Hamartiogonic

Hamartiogonic OP , 10 months ago

I’ve had some good experiences with asking Bing to write a few lines of VBA or R. Normally, I’ll just ask it solve a specific problem, but then I’ll modify the code to suit my specific needs.

Hamartiogonic OP , 10 months ago

Recently I’ve seen some discussion surrounding this. Apparently, this method also gives lots of false positives, but at least it should be able to help teachers narrow it down which papers may require further investigation.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

For a while, I’ve been quietly preparing for the day when YT becomes unusable. I’ve been using Odysee and _ to see if they are viable options. To some limited extent they already are, but there are still lots of room for improvement. Just like Mastodon feels like the early days of Twitter, Lemmy feels like the early days of Reddit, Odysee is a bit like YT once was a very long time ago.

in recent years, YT has been working hard to kick out certain types of channels, so nowadays you can find that sort of content in some of the other platforms. It depends on what you’re looking for, so the experience can be anything between awful and great.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Fortunately for me, I live in an area where there are no dangerous spiders, but if you you live in India, Australia or some other place like that, you can usually safely assume that all the spiders are out there to get you. In my case though, you don’t need to worry about them, so we get along really well.

One night, I switched the lights off and went to bed. After a while, I realized I forgot to do something important, so I switched the lights back on and got up. In the middle of the now lit room I saw a big spider (tiny by Australian standards), and it quickly scurried along under the kitchen cabinets. I hadn’t seen this fellow before, because apparently that’s where it hides during the day. If it eats some bugs in the house, it can continue to live here. I don’t mind at all.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

It’s just history repeating itself. Israel keeps on pulling this same trick every now and then.

Here’s an example from 2009, and here’s another one from 2006.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Producing quality text isn’t just a single skill. You need to come up with a good idea, write some text about it, delete half of it, turn the remaining part inside out, cut it to pieces, rearrange everything, delete everything, start over etc. it’s a lengthy process where the actual writing isn’t even the biggest part. Asking an LLM to write it for you will speed things up, but you still need to make all the big decisions yourself. You are still the captain of the ship while the LLM makes the propeller move.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Ok, but can I generate a new passkey with the same fingerprint? I’m pretty sure that eventually someone will find an exploit that allows them to steal your keys, so you need to make the old keys invalid by generating new ones.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Ok, that’s great. Seems like a fairly secure option, so I don’t see any major problems with it.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Install Signal and tell your friends to do so as well unless they want to use SMS to contact you. If they refuse to use Signal in order to stay in touch, you should ask why. My guess is that those people are exactly the type you should have blocked years ago, so this is also a good opportunity to clean your address book and start from a clean slate.

Edit: That was badly worded, so here’s a clarification.

I’m not telling anyone to block anyone because of the app they use or don’t use. I’m talking about an underlying cause that affects many things such as the apps they use, flexibility and social interactions. Perhaps that person is actually a jerk, but you just haven’t realized yet. Here’s your opportunity to find out. Perhaps there’s a good reason for not installing a new app, but you just haven’t thought of it yet. That’s why you need to ask.

If someone doesn’t want to install a new communication app, that’s ok. Explain why WhatsApp sucks and how Meta is exploiting and abusing the users. Explain how Signal respects your privacy. If the answer is still no, then you have discovered something important. Maybe your friend is a bit more inflexible than you previously thought. Perhaps you value the friendship more than they do. Is it really worth it to be in contact with a person who doesn’t value you and the friendship that much? Maybe this is the type of person who you should have abandoned a long time ago. Not because of their app preferences, but because of their personality.

Of course there’s always a possibility that there is a valid reason and you’re not dealing with a jerk after all. If that’s the case, you can always use SMS and email to stay in touch.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Did the others give any reasons? Did you tell them why you prefer signal over WhatsApp?

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Yeah, well that’s the problem with writing short messages on a phone. It takes a lot of time to express your thoughts clearly. I’ve added an update.

Anyway, here’s a shorter version of it: I’m not telling you to block people just because they refuse to install Signal. Use this opportunity to find out more about your friends. If you find out that you’ve been hanging out with a jerk all these years, maybe it’s time to let that relationship go. That’s the idea I was chasing with my poorly worded message earlier.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Oh, I have this idea for a social media platform called Hate Furnace. The whole point is to disrupt the social media landscape by maximizing revenue, privacy violations, corrosive atmosphere and abrasive relationships. Instead of making friends, you make enemies in the Hate Furnace. Instead of following someone, you stalk them.

Hate Furnace - Watch the world burn!

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

In Terminator 1 the T-800 made a scam call to Sarah in order to find out where she is. He deepfaked the voice of Sarah’s mother, and she fell for it.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

“Don’t order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.”

See also: lean manufacturing

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

This is a part of a bigger topic people need to be aware of. As more and more AI is used in public spaces and the internet, people will find creative ways to exploit it.

There will always be ways to make the AI do stuff the owners don’t want it to. You could think of it like the exploits used in speedrunning, but in this case there’s a lot more variety. Just like you can make an AI generate morally questionable material, you could potentially find a way to exploit the AI of a self driving car to do whatever you can think of.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

That’s true for all the things that can have a query cost. What about those AI applications that don’t have any financial cost to the user? For instance, The Spiffing Brit continues to find interesting ways to exploit the YouTube Algoritm. I’m sure you can apply that same “hacker mentality” to anything with AI in it.

At the moment, many of those applications are on the web, and that’s exactly where a query costs can be a feasible way to limit the number of experiments you can reasonably run in order to find your favorite exploit. If it’s too expensive, you probably won’t find anything worth exploiting, and that should keep the system relatively safe. However, nowadays more and more AI is finding its way in the real world, which means that those exploits are going to have some very spicy rewards.

Just imagine if the traffic lights were controlled by an AI, and you found an exploit that allowed you to get the green light on demand? Applications like this don’t have any API query costs. You just need to be patient and try all sorts of weird stuff to see how the lights react. Sure, you can’t run a gazillion experiments in an hour, which means that you might not find anything worth exploiting. Since there would be millions of people experimenting with the system simultaneously, surely someone would find an exploit.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Based on this data, 48.6% of oil was used on the read. If we assume that about every other car becomes electric, that could cut the total oil demand by about 24%. That’s actually quite significant, but obviously it will happen so gradually that the oil industry should have enough time to adjust.

Eventually most cars will be electric, but even that won’t destroy the entire oil industry, because there are still many other uses for oil. It takes a while for various other industries to shift away from burning oil and gas, but when that happens the oil industry will be totally screwed.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

The oil industry isn’t about to go anywhere, that’s for sure. It’s just that within the next 100 years, it will probably shrink to a tiny fraction of what it is today.

Now that plastic bags or straws have been banned in certain parts of the world, the future of plastic is beginning to look slightly more uncertain than it used to, but I wouldn’t be too worried just yet. Microplastics are also lookin pretty concerning, so maybe in the very long run we’ll start addressing that as well. All of this might reduce the demand for plastic in general, but I don’t think that’s going to have a major impact any time soon. As you pointed out, plastics are too versatile to ditch entirely.

Maybe we’ll start using more bioplastics, but petrochemical based plastics will be used in many places regardless. At the moment, plastics are used pretty much everywhere, even when it clearly isn’t the most optimal solution. I think that this situation will begin to gradually change as the production and use of alternatives become economically attractive.

For instance, a plastic wrapping around a salad doesn’t need to last thousands of years. As long as it protects the salad all the way from the farm to my kitchen, It’s good enough. This sort of optimization will probably reduce the demand for plastic, but it will probably never go down to zero. There are lots of applications such as chemical bottles where long term durability is far more important.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Yes but the question is why would anyone pay for ads like that? How is that investment going to make any sense?

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

That’s just human psychology at work. Many of these BS explanations are appealing to a certain type of mind.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

If you look at the ratios of each picture, you’ll notice that there are roughly two categories: hard and easy pictures. Based on information like this, OP could fine tune a more comprehensive questionnaire to include some photos that are clearly in between. I think it would be interesting to use this data to figure out what could make a picture easy or hard to identify correctly.

My guess is that a picture is easy if it has fingers or logical structures such as text, railways, buildings etc. while illustrations and drawings could be harder to identify correctly. Also, some natural structures such as coral, leaves and rocks could be difficult to identify correctly. When an AI makes mistakes in those areas, humans won’t notice them very easily.

The number of easy and hard pictures was roughly equal, which brings the mean and median values close to 10/20. If you want to bring that value up or down, just change the number of hard to identify pictures.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

That’s a very important distinction. Hard wasn’t the clearest word for that use. I guess I should have called it something else such as deceptive or misleading. The idea is that some pictures got a below 50% ratio, which means that people were really bad at categorizing them correctly.

There were surprisingly few pictures that were close to 50%. Maybe it’s difficult to find pictures that make everyone guess randomly. There are always a few people who know what they’re doing because they generate pictures like this on a weekly basis. The answers will push that ratio higher.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

My guess is that MS will figure out a different approach. Maybe the enterprise versions are behind a subscription while the consumer version stays the way it currently is. They could also take the Apple approach. Offer a little bit of something for free (like iCloud) and charge if you want more of it. There could also be specific features that are not available if you don’t pay (like Apple Music). MS could offer a certain part of consumer windows for free, and charge for some other part, like advanced settings.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

You’re supposed to take a photo of the screen, get the film developed, use a marker to draw a big read circle to highlight the important part, scan the photo, and post the digital image it here.

This is the way.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Disappearing top bars. Sure, limited screen real estate and all that, but I find it annoying that I have to scroll up a bit to reveal a button I need. Let’s say I want to copy the URL of a website, but I still want to keep on browsing. I need to scroll up a bit in order to reveal the ULR bar. Then I need to scroll back down again to continue where I left off. Usually thats “bit of scrolling” means I’m way off where I used to be.

In case you wanted to hear the “first world problem of the day”, you’re welcome.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Were anti-union? How is that possible? Why would anyone other than the CEO of the company be anti-union? So many things I don’t understand about America, but this union stuff has to be somewhere in the top 10.

Wouldn’t it be more democratic if the voice of the people would be heard in these matters? Americans say they love democracy, but somehow I’m not seeing much democracy being applied here.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Have to say, the first 4 seasons of the Shitshow were pretty epic. You just have to watch it from a safe distance, such as 3000 km or more. If making 4 more seasons costs one country, I’m not entirely sure if it’s too much or a bargain.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Yes. I’m aware that if you’re not watching it from a safe distance, it’s obviously not going to be very safe or enjoyable. My condolences.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

You can also buy used DVDs. Just got a stack of studio Gibili movies for a fraction of the price they cost when they were new. Still haven’t watched all of them, but some I have watched more than once.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

FB is struggling with an interesting problem. If you have enough early adopters, the rest of the population will follow. These things behave a bit like the critical mass in nuclear fission. Once you cross over a specific threshold, that’s when things start happening. In the early days of FB, it was all about growth and providing value to the users.

Once they had enough users, they started selling user data to advertisers. At that point, most users weren’t particularly privacy aware, and you could argue that it still isn’t ja major concern for a most people who use platforms like Tweetook or Snapstgram. People here on Lemmy aren’t really a representative sample of the rest of the population.

Providing a privacy friendly option wasn’t really that necessary back in those days. Providing a paid option might also hurt the ad sales, so that would have been a risky move. If only a certain part of the uses are subjected to data harvesting and ads, you’re essentially selling an inferior product to the advertisers. Sounds like a very risky move if the subscription becomes more popular.

If that happens FB would have to cross that bridge quickly. Being in the middle is a very precarious position, because the way I see it, these options don’t really support each other.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

When the platform dies.

“first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. “

Source

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

My guess is that eventually the back of the phone will be completely covered by cameras.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

You still can, and nowadays we even have a word for it: distracted driving.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

“The script accepts the name of a program or package as an argument when you run it. This value is then referenced as “$1” (argument number 1). Everywhere the script says “$1”, it substitutes in the name of the package you gave it. The end result is the name being tried against a large number of software repositories and package managers, and hopefully, at least one of them will be appropriate and the program will be successfully installed.”

Source: explain XKCD

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Nobody asked, but I needed it. Thought that perhaps I’m not alone, so now that I have the answer, might as well share it here.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Rule number 1 on Reddit is: “never read the article “

I guess that still applies here.

Rule 2: “disagree with everyone”

Rule 3: “You’re always right”

Rule 4: “everyone else is always wrong“

I’m sure there are lots of other rules, but that should get anyone started in the modern social media.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

And so it begins.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

In the fires of Mordor, or the bottomless pit of Z’ha’dum, depending on your interpretation of the starting point. Either way, it’s pretty dramatic.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

I prefer to give them a chance first. As soon as an app abuses that privilege, the permission to show notifications gets instantly revoked.

If it’s a somewhat useful notification, but I don’t need to read it right now, it gets scheduled and I’ll read that in the afternoon if I feel like it. If it’s a serious offense like spamming, then that right is gone forever. The app may also get a negative review as result.

Now that I look at my notification settings, I can easily identify three groups:

1. Serious apps that never send me anything, or if they do, it’s actually something I need to know. There are surprisingly many apps like this.
2. Semi-serious apps that send notifications a bit too frequently and they aren’t really that important anyway. These get scheduled. If I ignore the notifications for a week, nothing bad will happen.
3. Back-stabbing cannibalistic monetary predator apps. They send nothing but trash and land mines, and they do it all the time. Their business model is usually based on manipulation, misdirection, deception and straight up lies. They try to trick you into clicking some stuff and then rely on you forgetting to cancel the subscription later. I don’t have many apps like this, but all of their notifications are forever blocked. If you have a lot of this cancer of the app store type of garbage, I can totally understand why all notifications are blocked for all apps.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

A group of brain cells begins to have emergent properties such as consciousness and intelligence. A group of human brains has similar emergent properties. An individual human mind wants this and that, but an entire human community will have completely different priorities.

I prefer to think of the human population on Earth as a single massive organism that spreads like the mycelia of a fungus. Individual cells have simple needs and goals, but the organism as a whole will do much more than just expand everywhere and extract nutrients.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

Think about the behavior of the colony. What does it do and when. How does the colony solve problems. That’s emergent behavior far beyond the capabilities of a single ant.

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

See also: emergence

Hamartiogonic , 10 months ago

The byproduct is a sort of like salt water, but a lot more concentrated. It’s mostly NaCl, but there’s also various other anions and cations such as Al, Ca, Mg, K, SO4 etc. Those metals came from the ocean, so you might be inclined to think that you can dump them back into the ocean. The problem comes when you dump a lot of that stuff and you get very high concentrations locally. When the concentration of those compounds is within the normal range, sea life can handle it. Once it’s above the limit, you can expect things to struggle or die. Eventually, it will get diluted in the ocean, but before that the concentrations will be high enough to cause damage to most living things.

Hamartiogonic , 11 months ago

In recent years I’ve been following the development of the energy storage industry. The latest video by Just Have a Think made me realize that an energy storage facility should use a variety of different technologies. Some would store energy for a few hours, some for days and some technologies would be used for seasonal energy storage.

I really think we need to start building these facilities. Not just pilot plants, but actual production scale facilities.

Hamartiogonic , 11 months ago

Did you notice that the Average Lemmy Comments by Day looks really weird? Some of the sudden jumps could be attributed to real life events, but I’m more inclined to think there’s something buggy going on with the way three numbers are logged. Besides, there’s also a sudden dip!

Hamartiogonic , 11 months ago

I think it also feels like magic because we haven’t developed much intuition about the way magnets work. If you had thousands or millions of magnetic items in your life, you would develop that intuition, which would shatter the magic. Obviously, not being able to see or feel magnetic fields plays a big role too.

For example, ropes, strings and cables are very familiar. You have a good intuitive understanding on how they work, because you’ve used them so much. There’s nothing magical about them. Imagine what it would be like if today is the first day when you learn to tie a knot. You could do completely magical things like attach two ropes together. You could even keep a box closed by tiring a rope around it. Pretty advanced stuff.

Hamartiogonic , 11 months ago

Yeah baby! Sign me up. Sounds awesome.