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lesostep

271 karma · joined October 16, 2023

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lesostep··on Company Offering '100% Human-Written, Never AI' Medical Research Is 100% AI
The people working in the company are anonymous from design. There are forms of LLC that hide the owners as well. Trade name is already a form of pseudoanonymity, and it's the highest level of anonymity that can be achieved. The company itself must be publicly known, at least for contract and tax reasons.

Buying stuff from truly anonymous provider isn't possible. From a legal standpoint you basically transfer money to them for fun. Since, you know, can't enter any agreement with unknown entity.

lesostep··on Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
>> AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it.

To this day I never saw an AI write anything less than a 3Mb binary. Do you have specific examples in mind, and if so, can you share them?

lesostep··on Obviously, DOGE Did Not Save Money
That's like helping a grandma to move her groceries, only to throw them on the ground, saying "I didn't sign up to be your carrier for eternity."

Like, understandably you could wish to stop helping her. But if you took her groceries to help, you also supposed to place them down gently.

lesostep··on New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
That wouldn't solve his issue, though: all of those countries have gore and porn

Maybe Utah or UAE would be a better fit for this.

lesostep··on I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
Or just drop websocket connection to them.

Refreshing pages to establish connection again is semi easy for someone who made a honest mistake (and Could make them more cautious), but if someone wants to trigger web-socket disconnect all the time, it would become cumbersome.

Add something like fail2ban, and you're set enough against passing trollers, but not interesting enough to draw attention from people that like the challenge.

lesostep··on Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines for a Pretextual Weed Search
Unless the footage didn't show guys face clearly.

Then you get hella hard time because technically it's an evidence and arguing against evidence is always way harder, even if the argument is "if you squint and imagine that this guy wore a wig and painted his face, here's an expert opinion that height and figure difference could be an illusion from camera position". Court almost always defaults to evidence and experts.

Or it wasn't a burglary in your girlfriend house, but face/plate-matching algorithms screwed up.

It's hard to choose between "police give hard time to victim and victim relatives" and "police randomly decides who fit the bill and get this person sacked"

lesostep··on AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
And that's why you teach your elders the wrong answer for a right question! :D
lesostep··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
Not the OP, but when the physical media for games dies, I will still be playing games I already own.

That's what collection is for.

lesostep··on How the words we teach English language learners changed
>> We have trended from subjective language to objective language. Why?

Alternative theory: asynchronous communication.

It used to be your speech stayed with you, and if you were unprecise, or misspoke, or was caught meandering off-topic, people could just ask you and you would clarify. With exception for authors and journalists, that were explicitly taught how to write.

Now, your speech stays while you leave, so you have to construct as precise of an image as you can. If you misspoke or said something wrong, people have to engage with your speech as-is.

People can ask you to clarify online, of course. But you have to build a solid foundation, before people even start to think that they could benefit from a few clarifications.

lesostep··on How the words we teach English language learners changed
Tbh, that's how I learned English. Rudimentary grammar, knew a few words, and then just read with dictionary until I didn't need a dictionary. Also watched a lot of shows until I didn't need subtitles.

Languages are weird like that – if you use them enough, your brain just figures some things out. After all, natural languages are easy enough for toddlers to learn.

lesostep··on A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
Good question!

Most of the heat doesn't go into evaporation. If it did, we wouldn't have higher temperature during the day, just more moist.

Truth is, I personally think farming evaporation is leagues more ahead of datacenters. Datacenters are more of a nuances locally, where depleting resources already don't give enough water to keep households water pressure up. Add to that a new water-hungry datacenter, and pressure in pipes drops even more.

They aren't bad on their own, but in a context where they want to share a depleting communal resource.

Edit: tl;Dr farming is worse but historically there. There is a lot of discourse around that, also, but it's a separate issue.

lesostep··on A California aquifer may have crossed the point of no return
>> Water which is evaporated is also returned to the ecosystem. It falls back out as rain.

No, not necessary to the same one. Every body of water has a catchment area, and through the bottom parts of some lakes/rivers water sips into the earth, filling underground water levels.

Now, let's say you life on a coast with a regular winds in the ocean direction.

You basin fills with water evaporated by you, your neighbors catchments and – sometimes – ocean (wind doesn't always blow in one direction). But the large percentage of the water you evaporate goes into the ocean. Let's say 90 percent falls again on your catchment area, 10 percent falls in ocean but is regained through neighbors basins evaporation.

Now, if you increase your evaporation, you could easily drain a lot of water from your land.

lesostep··on Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick
Simple. Buy one, put it on a test stand, and look at connection log.

Buying in bulk for a resell without testing even one product is kinda insane.

lesostep··on Truth is not a direction: a Tarski attack on LLM probes
As I understand it, this argument holds exactly the same for any type of truth: both objective and subjective (assuming subject is logically sound).

Whatever vector we choose, there always would be contradictions.

And while people also have internal conflicts, they are capable of adapting their belief system, while adjusting a vector would just give an LLM new self-contradictory classifier.

lesostep··on Em dashes are amazing
It's really hard to find style guides on reading specifically.

But what I see from trawling the posts made by narrators, a lot of them do mention that em-dashes are read as interruptions with sudden tonal shift, while cursive implies a non-interuptive tonal shift.

That said, apparently, most audiobook authors actually supplement their own guidance on how to read their books. I haven't found any universal guide yet.

lesostep··on Em dashes are amazing
I can't be the only one that reads those two examples very differently.

In a first example, the second "occasionally" is stressed, when in second example it feels almost whispered.

lesostep··on It's getting harder to focus every day
>> What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself?

For me it's one of the three layers.

First layer, it starts to wonder to the direction offered by real world. Wonder about song lyrics I'm listening too, or the colors of buildings, or something like that.

Second layer happens if you purposefully stray your thoughts away from a real world. Brain starts trying to remember whatever you wanted it to remember. For example, if I tell myself three times "don't forget to call mom", if I just sit idly, chances are my brain would surface "call mom". Sometimes it surfaces "remember you wanted to try arch 2 years ago". Also this is the layer that works badly if you tried or depressed, because it can start surfacing bad thoughts.

Third layer I call time skipper because it's just a basic time fast forwarding. I have no idea whether it's true meditation or controlled dissociation or something else, but thoughts slide of your brain, so there's nothing to remember afterwards. My friend said that maybe meditation is a controlled dissociation.

I prefer to say that I'm so dumb, I can just switch my brain off.

lesostep··on Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs
I wonder whether people moving to development LLM and people moving away from LLM will create a divide comfortable for both parties or not.

I would hope so, that split would be a natural parting of the communities.

My pessimism tells me that the more any community rejects LLM and polices against generated output, the heavier they would be crawled. Which means that proLLM community by nature puts pressure on all antiLLM infrastructure – an asymmetrical problem, where other people pay for your choice.

My optimism, on the other hand, tells me that after bubble pop, hopefully, far less people would have money to feed aimless crawl results into machine learning algorithm in hopes of slight improvements.

lesostep··on Making
>> He was a great architect, and made great constructions

He designed them. If you can find any book that claims Gaudi made them, I will personally send you 5$ for an isbn

But that wouldn't happen, because any editor would catch that mistake easily. It's not how language works, and it never was

lesostep··on Making
>> 'Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma made "Ocarina of Time"'

I googled that to check, and on first few pages no one said that they did? It was always "the team made".

Mark Zuckerberg for sure made "Meta" – whatever it is – at least into the joke it is today, but that's beside the point. Meta isn't a product, it's a company

lesostep··on Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
That's spatial memory! I have long walk-and-talks with friends, and sometimes I forget minor details of previous discussions, but not where we were when it was mentioned.

A lot of my friends can't do same trick. But the fascinating part is that it still works for them! Usually they can recall whatever I forgotten after I described the place we were in.

lesostep··on It's a shame what's happened to radio
If I remember correctly, wasn't that because you can't fit proper antenna into the phone?

Something-something antenna 1/4 of the wavelength physics. And FM wave is roughly 3 meters long.

When people carried antennas (headphone cords) around it was handy, but not a lot of people would carry antenna now

lesostep··on Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM
My mom grew up in a small town (village? settlement even?) like that (surrounded by nature, lots of hunting, animals can wonder in town) in a country where guns weren't free.

Every family still had a rifle, getting license isn't that hard when you could answer questions about your intentions.

No handguns though, not very useful for self-defense or wildlife. I believe mom made and shot her first arbalest around 6-7 yo though.

Similar cultures, but one of them allows for outsiders to screen potential gun owners, and the other doesn't. Which, I believe, is the point – there always will be mentally unwell or ill-intentioned people. There should be a way for a small town to revoke the trust of allowing weapons in their hands.

lesostep··on Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)
As an artist, I was taught that when dark area meets a lighter one, I should add a slight gradient, deepening the dark near light.

Is it realistic?

No. But it looks more realistic. Because as our eyes track across real room, they adjust to the brightness.

So the darker region would look much darker near a light region – not on camera, but to human eye. And we replicate that effect in drawing, to trick the nerve behind the eye into believing that our pupil adjusted.

That's it, I think. We are not cameras, and our realism doesn't look like a photo.

lesostep··on Orion Browser by Kagi
>> once people started publishing books or whatever in the 1600s - the world runs on ads.

I remember seeing old books (early victorian era) that were printed with healthy "subsidize" from the ad revenue. They honestly looked very much alike any site without ad blocker looks now. And I had the feeling that some content of the book was sponsored as well. Kept mentioning specific shops by name.

I wonder what did we do right, to stop books from looking like that? Maybe it could help us fix internet issues.

lesostep··on Orion Browser by Kagi
I know few web sites that has unblockable ads. Mostly nerdy themed websites that has relationship with small nerdy webstores. They just host the ad themselves and it's a part of the site.

It's cheaper for a webstore to pay one good website personally, and people trust ads like that a lot more. It's almost like a personal recomendation from the team curating knowledge base.

And no ad trackers, plus quicker website, win/win|win situation for everybody

lesostep··on Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign
I'm half joking because the situation is quite bizarre and I never encountered anything like that.

Where I live usually it takes a few eyewitnesses testifying for a police to take someone into custody for a few hours and give them a talk (like general "don't do it again or next time we will detain you for a 15 days" talk). And after a few talks, they would generally really just detain someone (it's different from a criminal record)

Not to mention the owner could just ban a person thatch bad for business. Or just install a camera, since police demands a proof.

From your retelling it seems like not only owner doesn't give a damn about it being bad for business, it's actually isn't even bad for business! You still go there, your friends still go there (do they know that you fear for your life filming the evidence of abuse for police to take action? Surely a friend would help you film this. Or at least be sympathetic enough not to go to a place where you fear for your life?).

I'm not saying anything about your testimony, but from your words alone it really seems like you life on a different plane of reality from everyone around you.

To hear you tell it, you can genuinely be killed or assaulted but everyone (including your friends??) is okay with that. And – most confusingly – you yourself is also okay with that?

I can't just wrap my head around that. If I feared for my life and health, I would just not go there, and fuck my friends for suggesting to risk it. Are you suicidal? Is that a missing piece of puzzle? Because even when I try to believe you, those pieces do not fit together.

lesostep··on Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign
I can't have a message or a LinkedIn connection without other person registering with messaging app or LinkedIn, willingly. When they setup LinkedIn or message me, they are fully aware of the fact that I will either access or receive that information. Not comparable.

>> face recognition, memory of interactions etc should stay on device

It can't be processed there, chip too small. And physics don't allow us to make chips smaller anymore.

I wonder, though, if it could be hosted on a phone and processed here. Not realistic for current smartphones, but if we talking about theoretical, it's would be a neat trick.

I can imagine a future device that has three parts: lightweight glasses with HUD as a thin client, a glovelike input device to track your hand, and a small box you put in your pocket/bag.

lesostep··on Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign
I'm sorry, there is a guy in a coffee shop that routinely threatens you, and it's still is your go to place?

Damn, just how good is that coffee?

(if that's real, and pulling phone out really is dangerous, can't you just ask the employee to film next time it happens for 10 bucks?)

lesostep··on Guerrilla London bus ads mock Kylie Jenner’s Meta glasses campaign
The bigger problem is that you essentially need to host somewhere a database with personal information of everyone you met, including their names, biometrics and private details. Nonconsensually. And it has to be accessible through the internet.

Honestly, just take notes and reread them sometimes, maybe?

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