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mecsred

705 karma · joined March 31, 2022

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mecsred··on So you think you could be an electrician?
1. you can definitely get electrocuted snipping a single wire with insulated ppe, just brushing up against a wall can form a circuit.

2. You are thinking of survivorship bias, selection bias is a different thing.

mecsred··on The Benchmarkpocalypse
AI is trained off a massive corpus of internet exchanges. If you tell people youre going to thoroughly inspect their work or are able to check if theyre right, only people with high confidence will respond. I imagine exchanges where the OP is more involved in fact checking have a higher proportion of thoughtful and honest answers.
mecsred··on Texas man sentenced to 30 years for transporting pamphlets
The person being sentenced was not involved in any way based on this information.
mecsred··on No Skill. No Taste
That would honestly be an incredible performance art piece, like a distilled waste of a human life just to prove a point. Then even after all that you could ask the question "Is the art inferior, did it prove the point effectively.". I think there's a real argument to be made that it didn't, becuase just having the argument surfaces some very interesting points about worth.
mecsred··on Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk
Obviously people know, but theres no impulse to introspect on why or how. Knowing that someone else knows you had a hard braking event taps in to our social brains to provide a much stronger response to the event. When we know people are watching we're more likely to try and justify our behaviour.
mecsred··on U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office
In the current social climate I would absolutely not trust public media to understand general consensus. Ask specific people you trust or seek out their opinions.
mecsred··on I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great
If the 16 performs worse in the power efficiency department, that is not great, but it doesnt make my machine run any worse. Calling it heavy is crazy to me, the thing is tiny. If you think it's heavy you'd have trouble using an iPad. The screen thing was a shitty manufacturing issue, they released a kit to fix it, which I luckily didnt need since mine came after they fixed it in production.
mecsred··on I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great
You mean the framework Ive been running for the past 4 years or so?
mecsred··on I'm just having fun
why do you have to do what people on this website tell you? Write the fun thing.
mecsred··on Brain has five 'eras' with adult mode not starting until early 30s
How do you plan on defending those rights if you dont vote.
mecsred··on The write last, read first rule
If you read first and write last isnt that the opposite of committing and then reading to see what is comitted?
mecsred··on Fractal Imaginary Cubes
None of the shadows you can physically see in the photos have 0 area because the construction of the fractal isn't perfect. What a perfect construction would look like and if it's ever theoretically possible to make physical are complicated questions. Beyond me for sure, how would an infinitely thin object even interact with light?

I would assume the problem with the idea is in the fractal physics rather than the definition of area, which has been solidly useful for me.

mecsred··on A New Algorithm Makes It Faster to Find the Shortest Paths
It only worked on undirected graphs in 2023. This article is about the newest breakthrough that works on directed graphs as well.
mecsred··on The U.S. Government's Extraordinary Pursuit of Kilmar Ábrego García
Belief is not binary and can change with new evidence. You may believe it is likely someone is innocent, but should still witness all the evidence to update your beliefs. In the rare case that there is concrete and infallible evidence that the accused IS innocent, they are typically not prosecuted, or it wraps up very quickly.
mecsred··on New quantum state of matter found at interface of exotic materials
Considering they provided multiple references to exactly what they were talking about, what gave you issues? They're not talking about what you linked, and they are talking about what they linked.
mecsred··on Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan
If you read the whole thread, the first comment I replied to, that user said exactly that thing.
mecsred··on Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan
No, an unnecessary hyperbole would be saying people should be outraged at any app that allows unverified communication.
mecsred··on Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan
So all forms of communication then? What is the end goal here, present your driver's licence and submit your comment to a Truth Verification Panel to be approved for distribution?
mecsred··on Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
Its all anecdotal all the way down, so here's another grain of salt to add to the pile.

(Calories in - calories out) is correct enough to be the single most reliable metric, and will serve you right 99% of the time. My "one level deeper" understanding is that there are a few transfer functions applied to calories in. So of the technically available calories you eat, how much does your body absorb. Then, when the calories are biologically available, how does your body spend them?

So the idea would be, if you eat the pizza at the right time you reduce calories in. Either you will digest less calories, or your body will allocated them differently at different times of the day.

Unfortunately these things aren't really measurable so it's very hard to separate from hearsay.

mecsred··on Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling
Not likely without other contributing technologies. These devices just move heat from one side to the other, at the cost of producing more heat. So you still have to dissipate even more heat on the hot end with a fan/heatsink, in addition to draining the battery running the Peltier.
mecsred··on My "Are you presuming most people are stupid?" test
I like this litmus test generally, but I think it applies mostly to self aggrandizing behaviour. "Most people are dumber than a threshold I consider intelligent" kind of vibe. I do think humans are stupid though, as in all of us, including myself and people I like. We just sometimes make terrible choices despite our best intentions, and by a strict definition that's pretty stupid.
mecsred··on RFK Jr.: HHS moves to restore public trust in vaccines
Thank you Spock.
mecsred··on The Shape of the Essay Field
I really don't think learning to rely on these tools for product review is a good idea. The web shows how much gravity the advertising industry has. As soon as the number of people using llms like this become statistically significant, you can bet product placement will find its way into the training data. Betting on enshittification is easy money.
mecsred··on Memetics – A Growth Industry in US Military Operations (2006) [pdf]
Everyone is an ideologue. What _is_ is too complicated to fit in a human brain, so we compress it. Thinking you're a free thinker is a type of ideology you can subscribe to.
mecsred··on Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself
Right, my complaint is that it only works like jargon, where you are just giving something a context-specific nickname. As a word shortening scheme, it's terrible. A world where many projects have names like s11g is a nightmare.
mecsred··on Chain of Recursive Thoughts: Make AI think harder by making it argue with itself
_#_ has to be one of the worst word shortening schemes I've ever seen get widespread. It only works with a very small number of long-lived technologies, in which case they basically just get a nickname, "k8s" "i18n". It does not at all work for larger contexts. You're basically making someone solve a crossword (2 across, 10 letters with two filled in) just to parse your sentence.
mecsred··on Particle Based Physics Engine in Golang
Nice work! I like that you put lots of examples in the readme for people to get an idea of the engine right away. It looks great and I hope you enjoyed building it!
mecsred··on Rotors: A practical introduction for 3D graphics (2023)
Thanks for the link to the Rodrigues form, that's quite interesting. Slightly confused by your comment though, shouldn't the matrix logarithm produce another matrix?
mecsred··on I think Yann Lecun was right about LLMs (but perhaps only by accident)
I think there's a lot more information in this one. Before I decide if I want to click or not, I know it's about Yann Lecun and LLMs at least. Where as Please Stop Talking About AGI could get me anything from Roko's Basilisk to a PSA.
mecsred··on Rust kernel policy
I think the way it was handled is pretty reasonable considering it's a public facing statement. Putting your name down on an authoritative statement is an important commitment internally, but a name put down for any reason on a public statement is a magnet for a firehose of questions, controversy, and potentially harrassment.
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