solidly in decline to an open source competitor.

Yes, Firefox was far from perfect, hence why Chrome adoption shot up and quickly over took Firefox and then Microsoft products, but to say stopping Microsoft’s stranglehold of the Internet was the reason Chrome was created is a complete fabrication. Google wanted to harvest your data from day one of the Chrome release. That’s always been the primary goal.

Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling.

I wonder if this is an attempt at smoothing out the differences between authentic video and AI-generated video from the other side. Secretly pass authentic videos through an AI filter not to improve them in any way, but to give them AI-generated characteristics. Then when purely AI-generated videos start to show up side-by-side on the platform, it becomes harder to differentiate from human-created content.

My understanding of why digital computers rose to dominance was not any superiority in capability but basically just error tolerance. When the intended values can only be “on” or “off,” your circuit can be really poor due to age, wear, or other factors, but if it’s within 40% of the expected “on” or “off” state, it will function basically the same as perfect. Analog computers don’t have anywhere near tolerances like that, which makes them more fragile, expensive, and harder to scale production.

I’m really curious if the researchers address any of those considerations.

Did blockchain solve it? Is blockchain actually pragmatically solving that problem better than existing alternatives? Or is the cost of adopting a blockchain payment system as the primary payment system, with all the risks inherent in it, higher than the benefits when compared to alternatives?

misused

Give me an example of a real world problem that was either unsolved before blockchain solved it, or blockchain solves it better than existing alternatives.

I’ll go ahead and save you “decentralized currency/finance between untrustworthy entities” (i.e. cryptocurrency) because it doesn’t actually (and can’t actually) solve that in the real world. Humans are too error-prone, and an immutable ledger presents too high a risk for business-ending mistakes for any business with any alternative options to adopt it for their primary revenue pathway.

We enable OCSP in hard-fail mode, meaning that if the revocation status of a certificate cannot be verified because the CA cannot be reached, then it will be treated as broken.

The fact that not every application that uses TLS certificates does this blows my mind. Certificate revocation should be a valid tool to deal with the compromise of cryptographic credentials, but if applications don’t check, then they’re opening themselves (and their users) up to a security vulnerability.

Several years ago I created a Slack bot that ran something like Jupyter notebook in a container, and it would execute Python code that you sent to it and respond with the results. It worked in channels you invited it to as well as private messages, and if you edited your message with your code, it would edit its response to always match the latest input. It was a fun exercise to learn the Slack API, as well as create something non-trivial and marginally useful in that Slack environment. I knew the horrible security implications of such a bot, even with the Python environment containerized, and never considered opening it up outside of my own personal use.

Looks like the AI companies have decided that exact architecture is perfectly safe and secure as long as you obfuscate the input pathway by having to go through a chat-bot. Brilliant.

A balloon full of helium has more mass than a balloon without helium, but less weight

That’s not true. A balloon full of helium has more mass and more weight than a balloon without helium. Weight is dependent only on the mass of the balloon+helium and the mass of the planet (Earth).

The balloon full of helium displaces way more air than the balloon without helium since it is inflated. The volume of displaced air of the inflated balloon has more weight than the combined weight of the balloon and helium within, so it floats due to buoyancy from the atmosphere. Its weight is the same regardless of the medium it’s in, but the net forces experienced by it are not.

I don’t follow Mexican politics closely, but this could be part of an effort to curb obesity. I’ve heard they introduced taxes on sugary drinks for this, so this might be another avenue.

If people are wanting cheap snacks, and private companies are only making unhealthy ones, you can introduce regulations to micromanage what they can produce, or you can introduce a complex taxation process to disincentivize sugar snacks. Or you can introduce your own product that meets a perceived unmet demand in an underserved market.

Oppenheimer was already really long, and I feel like it portrayed the complexity of the moral struggle Oppenheimer faced pretty well, as well as showing him as the very fallible human being he was. You can’t make a movie that talks about every aspect of such an historical event as the development and use of the first atomic bombs. There’s just too much. It would have to be a documentary, and even then it would be days long. Just because it wasn’t the story James Cameron considers the most compelling/important about the development of the atomic bomb doesn’t mean it’s not a compelling/important story.

They keep tasking these LLMs with things that traditional programming solved a long time ago. There are already vending machines run by computers. They work just fine without AI.

Honestly the computer controlled vending machines are already over-engineered since many of them play ads when you walk up. The last customer-focused feature added was credit card support, and that just needs a credit card reader and a minimal IoT integration. They really shouldn’t even have screens.

Why are they… why are they having autocomplete recommend medical treatment? There are specialized AI algorithms that already exist for that purpose that do it far better (though still not well enough to even assist real doctors, much less replace them).

The size of the cut is what they use for the appeal to the public to build their social narrative, but legally/economically speaking it’s not really the problem. The problem is that Apple effectively forbids developers from having any other mechanism to transact with customers except through their marketplace where they take the 30% cut, hence the lawsuit being about monopolistic practices, not the amount they’re charging.

Valve handles things completely differently. Sure, listing on the Steam store requires giving Valve a 30% cut of the purchase price, but Steam doesn’t demand a 30% cut of any and all transactions that happen within or related to the game like Apple does. You also don’t have to buy a game from the Steam store to load it and launch it from the Steam client. And Proton works with a lot more games and applications than just those on the Steam store.

The fact that the two companies charge a similar price for a single relatively similar business case oversimplifies a lot of how the two companies operate.

The article talks about “Ultraviolet (UV) light boxes, which emit only a narrow bandwidth of light that is not linked to skin cancer,” so it’s possible the UV treatment and the drugs can be combined.

Somewhere there’s a quality control engineer with tritanopia who got assigned this job one day without warning and is desperately employing the “fake it until you make it” strategy.

Even more surprising: the droplets didn’t evaporate quickly, as thermodynamics would predict.

“According to the curvature and size of the droplets, they should have been evaporating,” says Patel. “But they were not; they remained stable for extended periods.”

With a material that could potentially defy the laws of physics on their hands, Lee and Patel sent their design off to a collaborator to see if their results were replicable.

I really don’t like the repeated use of the phrase “defy the laws of physics.” That’s an extraordinary claim, and it needs extraordinary proof, and the researchers already propose a mechanism by which the droplets remained stable under existing physical laws, namely that they were getting replenished from the nanopores inside the material as fast as evaporation was pulling water out of the droplets.

I recognize the researchers themselves aren’t using the phrase, it’s the Penn press release organization trying to further drum up interest in the research. But it’s a bad framing. You can make it sound interesting without resorting to clickbait techniques like “did our awesome engineers just break the laws of physics??” Hell, the research is interesting enough on its own; passive water collection from the air is revolutionary! No need for editorializing!

The use of “quantum leap” isn’t about comparing the absolute size of the change to quantum phenomena. It’s about the lack of a smooth transition. Quantum leaps in physics are instantaneous transitions between states with no intermediate. That’s the idea with the colloquialism: a sudden shift from one state to another without a smooth transitional period.

I cannot imagine already being married and going through that tectonic of a shift of worldview. I had pretty much figured out I couldn’t be Christian by the time I got to college and met the woman who would become my wife. She was still very strongly Christian, and I was okay with that and didn’t push anything. I’m just a naturally curious person and read a lot of nonfiction and like to talk about what I read, and she is a naturally curious person, too, so she would enjoy the conversations. And after talking about the history of philosophy and philosophical ideas and how that intersected with religion, she had a worldview-shattering realization that the concept of the soul wasn’t handed down by God to early Christians, it was borrowed from non-Christian philosophy that was around at the time in roughly the same geographic area. It was another in a long line of philosophical diffusion of ideas that happens everywhere all the time in human history. Nothing intrinsically earth-shattering in itself to students of history, but that was her equivalent of Rhett’s evolution moment.

It was devastating to her, and it took years for her to figure out who she even was after that. I think it worked out as well as it did partly because I came from the other side and had already thought through a lot of the questions (What is morality without God? What brings value to our lives without God? Etc.) and could help anchor her and prevent nihilistic spirals while she figured herself out. I can’t imagine being married to someone still very much entrenched in the worldview I realized I had to abandon. I honestly think I would be terrified of how they would react: I came into my realization on my own, and so it came as an internal struggle, but now presenting this major change in myself and the way I want to lead my life to my partner, I represent in a way an external threat to their worldview and their way of life. In the face of that kind of threat, people can act drastically differently from the kind of person you have come to know them as through normal interactions. And however they react, it’s going to set the course for the rest of both of your lives.

I’m going to have to watch the full interview.

What’s the y-axis, and how exactly are you measuring it? Anybody can draw an exponential curve of nothing specific.