lvxferre

lvxferre, 9 months ago

Maybe that’s why I remember the first time that I had wasabi. Oh wait, it’s because my mouth was on fire.

Jokes aside, I’m a tiny bit sceptic on the claim due to the funding. Good news for sushi enjoyers if true, though.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

Baking soda raises the pH. (Low pH = acid; high pH = alkaline. Yes, they’re switched.)

Alkalinity catalyses caramelisation and the Maillard reaction, that’s why meat gets to brown more. However in acid environment both processes happen mostly the same as if they were in a neutral environment, acidity doesn’t really prevent this sort of browning. (I’m glad for this, otherwise my Sunday roast would be really sad. I often leave the pork marinading in lemon juice for a day, and it still browns just fine.)

lvxferre, 9 months ago

Typically 1~10. Four right now (all four are Lemmy: inbox, another thread, front page, this thread)

I close them as the tabs bar feels cluttered and/or I see no reason to keep them open.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

A lot of times you don’t need to buy containers, you can reuse the ones where your food came from.

For example inside my freezer there are three ice cream pots, but none of them has actual ice cream - it’s tomato paste, chickpeas, cat food. In the past I’ve also reused margarine and requeijão pots to store leftover food, as makeshift planters, etc. The requeijão pots even worked as drinking glasses in my uni times.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

1. The person says “I don’t know” fairly often. It shows that the person is not quick to draw conclusions, based on little to no information; this is gold, it means avoiding a lot of personal drama where they could blame you for things that they assume that you did.

2. They’re generally on the same page about common acquaintances as you.

lvxferre, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

That’s different. I’m talking about avoiding to rush towards certainty, not lack of opinion/preference.

That said, “I don’t know… it’s too late to buy groceries, but we got a frozen lasagna, there are some vegs in the fridge, and I could whip some fried chicken if you want. What do you want?” sounds perfect for me. So the issue here isn’t the “I don’t know”, it’s the lack of input.

[Dunno if you were speaking seriously or joking. If joking, sorry for the serious answer.]

lvxferre, 9 months ago

It’s a bit off-side, but another sad part of this quote is that it actually sounds reasonable in the original context:

I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.

Marilyn Monroe went out of her way to list what she considered her “worst”, that is in direct contradiction with the “best” (that everyone could see) from her public persona. She’s saying “Here’s my worst; you know my best. If you don’t accept me for who I am, you don’t deserve that sex symbol that I built”.

It’s a fair cry from how people often use this quote, where they justify making your life a living Hell under the promise of some “best” that you’re never going to see.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

The way that I explain it is quite similar to yours. It works, but you need to emphasise

• that unlike in Reddit, there’s no central group of admins controlling the whole thing; and
• that each instance has its own communities, and those are equivalent to subreddits.

otherwise users start associating instances with subreddits.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

I won’t mention the rest of the text because I’m not interested enough on the discussion to do so. I’ll focus on a single thing.

On the science side it’s a human from the moment of conception.

What should be considered a human being or not is prescriptive in nature, because it involves ethics. Science - i.e. the scientific method - does not give a shit to prescriptive matters; science is descriptive, it’s worried about what happens/doesn’t happen. For science it doesn’t really matter if you call it a human, a tissue, a wug or a colourless green thing sleeping furiously, as long as you’re unambiguously and accurately describing the phenomenon being studied.

As such, no, science itself doesn’t really tell you “when it becomes a human being”.

[From another comment, after being asked for source] pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33620844/

The only thing that it “proves” is that the author (not “science”) is referring to foetuses (from nine weeks after conception [not zero] to 16 weeks) as “children”. And it certainly does not back up your claim that [ipsis litteris] “On the science side it’s a human from the moment of conception.”

And no, “The growth and development are positively influenced by factors, like parental health and genetic composition, even before conception.” does not prove it either, given that the author is solely mentioning conception as a time of reference.

---

Sorry to be blunt but the way that you referred to science sounds a lot like “I’m ignorant on science but I want to leech off its prestige for the sake of my argument”. If you don’t want to do this, here’s a better approach:

• Show how certain actions generate certain outcomes. Science will help you with this.
• Explicit the moral and ethical premises that you are using, to judge said outcomes as good/bad. Science will not help you with this.

It’s also a nice way to avoid a fallacy/stupidity called appeal to nature (TL;DR: “[event/thing] is natural, so it’s good lol lmao”), that often plagues discussions about moral matters like abortion.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

If you’re going to avoid psychology, do it because of the replication crisis. What is being called “AI” should play no role on that. Here’s why.

Let us suppose for a moment that some AI 7y from now is able to accurately diagnose and treat psychological issues that someone might have. Even then the AI in question is not a moral agent that can be held responsible for its actions, and that is essential when you’re dealing with human lives. In other words you’ll still need psychologists picking the output of said AI and making informed decisions on what the patient should [not] do.

Furthermore, I do not think that those “AI systems” will be remotely as proficient at human tasks in, say, a decade, as some people are claiming that they will be. AI is a misnomer, those systems are not intelligent. Model-based text generators are a great example of that (and relevant in your case): play a bit with ChatGPT or Bard, and look at their output in a somewhat consistent way (without cherry picking the hits and ignoring the misses). Then you’ll notice that they don’t really understand anything - they’re reproducing grammatical patterns regardless of their content. (Just like they were programmed to.)

lvxferre, 9 months ago

It boils down to scientists not knowing if they’re actually reaching some conclusion or just making shit up. It’s actually a big concern across multiple sciences, it’s just that Psychology is being hit really hard, and for clinical psychologists this means that they simply can’t trust as much the theoretical frameworks guiding their decisions as they were supposed to.

lvxferre, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Luigi	Yoshi
Scared of ghosts	Eats ghosts for breakfast
Gives Mario trouble	Gives Mario a ride
Started out as "Mario for those who can’t play as Mario"	Designed from the scratch as a character
Uses synthetic green dyes in his clothes to LARP as an environmentalist	Has his own self-sustainable island, is naturally green
Weirdo in a costume	A MOTHERFUCKING DINOSAUR

Mama should disinherit Luigi and adopt Yoshi in his place.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

No poop challenge.

lvxferre, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

5. We don’t talk about Reddit here. Except when we do.
6. [De]federation is srs bizniz.
7. Seize the means of production computation.
8. People from that instance over there are bad.

lvxferre, 9 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

I love how it pokes fun at an ackshyually, and then proposes a monophyletic clade for arseholes.

…at the end of the day herpetology studies tetrapods minus the ones that ornithologists and mammalogists called dibs on. You’ll see the same in medicine - vets treating all animals, except the species that physicians said “NOPE, I GOT THIS ONE”.

lvxferre, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I’m a nobody, but I’m officially supporting this decision of the devs to remove karma (user score aggregates) from the API. Because karma brings on a plethora of problems¹:

• It is gamification of the system. As hinted by their PR, this is not healthy.
• It leads to less varied and less interesting content, due to the fluff principle.
• It feeds echo chambers, by giving people yet another reason to not confront them, even when moral and sensible to do so.
• It shifts the focus from the content to the people, detracting from the experience of what boils down to a bunch of forums.
• It is yet another reason for people to congregate in oversized and unruly communities, instead of splitting into smaller ones.

Re-enable it at the API level and continue hiding it in Lemmy-UI if that is your personal stance on the matter.

A lot of those issues will affect negatively your user experience, regardless of you using the karma feature or not. Simply because other people use it.

And it’s also the sort of "lead acetate"² feature that makes clueless users annoy the shit out of interface developers, until they add it. “I dun unrurrstand, y u not enable karma? Y u’re app defective lol l mao” style. With app devs eventually caving in.

As such, “leave it optional” is probably a bad approach.

Considering how easy it is to spin up troll accounts or amass multiple troll accounts across multiple instances, removing a useful metric for identifying them at a glance is, IMO, irresponsible.

This is a poor argument. It has some merit in Reddit³, but not in Lemmy.

You aren’t identifying trolls by karma. You’re assuming that someone is a troll, based on a bad correlation. Plenty users get low karma for unrelated reasons (false positive - e.g. newbie user unknowingly violating some “unspoken rule” of the local echo chamber), and plenty trolls get past your arbitrary karma wall³ (false negative).

So relying on karma to decide who’s a troll is not as effective as it looks like, and it’s specially unfair to newcomers, thus discouraging the renovation of the community. IMO it’s a damn shitty moderator practice.

Since trolling is mostly an issue when you get the same obnoxious troll[s] coming back over and over and over, under new accounts, to post gaping anuses again, and mods have no way to detect if the troll came back, mods should be upstreaming this issue to the admins of the instance of their comm - because the admins likely have access to your IP⁴, and can prevent the user from creating a new trolling account every 15 days.

And, if for some reason the admins are uncaring or uncooperative, the mods should be migrating the comm to another instance.

What Lemmy needs is not to enable shitty moderation practices. It needs better mod tools to enable good moderation practices:

• the context of the content being reported should be immediately obvious, no clicks needed
• there should be a quick way to check all submissions/comments of a user to your community
• there should be a way to keep notes about users, and share them with the rest of the mod team
• some automod functionality. Such as automatically reporting (not removing!) content or replying to the user based on a few criteria defined by the mods.

e.g. #2: If someone posts a particularly toxic comment but their score is high, I’m more likely to read through their history and conclude they’re having a bad day or something. Without the score, I will not read through and likely just ban them and move on.

IMO this is also a shitty moderation practice. Should I go further on that? [Serious/non-rhetorical question.]

NOTES:1. Since this is already a huge wall of text I didn’t go deep on each of those claims, but I can do so if desired/requested. 2. It’s sweet but poisonous. 3. Because in Reddit you can’t “migrate your sub to another Reddit instance”, and the only instance there happens to be administered by arsehats who give no fucks about you or your sub. It’s a dirtier situation that warrants dirtier solutions. 4. Anecdote exemplifying this claim: from 2020~22 I had multiple trolling accounts in Reddit, to shitpost in cooking subs (for some puzzling reason they’re cesspools). Guess how many times this sort of “you need more karma to post here” barrier locked me out? Zero. It’s simply too easy to comment some shitty one-line in a big community (I used r/askreddit for that) and amass 500, sometimes 2k karma points in a single go. 5. If instance admins do not have access to the IPs of the users engaging with their instances, regardless of where they registered in, that should be fixed.

lvxferre, 9 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Then join an instance where scores are disabled if you don’t like them. :shurg:

Already addressed - a lot of those issues will still affect you, even if you don’t use the karma system.

Let’s say that instances A (karma disabled) and B (karma enabled) federate. A users won’t get the karma system itself, but they’ll still get: less varied and less interesting content, stronger echo chambers, and higher concentration of users in oversized and unruly comms. Because they use the same comms as the B users and thus the behaviour of B users affect A.

Choosing an instance where downvotes are disabled is already a preference, so making the score aggregates optional is completely in line with that.

Downvotes are a mixed feature, with pros and cons.
Karma looks good from a distance, but upon closer inspection it’s only cons. (Including enabling shitty=assumptive mod practices.)

You’re already on .ml, so…

I am clearly not talking about my individual usage here. I’m talking about users in general and the Lemmyverse as a whole.

The whole shtick of Lemmy is run your instance the way you want to run it.

I’m not sure on what’s supposed to be the [ipsis digitis] “whole shtick of Lemmy”, and I’m not assuming it.

The removal of the scores from the API seems [for me] heavy-handed and feels [for me] like the devs are forcing their preferences/values on others.

For me it looks like a sensible decision that takes into account its impact into users and the Lemmyverse.

EDIT: I’ll go further. Dunno if the devs agree with this or not, but I believe that “user aggregate score” = karma also attracts and retains users with the wrong mindset - who are not here to share, contribute or be part of something social and collective; but instead to farm virtual e-peen points for the sake of their individual egos. And I believe that this “it’s all about MEEE! ME! ME!” mindset is part of what makes Reddit such a dumpster fire.

lvxferre, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

My guesses:

• Toner’s role is being underplayed by the video. She’s potentially calling Altman out, for underrating the dangers of AI.
• At least Altman is lying about something - about how much OpenAI is going towards AGI in the short term. The above might’ve bought the bullshit fully, while Sutskever knows that it’s bullshit.
• I’m not sure if the board is also lying or not.
• The boiling point was likely OpenAI potentially receiving some cash grant from some scummy party, that would be in a moral grey area considering the "non-"profit goals of the company.
• Everybody will get a bit more of free popcorn for a while. 🍿 This mess is far from over.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

That’s practically what happened with Siegfrieda (my cat) and me.

Long story short: a stray hid herself in my garage. She was beaten, bleeding and pregnant, so I rushed her to the vet. “I don’t want another pet, we’re going to fix her up and find her a new home.” Seven years later, she’s still here.

lvxferre, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Infinity. We’re simply too dumb to grasp it. Example:

<span style="color:#323232;">3*(1/3) = 3/3 = 1
</span><span style="color:#323232;">3*(1/3) = 3*(0.333...) = 0.999...
</span><span style="color:#323232;">0.999... = 1
</span>

That “…” means “it continues to the infinite”. And yet when you show this reasoning to people, they keep “looking” for the last 9, to claim that 0.999… is not the exact same as 1.

And that applies to all humans. You might counter it rationally, you might train yourself to recognise “it’s infinite, so theoretically it’ll behave in a certain way”, but you don’t grasp it. I don’t, either.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

Driving safely and smart is essential for other reasons, it does prevent additional bottlenecks (you mentioned one, wreckages), and it reduces the impact of the unavoidable bottlenecks (because the cars won’t waste so much time re-accelerating after them). But if my reasoning is correct, most of the time there isn’t much that drivers can do against traffic besides “don’t use the car”.

lvxferre, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I get its basic shit that’s over my head.

It’s over the head of everyone. That’s why I shared it here.

Likewise would 0.888… be .9?

No, but 0.899… = 0.9. This only applies to the repeating sequences of the last digit of your base. We’re using base 10 so it got to be 9.

If I have 100 dogs, and I split them into thirds I’ve got 3 lots of 33 dogs and 1 dog left over. So the issue is with my original idea of splitting the dogs into thirds, because clearly I haven’t got 100% in 3 lots because 1 of them is by itself.

Then you split the leftover dog into 10 parts. Why 10? Because you use base 10. Three of those parts go to each lot of dogs… and you still have 1/10 dog left.

Then you do it again. And you have 1/100 dog left. And again, and again, infinitely.

If you take that “infinitely” into account, then you can say that each lot of dogs has exactly one third of the original amount.

lvxferre, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Because it isn’t 0.9; it’s 0.999… with the ellipsis saying “repeat this to the infinite” being part of the number. And you don’t need to round it up to get 0.999… = 1, since the 9 keeps going on and on, so their difference is infinitesimally small = zero.

Another thing showing that they’re the same number is that there is no number between them. For example:

• 0.9 (no ellipsis) and 1 are different because 0.95 is between them
• 0.95 and 1 are different because 0.97 is between them
• there’s no number between 0.999… (with ellipsis) and 1, so they are the same. inb4 no “last nine” because it’s infinite.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

Based on a game* I think that the root issue is that there are multiple bottlenecks, unavoidable for the drivers, like turning or entering/leaving lanes, forcing them to slow down to avoid crashing. Not a biggie if there are only a few cars, as they’ll be distant enough from each other to allow one to slow down a bit without the following needing to do the same; but once the road is close to the carrying capacity, that has a chain effect:

• A slows down because it’ll turn
• B is too close to A, so it slows down to avoid crashing with A
• C is too close to B, so it slows down to avoid crashing with B
• […]

There are solutions for that, such as building some structure to handle those bottlenecks, but they’re often spacious and space is precious in a city. Or alternatively you reduce the amount of cars by discouraging people from using them willy-nilly, with a good mass transport system and making cities not so shitty for pedestrians.

*The game in question is OpenTTD. This is easy to test with trains: create some big transport route with multiple trains per rail, then keep adding trains to that route, while watching the time that they take to go from the start to the end. The time will stay roughly constant up to a certain point (the carrying capacity), then each train makes all the others move slower.

lvxferre, 9 months ago

It’s really similar to the fundamental attribution error, though, as you can see if phrased this way: “I value $foo by a certain amount because I’m a human being, thus other human beings value $foo as much as I do”.