SkoomaDentist
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User ID: 84
A while ago I came to the conclusion that any intellectual (or ”intellectual”) commonly being discussed here is a sign that their main skill is filling pages and pages with nonsense and that I should simply completely ignore anything that intellectual says. It works remarkably well.
SkoomaDentist
8d ago
It looks like this classic low budget Finnish comedy skit from the 90s was really more of a documentary.
SkoomaDentist
9d ago
Does Trump even care about trans people as long as they (or more likely their allies) don't make a huge amount of noise?
SkoomaDentist
10d ago
AI is still limited to text boxes and text manipulation or content generation
What? Of course it isn't.
AI is used all the time in a whole bunch of "invisible" applications that have nothing to do with text or content generation. Take a photo with a phone camera? You're using AI. Use Nvidia RTX voice? AI. Deal with pharmaceutical molecule research? Fair chance of AI being used. Play guitar and use the newest generation of amp modelers? That's AI again.
SkoomaDentist
10d ago
Of course. I'd estimate that using synthetic data results in an overall worse performing AI but I could see it being used to fill specific gaps in the real training material (probably using a specialized model that's good at that specific type of data and possibly not much else).
SkoomaDentist
10d ago
It’s interesting that the bottleneck is given as lack of data rather than architecture.
It's not lack of data as such (there's gobs and gobs of raw data). It's curated high quality data of a suitable form and that can actually be used (be that for legal or technical reasons). The reason synthetic data is used because it solves (or claims to solve) the curation and form issues. The trainers can directly instruct the source AI to provide data of type X in quantity Y.
SkoomaDentist
12d ago
I legitimately can't tell if it's real or not.
It's easy to tell it's not AI: It's coherent over a very long time which is beyond what video AIs are capable of currently.
SkoomaDentist
14d ago
I've been really thinking about how gendered this election is. I use Instagram. If I could turn off every woman in my feed for the next week and the past one, I would take that option in a heartbeat.
This applies even (or especially) outside US. I expect to see much social media wailing from some of the women I know while the few men to comment anything are likely to be about what Trump's win means for European defence and economy.
SkoomaDentist
14d ago
What's ACB?
SkoomaDentist
16d ago
Another relevant fact is that the problem is self solving with time at any height where there is meaningful atmospheric drag because any debris would need further boosting to stay up.
SkoomaDentist
17d ago
Surely expecting to read the first paragraph of an article isn’t too much…
SkoomaDentist
22d ago
Q: How do you recognize a second generation Polish or Ukrainian immigrant?
A: They have a funny (sur)name.
At least that's how it works in Finland.
SkoomaDentist
22d ago
This was notably the case in the Winter War in 1939 when Finland was so poorly resourced that many soldiers couldn't be equipped with proper uniforms. They used their own clothes and were only provided with a belt and a hat with the official emblem sewn on.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
even if you have a slow computer, as long as it is Turing-Complete
Here's the thing, though. No real world computer is Turing-complete. They all have finite storage and thus fail the infinite tape requirement. For an obvious example, try running eg. Stable Diffusion on an early 90s PC - you simply can't because they don't have enough storage for the model and results, even if you allowed infinite time.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Man, I miss TPO…
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
I doubt that'll work since it's essentially same as EMPing your own positions given that drones are offensive, not defensive forces. If you had enough space between for your own units and positions being affected over a very large area, you wouldn't be having a drone problem in the first place.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Lightroom / Photoshop or a bunch of other similar programs. Pretty much every major image editing app has added or is racing to add AI features because they are so useful. Some sort of decent AI denoise is nowadays expected even from free apps.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Here's an example from non-LLM (because LLM are massively overemphasized here): Fixing a noisy photo I took after the sunset against the sky.
First thing is using AI Denoise to massively reduce the visible noise due to the lighting conditions.
Second is using AI sky detection to make a one-click accurate mask of the sky so I can easily even out the brightness between the ground and the sky.
Final step is using content aware remove (aka generative neural network) to remove distracting tree branches with near-perfect results.
You could have sort of done the same four years ago, but it would have resulted in blurry details (from old school stupid denoise) and taken an order of magnitude more manual work. With AI tools it's just pointing at the thing and telling the app to "Just Do It".
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
If by effective low pass filter you mean a filter that makes me ctrl-w almost immediately, you're right. Such posts are the ratsphere textual equivalent of youtube videos where you have to watch half an hour of video to get two minutes of actual information.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
One thing unusual about our neighborhood is that it sits in the local bubble of unusually deep vacuum, which makes astronomy easier. And on a larger scale there's the local void where there's unusually few galaxies nearby.
On the other hand, we're blocked from what'd be probably the most fascinating view by interstellar dust clouds between us and the galactic core. We win some, we lose some.
I just wish some astronomy apps had a simulation of "This is what we'd see if there weren't those damned clouds in between".
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
I've always thought that a lot of rat adjacent people cannot really differentiate between actually good posts and posts that are just overly long, Scott being a notable example of that group.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
Not to mention medical professionals getting sick at a (much) higher rate than the general population, further decreasing the capacity. That already had an effect here in Finland during Covid.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
I'd like to note that it isn't just the medical establishment or the government (in the USA) that has lost credibility: the public has as well. Going into Covid lockdowns in March 2020, I might have thought that everyone would play along, now I know that there is no chance everyone will play along.
It's fascinating and banging-my-head-to-the-wall inducing to read peoples comments here regarding lockdown and particularly those who assume that the Western response was universaly the same, or at least very similar, as the American response.
Finland never had a lockdown. Not a single one. When the pandemic hit in mid March, the only things forcibly closed were bars and restaurants (after massive public pressure). Yet everything shut down because 1) people voluntarily stopped going out, 2) many facilities owners didn't want the risk of spreading the infection (of which a lot was uncertain back then) and 3) many of the rest didn't want the bad PR. I personally skipped town for two months because I preferred having views like this instead of being stuck in the city with absolutely nothing happening. Apparently nature parks have never been as popular as during that time (and no, nobody even suggested restrictions to that - there's shitloads of open space in Finland, might as well let people enjoy it when it's especially useful).
So, in some places people do play along. It just seems that US is not one of those.
SkoomaDentist
1mo ago
True Finns in Finland. The only reason the party ever got anywhere beyond a minor protest party is because all the other parties steadfastly refused to talk about immigration issues for two decades. As a result, they've gotten the second most seats in the last two elections and are currently in the government. This has also broken the old system of three traditional big parties and several smaller ones, with the Center Party being now just a shadow of its past size.
What's the difference to old? What do they mean in practise?
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