energywut

I genuinely believe humans are kind and empathetic by nature. I believe that humans have invented systems that penalize kind and empathetic behavior and adhere to those systems because they are familiar.

Look at what happens after a disaster or when a neighbor falls ill -- people band together and feed one another. They care for one another. They pick up the slack. Not because anyone pays them, but because it's what they intrinsically want to do.

But it only occurs during disruptions from the norm.

If only we didn't need to resort to selfish reasons for accessibility. Even looking past the idea that most, if not all, of us will benefit from a more accessible world, it makes me so sad when I hear people say "it's just not worth it".

To me that's equivalent to saying, "we know our system has bugs, but we only want our blind users to experience them". It's just... such a downer of a way to look at the world.

It's both. Child neurological development goes through a lot of mirroring the environments they observe in play, and mapping them onto stuffed animals, dolls, bugs, pets, toys, etc. There's an age where kids are developing interiority (children do not have an "inner voice" and do not develop it until 5-7, typically) and during that time, a lot of their play is them learning the rules and developing empathy (children do not have a concept of being able to put themselves in others shoes until age 3-7, typically).

Autistic children are often times very interested in learning rules and applying them in other settings. Autistic young women, especially, are navigating a complicated social environment that strongly encourages them to understand the rules of what it means to be a woman in society. Learning those rules and then saying, "Ok little (bugs|stuffed animals|toys), here's how things work" is both a thing kids do and a thing autistic kids do.

Couple that with special interests (dinosaurs, trains, bugs, bones, whatever), and you'll often see autistic kids getting WAY into one particular thing and then mapping the world they experience onto that thing.

It's not the worst name for the concept when you include "a male" and "a female" as prominent nouns in that noun class. If you adjust your language depending on whether you are addressing a man or a woman (or speaking about a man or woman), then it's definitely also social gender (as well as grammatical gender), even if those two concepts are separate.

Some scientists believe that autistic people have different levels of empathy than allistic people. Sometimes this manifests as higher levels of empathy for objects and animals, or higher emotional empathy.

I'm dx'd autistic, and I am someone who will weep openly or experience unbridled joy alongside, say, a movie about a bunch of animals surviving tough times. But if I see an adult human make a poor choice and suffer consequences I feel nothing. I have to teach myself that my values are that we should care for everyone -- even the people I feel no intrinsic empathy towards.

In speaking with my doc about it, it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others.

We're so fucked, as a species.

People are already way too easy to get to believe conspiracy theories. Shit like Pizzagate or whatever is only going to get more common when bad people start making, "and look, here's the video proof!"

And we've already got Tiktok and Youtube Shorts just pumping the dopamine centers in the brain for short form content. Generating shit you like dynamically is going to be an addictive nightmare. The moment it gets monetized we're going to see the equivalent of slot machines pumped at us from every channel -- flashing lights and emotional tugs to get us to part with our valuable money or attention.

And that's to say nothing of the impact these tools have on artists and creative people or the costs to train and deploy these tools.

We're already seeing it today. The amount of 'footage' about LA right now that's showing some sort of war zone that is clearly AI generated, but being consumed as if it was real is staggering.

That's literally the first sentence I wrote in my comment. ;)

0.57 x 0.57 miles is a good estimate. The lot is more or less square.

Yes. Maintaining 15mph is tough because of elevation changes. The land has a 1,200 foot tall ridge in it, so the drone must gain (and lose) 1,200 feet across that 0.57mi span. Which is steeper than the drone can do while maintaining a forward speed of 15 mph.

Additionally, SFM algorithms struggle with repetitive environments like pine forests, where there are not clear points or lines they can align. GPS data helps somewhat, but if the pictures are too sparse then it can get confused and start stitching images together incorrectly. Additionally, too few images lowers the fidelity of the output and causes strange gaps and black spots in clearings (where the clearing is visible in one pass but obscured in another.)

Finally, radio transmissions require two flights due to that ridge. I need to fly once on either side or I lose signal. There is no accessible point on the property I can maintain visual line of sight across the entire span, and "mountain" is a pretty good radio signal attenuator.

I'd LOVE to have some automation help in developing a flight plan, as right now it's manual, and I'm creating little segments myself, individually placing points and grids. Several tools claim to support automatic elevation, but none of them do so well when you have a 1000+ foot cliff or a narrow stream bed that has cut 20 feet into the earth in your environment.

The area was partially clearcut about a decade back. Some areas are due for brush management and some for commercial thinning. Additionally, because it is alpine and contains a stream used by fish for spawning, it is interesting to see the variations in snow load and water flow in the stream year over year.

So there's at least a reason to get out each winter (snow load), spring (melt/brush growth/flowers), and summer/fall (stream health/identify trees once brush loses leaves).

I also like seeing if there's trees in stands dying at an unusual rate, which might indicate pine beetle infestations or sickness that I'd need to take care of.

Also, it's a fun hobby and a cool dataset to flip through.

I wonder if it can play through MyHouse.wad. Which, if you haven't seen before, is an incredible art piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wAo54DHDY0

If you've read House of Leaves, do yourself a favor and check it out.

You are technically correct, and I believe the GPL doesn't cover the assets for the game (levels, art, audio, etc.), but I suspect there aren't many GPL licensed games out there for sale that have sold enough copies to make developing them worthwhile financially.

I'd love to be wrong, so if you have a few examples, I'm all ears.

I map quarterly! I just deal with it for now. :D

I am limited in height I can fly by the FAA (400 feet AGL).

The thing this doesn't do well, as far as I'm aware, is provide SFM data that can generate heightmaps or point clouds. Maybe I'm wrong!

This is the challenge. I spent <$2k on my setup.

It's heavily pine forested mountain areas. With a 65-75% overlap, the SFM algorithms struggle to produce sufficient details. Additionally, because of the verticality of the terrain and very tall pine trees there's a need to have multiple angles to generate a good orthophoto. So the grid is denser than other environments for a reason. I'm continuously updating my flight plan based on the results generated -- squeezing density up/down based on observed results.

The 4 hours is an overestimate, it's probably genuinely closer to 3 hours flight time.

The FAA does not permit this, by default. You are allowed to remote pilot in command one drone at a time. I could apply for an FAA waiver (I have one to fly beyond VLOS). I've genuinely considered doing so, but I don't know how I could convince the FAA that I could safely monitor multiple drones simultaneously.

I have ~200 acres of land I fly a drone survey mission to map. Today, that piloting is done by dronelink and a DJI drone. The challenge is that it's about 3 hours of flight time, give or take, to cover the space, and a given battery is good for about 35 minutes of flight time.

I have 4 batteries, which means I basically need to be refilling my batteries as quickly as I consume them in order to keep flying continuously (unfortunately, even with a quad-charger, I cannot fully sustain this.)

I would LOVE to have a fixed wing drone that could fly over the area and snap close-to-nadir photos as it did so, but the complexity of building and programming a hand built drone seems so much higher than deploying an off the shelf DJI drone. Additionally, the land is steep, with a 1,000+ foot elevation difference, and rugged, and the neighboring land is airspace I cannot fly within, so I couldn't use it to perform my turns.

Author, or others, any thoughts on whether it's worth pursuing a fixed wing aircraft to perform this mapping mission? Or is the best bang for my buck to just buy enough batteries to fly the mission continuously on an off the shelf quadcopter?

So a human failure looks like "alarm fatigue"? That when asked the same question many times, they might miss one or two?

Is that at all what is being exhibited here? Because it seems like the AI is being asked once and failing.

I don't disagree that humans might fail at this task sometimes or in some situations, but I strongly disagree that the way the AI fails resembles (in any way) the way humans would fail.

Transfusions can be whole blood, plasma, platelets, RBCs, etc. in addition to saline or electrolyte solutions.

Ok, but the computers were asked to specifically count the legs and return a number. So you've made the case that humans would specifically find this question odd, and likely increase their scrutiny. Making an error by a human even more unusual.

Yes. AI is advancing, but is still regularly making mistakes. Even in the domains where it excels, it still needs oversight from a skilled practitioner. Would you trust AI to run `rm` commands on your machine without your intervention? If not, why would you allow it to run a deadly multiton device on an unpredictable environment with adversarial actors?

AI is definitely not even close to being able to safely drive cars using cameras without an observant human driver.

More than a decade. I bought my Tesla in 2014, and I recall the announcement because it came after I had bought but before I took possession of my car, and thus I was ineligible for the upgrade.

In hindsight, thank fuck. I would have dropped thousands on it in a heartbeat and never, ever seen it. (Also, that car was a nightmare to own and the service centers were really scammy. Getting rid of it was the best move I could have made.)

Are they? Did you see the picture of the chicken with three legs? Because there's no human I know who would confidently assert that chicken has two legs.

Interesting to see. There's been some other efforts in this space, from blood products derived to chemically derived (e.g. perflurocarbons, which carry many multiples of what hemoglobin can carry, oxygen-wise).

There's definitely a need for a safe, shelf stable blood substitute.

Though, I'd argue that this isn't artificial blood, it's artificially replacing only the oxygen carrying role of blood -- there's nothing in this product that is producing clotting, fighting disease, managing hormones, fueling cells, etc. Still, excited to see this progress, transfusions are still a risky bet, and having something that can provide at least the O2 capacity in a safer package is very welcome.

We differentiate based on scale all the time. If I steal a pack of gum I expect a very different legal outcome than if I steal the entire contents of a best buy. In violent crime scale matters -- manslaughter is very different from mass murder.

In financial crimes ripping off my friend by not paying back a dinner is very different from embezzling millions from my company. Possessing a dime bag of marijuana is a very different crime from possessing 100 kilos of marijuana.

And in many cases, scale reaches a level of either not being enforced as a crime or not being a crime at all.

Federal sentencing guidelines specifically call out scale several times: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/about/overview/...

Scale matters. Reducing an example down to a single artist reproducing a single style of a single other artist isn't theft, it's a fundamentally different thing. Kawano is not making a tool that can predict and reproduce all art produced by all artists with a reasonably high degree of success.

If I use a single sample from a single record (say, drawing from the Amen Break) to build a small number of songs, that's fundamentally different from being able to wholesale lift the musical stylings of every artist across time.

Remix culture is important, and copying small elements out by hand with intention is an important part of remix culture. But the scale matters. The industrialization matters.

A kid taping the radio is different from Spotify selling every piece of music for a subscription and sending (almost) nothing on to the artists. Sure, both cut the artist out, but the scale matters.

I've never encountered a radical centrist in the wild before. Now I can say I have. Fascinating.

But the politics of the Dems are absolutely pro-capital, pro-moderate, pro-"nothing fundamentally changes". Biden, Obama, Harris, and Clinton were all "let's not make any radical shifts here, the markets will sort us out, we just need some easily ignorable guard rails on them" candidates.

I don't think the party, at the national level, contains many leftists. Perhaps Sanders (though I think of him as a soc-dem, not a dem-soc, based on his policy positions), and he's not even a member of the party anymore.

Politics is not limited to specific parties or governments. Politics is also concerned with the principles of an organization within their sphere, particularly if those principles are about who has access to power.

The FSF is very concerned with who has power within the relationship of software author and user -- namely that users should retain the power to redistribute and edit their software.

If someone is trying to ensure a community retains power or someone is trying to ensure a community loses access to power, that's politics too.

> favoring retributive discrimination, wanting frivolous late term abortions to be legal, etc.

I don't think these are the positions held by the Democrat party at large. I don't deny they exist within the party, but this isn't what a Biden or Pelosi are pushing for.