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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Thing is a conscience (and any emotions, and feelings in general) is just chemicals affecting electrical signals in the brain… If a ML model such as an LLM uses parameters to affect electrical signals through its nodes then is it on us to say it can’t have a conscience, or feel happy or sad, or even pain?

    Sure the inputs and outputs are different, but when you have “real” inputs it’s possible that the training data for “weather = rain” is more downbeat than “weather = sun” so is it reasonable to say that the model gets depressed when it’s raining?

    The weightings will change leading to a a change in the electrical signals, which emulates pretty closely what happens in our heads




  • You see humans everywhere you go

    I don’t know if it’s that unless you live in Nigeria, India, SEA etc.

    In high income countries, the cities have grown in population and there’s fewer people in rural areas, so sure you’re going to see people in cities in urban areas and in touristy rural areas during common vacation times, but that’s been the case for ages and for the rest of the time there’s still plenty of easily accessible places where you can get away from people.

    There’s also people capitalising on people wanting to be away from humans so they advertise “retreats” which are full of other humans, but just don’t go there and camp in the middle of nowhere instead and there won’t be humans for miles around


  • So personally I prefer Erlang to Elixir - the language feels more like it was designed around the programming paradigms it supports (message passing, everything’s one of about 6 types for efficient serialisation etc), whereas Elixir feels like “what if we made a language with syntax like Ruby that worked like (and with the backend of) Erlang?” - there are some aspects I like, such as how the vast majority of things, even def, are a function call, and the parameter lists, but it feels very much like there’s a lot of workarounds of the design principles of the language to get it to work

    I also prefer Gleam to Elixir - it brings much nicer functional programming than either Erlang or Elixir and of course typing, which feels very missing from Elixir but not from Erlang, which is far clearer that something is one of very few types and lets you handle multiple types in a very natural feeling way. It also feels more akin to modern “full featured” (as opposed to scripting) languages than either Erlang or Elixir does.

    Basically if you’re learning something for employability, learn Elixir. If you’re learning something for a potential business idea, use Gleam. If you’re learning something for personal projects, see if Erlang is intuitive for you - if it is, I can guarantee you’ll love it, if not, use Gleam.


  • Can code in without code completion or checking the docs: C, C#, Scala, F#, SQL (ms server), js/ts, Erlang, Elixir

    Have a general idea of but may need to check things about the standard library every so often: Kotlin, Python, OCaml, C++, prolog

    Have used in the past but would need to look up the syntax to use again: Go, Rust, Haskell, Java, Gleam

    I’m probably missing some from each category though


  • Ah I got thrown off by it being a US unit as I know in the US for some braindead reason they call a pint a “half quart(er gallon)” so I was thinking 1.136 litres, but yeah the US decided to not even use the same imperial units as anywhere else which still used them at the time just to be extra special (and scam people into thinking they were getting more than they wore, which sets the tone for the US I guess)



  • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.detoScience Memes@mander.xyzCan I lick it?
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    2 months ago

    I think yellow is actually fine - a lick is 3 seconds of contact maximum and you’re not sucking on it or ingesting it…

    Lithium’s the only one you’ll ingest decent quantities of and it’s just gonna taste fizzy and soapy with no real lasting damage, stuff like lead you won’t even ingest and even if you did it’d probably be fine in such low quantities, even mercury is probably ok to lick if you’re careful

    That said, with the radioactive ones you need to be careful of what isotope and sample size you’re licking, so licking a huge ingot of U235 would probably do some lasting damage just by being near it, but licking a small piece of U238 is more than likely fine so long as it’s solid and not dust


  • There can be stable timelines with time travel - there’s actually 3 states:

    • Perpetual instability, where the timeline changes each time the time machine is used but never reaches the same state twice

    • Perpetual cyclic stability, where people’s actions in modifying the timeline lead to it eventually reaching the same state, eg. you go back in time to kill someone who becomes evil and oppresses you but the near death experience leads them capture you, so you can’t time travel any more, and to blame your people and start oppressing them, leading to the same actions

    • Stability without time travel, which is the default state but incredibly hard to get once time travel is invented as with nobody to stop time travel being invented it would probably get invented again, however parts of a cyclically stable timeline could have nobody having access to time travel, but any actions by time travellers to stop time travel would likely lead to the second rather than third option


  • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.detoScience Memes@mander.xyzrabbit hole
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    3 months ago

    Yeah in 1200-1300 not 700AD, but there is some evidence of eariler voyages to South America and Antarctica

    Also the DNA is the other way around and also a coin flip as to whether it came from Madagascan slaves after the slave trade or from Polynesians hundreds of years earlier, and the sweet potato is also not hard evidence as it could be coincidence, and there is some evidence of it having spread earlier

    However oral history is quite strong in Polynesia and for whatever reason there’s no stories of large landmasses to the east, only icy ones to the south

    Essentially there’s no hard proof like there is with Leif Erikson and Columbus as it was at most a couple of accidental crossings which may not have even been return journeys, but there is a lot of evidence that suggests there was contact of some sort or another