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xorbax

365 karma · joined June 27, 2022

Polymer materialst and neutron scatterist
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xorbax··on Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?
> trying to switch to KDE actually sent me BACK to Windows.

....uh, why not use Cinnamon or MATE or Gnome or XFCE?

Conflating KDE with desktop Linux is strange

I say this as someone who suffered the same problems trying to use KDE (frequent windowing freezing requiring logout) and just swapped to Cinnamon. It's two mousebutton clicks at the login.

xorbax··on The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (1830)
So coffee doesn't calm people, so then why do stimulants also act oppositely for those people? It's not caffeine.

It isn't stimulating that part of "the nation", it's calming and focusing them.

> Lets stop spreading this BS lie that stimulants calm people with ADHD down.

Most people who follow the science and personal experience probably don't have any reason to follow your command, sorry.

xorbax··on The Tax Nerd Who Bet His Life Savings Against DOGE
I mean, that's the GOP

For all the sloganeering, Democratic administrations have better fiscal responsibility about deficit spending

It's amazing how Reagan-era propaganda still sticks despite all evidence

xorbax··on GLP-1 Second-Order Effects
So you went from know it "reduces appetite" to make a bunch of conjectures about why it affects other things

> But please, tell me how it's better than finally doing some exercise and eating right.

Because it actually works well?

Good ol' fashioned gumption doesn't work, no matter how crankily and haughtily you say it. GLP-1s do

Also, you don't mention why the things you listed are bad. Any weight loss will require a calorie deficit, which has the same "starvation" you're so aghast at.

xorbax··on Trump revokes landmark ruling that greenhouse gases endanger public health
So what?

Are you fantasizing that they'll reduce the price of cars because of this and somehow benefit people?

And they'd have to take the time to redesign. And Democrats will (hopefully) reinstate it in a few years, and carmakers probably recognize that. Along with the threat of legal challenges by environmental groups.

And, further, if we eventually do get these inefficient polluting cars - who's going to want to buy them? They certainly wouldn't be able to sell them in same countries. Seems pointless overall for carmakers, generally.

Just a gift to polluting corporations and billionaires who want profit at our expense.

xorbax··on U.S. asks American citizens to 'leave Iran now'
Bush-era fabrications really worked on some people, I guess

Or is this a hard-to-parse witticism about Iran?

xorbax··on Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica
> like a road with traffic, cars parked, pedestrians about, weather

Not all of those need to be done "quickly". That's where LLMs fail

You note the weather when you leave. You understand the traffic five minutes ahead. You recognize pedestrians far ahead of time.

Computers can process a lot in fractions of a second. Humans can recognize context over many minutes.

The Waymo may have done better in the fraction of a second, but humans can avoid being in that situation to begin with.

xorbax··on Flint Confirms Biodegradable Paper Batteries Are Now in Production
...did you expect an electrolyte-free battery entirely made of paper and nothing else?
xorbax··on Rats Play DOOM
They also seemed to basically do it for two weeks and then stop because the rats "aged out" - despite it supposedly working well and achieving concrete results.

I know rats aren't long-lived, but I would be interested to know how they determined the rats 'aged out'.

Could also be a complete failure they spent considerable effort in with zero results, and are hand waving and constructing a way to quit while claiming success.

I could see the rats not really connecting things and just puttering around. It's a pretty involved setup and I poor uptake on the part of the rats would be a steep disappointment.

xorbax··on 'Those who eat Chilean salmon can't imagine how much human blood it carries'
It summarizes the point of the article using the words of people interviewed.

How do you judge it as "clickbait"?

xorbax··on 'Those who eat Chilean salmon can't imagine how much human blood it carries'
...it was pretty obvious. Did you assume it was literally dipped in human blood before export or something?

I'm curious how the metaphor is so far from one's mind when reading.

xorbax··on The Lucas-Lehmer Prime Number Test
Definitely makes me feel better about my own work
xorbax··on Caffeinated coffee consumption or abstinence to reduce atrial fibrillation
> (and I hated it, but the place was great)

That's a mystifying statement. Why go if you found the coffee so unpleasant?

Decor?

xorbax··on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence
Well is his kid a good speaker or a bore?
xorbax··on French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence
So how is the French populus reacting to Sarkozy being jailed?
xorbax··on Discord says 70k users may have had their government IDs leaked in breach
It never happened to him, so it's never happened

Makes this huge data leak a real head scratcher

xorbax··on Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Passed Mars Last Night
How is it "illuminating the whole star system"?

It seems more likely that it'll act like a non intelligent hunk of rock going through some random trajectory.

It's less silly to declare you'll win the lottery. That has happened many times over - but we're yet to discover that can or has existed outside of Earth. While it's nearly impossible it hasn't happened several times over, it's so far impossible that we've encountered even the crumbiest excuse for life.

I assert that it is silly. We're not indigenous American happening upon European settlers. We're indigenous Americans wandering about the continent harassing mammoths, inventing stories of how it'll go when it happens.

xorbax··on Study confirms that pianists can shape piano timbre through touch
How is arm movement affecting the tone without impact on the physics of the hammer?
xorbax··on Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Passed Mars Last Night
"What if 3I/Atlas is responsible for the Wow! Signal?!" is one of the sillier ones

He's definitely turned into a "I'm just asking questions and keeping an open mind" kinda grifter, whatever his past qualifications and respectability

xorbax··on Blender 4.5 LTS
The only downside is that this doesn't produce a scene that always you render it. You just get to watch it in the composition window. Rendering it is just a static opaque box.
xorbax··on The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh
Pronounce the g in garage
xorbax··on Jane Goodall has died
Why do you say that? I'm not sure how that follows.
xorbax··on Toxic Fumes Are Leaking into Airplanes, Sickening Crews and Passengers
Why post 3 distinct versions of the same statement?
xorbax··on South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid
Because it's necessary for the plant to function and the government has never seen fit to provide a different arrangement for the work to happen and tacitly approved it as a way for this sort of short-term work to happen. They have quotas to meet, these workers helped them fit the quota, so who cares what effects it has.

It probably requires a lot of work and effort to lay it out explicitly, so they don't. It would be better for workers to figure it out, but that's not the administration's style either.

Hopefully the plant doesn't have to shutdown because of this.

xorbax··on South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid
This happened in Alabama.

Arrest the wrong German executive as part of your "immigration crackdown" and suddenly Mercedes is pulling out of your economy.

Alabama has gone down this road, and I'm not seeing how it will be any better for anyone this time around. People tentatively agreeing with it or not.

If there are so many undocumented laborers we need, then the issue is documentation. Trump is [not exactly endearing himself with SK](https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-china...).

Aren't we supposed to be encouraging American manufacturing? Or is the plan to run out Hyundai and make Fords?

xorbax··on Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock
Tangential, but very interesting.
xorbax··on AI Eroded Doctors' Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study
I think the same thing about meals.
xorbax··on AI Eroded Doctors' Ability to Spot Cancer Within Months in Study
It's like research. People had encyclopedias. If they wanted to know real, deep information about subjects they'd have to specifically spend effort seeking and finding books or papers about that specific subject (which are typically just distilled papers in a far wider range and number than an encyclopedia would be)

Then we could just go Google it, and/or skim the Wikipedia page. If you wanted more details you could follow references - which just made it easier to do the first point.

Now skills themselves will be subject to the same generalizing phenomenon as finding information.

We have not seen information-finding become better as technology has advanced. More people are able to become barely-capable regarding many topic, and this has caused a lot of fragmentation, and a general lowering of general knowledge with regard to information.

The overall degradation that happened with politics and public information will now be generalized to anything that AI can be applied to.

You race your MG? Hey my exoskeleton has a circuit racer blob we should go this weekend. You like to paint? I got this Bougereau app I'll paint some stuff for you. You're a physicist? The font for chalk writing just released so maybe we can work on the grand unified theory sometime, you say you part and I can query the LLM and correct your mistakes

xorbax··on Testing Bitchat at the music festival
Is a 'Bit' prefix now solely read as a bitcoin reference?

I thought it existed before bitcoin as, like, some computer thing or the platonic ideal of information. Did I get that wrong? Does 'bit' just mean bitcoin?

xorbax··on 60% of medal of honor recipients are Irish or Irish-American
Is that noise or data?
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