[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 63 points 3 weeks ago

Fuck Spez

(Hey noone else said it in this thread so I think I have to)

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 77 points 3 months ago

VESA Adaptive-Sync goes back to the eDP stardard, 2009. AMD simply took that and said "Hey why aren't we doing that over external DisplayPort". And they did.

So instead of over-engineering a solution that nobody asked for to create vendor lock-in nobody (but fanboys with Stockholm Syndrome) want they exposed functionality that many many panels already had, anyway, because manufactures don't use completely different control circuitry for laptop (eDP) and stand-alone monitors.

And, no, nvidia's tech is not superior. From what I gather they have stricter certification requirements but that's it.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 57 points 4 months ago

And here we have a typical specimen exhibiting capitalist realism: Observe how the subject is analysing everything they come across on a "who works for who" basis, projecting human modes of production onto the universe. Applying it, even in vain, this reductive universality ensures that they will never think beyond it and, not thinking beyond it, not question either working for a capitalist or being a capitalist who is worked for, thereby in either case working for capitalism, a form of human cooperation in which happiness, well-being, yes even human connection (that necessitating eye-level communication) is traded for hastened advancement of the economy to achieve post-scarcity.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 70 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Somehow I have the feeling that this is not going to convince people who think that 0.9999... /= 1, but only make them madder.

Personally I like to point to the difference, or rather non-difference, between 0.333... and ⅓, then ask them what multiplying each by 3 is.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 57 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Good ones still last a long time. What fails is generally not the LED itself but the cheap-ass rectifier in a cheap-ass case that is optimised for production price instead of heat dissipation. The fixture can also be an issue as nobody designed for heat dissipation in the days of incandescent bulbs, you might be baking those poor capacitors.

And those kinds of bulbs will stay available because there's plenty of commercial users doing their due diligence on life-time costs. Washing machines, fridges? Yes, those too, though commercial ones aren't necessarily cheap. Want a solid pair of pants? Ask a construction crew what they're wearing.

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submitted 6 months ago by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

A new paper suggests diminishing returns from larger and larger generative AI models. Dr Mike Pound discusses.

The Paper (No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data): https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125

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submitted 6 months ago by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world
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submitted 7 months ago by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/videos@lemmy.world
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submitted 7 months ago by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/videos@lemmy.world

There are lots of ways we are tackling the climate crisis, bringing down emissions and sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. But which method is the most cost-effective? For a given investment, which draws down the most carbon emissions? In this video I answer that question... and then talk about why that answer doesn't necessarily mean much.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 65 points 8 months ago

The problem isn't GMO, the problem is the type of changes big agritech is making.

Take, e.g. Clearfield Rapeseed: It's a herbicide-resistant strain, non-GMO, bred by BASF, and resistant against Clearfield, another BASF product. Thing is: Rapeseed is a brassicaceae, and they really like to exchange genes cross-species. There's tons of wild plants ("weeds") that are brassicaceae, in fact if you don't happen to be growing it rapeseed itself is a rather nasty weed. Which means that once that resistance is out there that stuff can't be killed by stuff that doesn't kill literally everything. Brassicaecae seeds can also stay dormant in the soil for years, making it even more nasty.

My state's agricultural ministry got wind of the stuff, quickly decided "that's insane we need to outlaw it", then quickly hit their head against the EU legislation which doesn't distinguish by impact on nature or environment or economy, but by GMO status. Instead they then flooded farmers with brochures telling them just in how much shit they would be should that stuff escape from their fields and other farmers demand compensation for loss of income etc.

The thing is: That stuff doesn't even make sense for BASF. "Sell resistant strain and a herbicide along with it" makes a lot of sense for chemical companies (and all big agritech are chemical companies), "spread that resistance throughout the whole environment" doesn't because who's going to buy their herbicide when it becomes ineffective. They really dropped the ball on that one, failed ecology 101.

Speaking of "we've got a hammer, where are the nails": Golden rice. The problem isn't that rice doesn't contain carotene, the problem is that there's people so piss-poor they can't afford half a carrot, onion, some garlic, and a spoon of beans with their bowl of rice. If you want a solution that is the problem to fix.

This is the kind of stuff actually modern agritech comes up with, problem being: It's not a thing you can earn money with as a company as there's no products to sell, definitely none you have a monopoly on, so those companies have literally zero incentive to research that kind of thing. Farmers don't have the funds (even in the west, they're getting squeezed by supermarkets and Nestle etc), but you know what, states already have universities. Give them a couple of fields to mess around with and you'll be surprised by what they come up with.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 81 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Unless you are advocating for a Communist regime along the lines of the Soviet Union or Maoist China, you aren’t really “far left”.

If you do that you definitely aren't, authoritarianism and far-left are mutually exclusive.

Council communists and Anarchists generally qualify for far-left status. (Or, differently put, council communism is methadone therapy for Marxists who don't yet dare make the jump to syndicalism).

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submitted 8 months ago by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/world@lemmy.world

Press release of the Parliement itself


  • Safeguards on general purpose artificial intelligence
  • Limits on the use of biometric identification systems by law enforcement
  • Bans on social scoring and AI used to manipulate or exploit user vulnerabilities
  • Right of consumers to launch complaints and receive meaningful explanations

On Wednesday, Parliament approved the Artificial Intelligence Act that ensures safety and compliance with fundamental rights, while boosting innovation.

The regulation, agreed in negotiations with member states in December 2023, was endorsed by MEPs with 523 votes in favour, 46 against and 49 abstentions.

It aims to protect fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability from high-risk AI, while boosting innovation and establishing Europe as a leader in the field. The regulation establishes obligations for AI based on its potential risks and level of impact.

[...]

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 56 points 8 months ago

It probably is. In the EU APIs aren't copyrightable in the first place, doubly so if it's necessary for interoperability, in the US there's Google vs. Oracle which declared Google's use of Java APIs in Android fair use.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 59 points 9 months ago

"Genital mutilation doesn't matter because men can't be victims" is what I read there. Get the fuck out of here with that sexist bullshit.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 80 points 9 months ago

There's generally rules of the "have to be on HRT for X months" kind which is perfectly sensible: Your body doesn't change the second you come out, or decide to swallow pills.

Then, all the data we have says that middling athletes stay middling after transitioning, bad ones stay bad and great ones stay great, that's enough for fairness given that we don't disqualify Michael Phelps for being half fish. All those genetic advantages he has would carry over if he were to transition and he'd dominate the female league not because he transitioned but because he's a genetic freak.

If you think that people transition just to have an advantage I don't know what to tell you either. I'll believe it when I see Matt Walsh do it, on camera, under doctor's supervision. If that clown with all his hatred can't do it with ideological fuel then noone can.

[-] barsoap@lemm.ee 82 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

For the curious, this is about as easy as it gets for proper type inference. You could leave out the one or other thing (most prominently, polymorphism), but that kind of stuff would hardly qualify as even a toy example.

I won't claim that J. Random Hacker will have issues understanding it -- it's a neatly tied bundle of necessary complexity without any distracting parts (like efficiency), if you sit down with the thing (ideally starting the whole series from the beginning) you'll be able to grok it (and have learned a lot). However, understanding HM isn't the same as being able to extend it, which includes proving soundness of the system, that kind of stuff is a specialised field within a specialised field within academia with more open questions than answered ones. The reason Rust doesn't have HKTs? Because their interaction with lifetimes is insufficiently understood. Those kinds of questions can easily start 20+ years of research only to be answered with "yep that's inherently unsound/uncomputable/whatever".

Oh, EDIT, forgot: AI-enabled typing is obviously a completely braindead idea. I don't need a second lazy, impatient, hubristic idiot looking at my code, I need something to catch mistakes. Something deterministic, rule-based, pure unerring logic. Which is exactly what type systems are and do.

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submitted 10 months ago by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/science@beehaw.org

In this video, I measure a wave of electricity traveling down a wire, and answer the question - how does electricity know where to go? How does "electricity" "decide" where electrons should be moving in wires, and how long does that process take? Spoiler alert - very fast!

I've been very excited about this project for a while - it was a lot of work to figure out a reliable way to make these measurements, but I've learned SO much by actually watching waves travel down wires, and I hope you do too!

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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/science@beehaw.org

This is from the 37th Chaos Communication Congress, still ongoing y'all might find other things of interests there, e.g. sticking with looking at stars the talk about the Extremely Large Telescope. Congress schedule, live streams, relive and released videos (i.e. final cuts not the automatic relive stuff which is often quite iffy)

Talk blurb:

The Solar System has had 8 planets ever since Pluto was excluded in 2006. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. But did you know Neptune was discovered as the 12th planet? Or that, 80 years before Star Trek, astronomers seriously suspected a planet called Vulcan near the Sun? This talk will take you through centuries of struggling with the question: Do you even planet?!

In antiquity, scientists counted the 7 classical planets: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – but their model of the universe was wrong. Two thousand years later, a new model was introduced. It was less wrong, and it brought the number of planets down to 6: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Since then, it's been a roller coaster ride of planet discoveries and dismissals.

In this talk, we stagger through the smoke and mirrors of scientific history. We meet old friends like Uranus and Neptune, forgotten lovers like Ceres, Psyche and Eros, fallen celebrities like Pluto, regicidal interlopers like Eris and Makemake as well as mysterious strangers like Vulcan, Planet X and Planet Nine.

Find out how science has been tricked by its own vanity, been hampered by too little (or too much!) imagination, and how human drama can make a soap opera out of a question as simple as: How Many Planets in Our Solar System?

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/technology@beehaw.org

~~Astronomers~~Engineers^1^ presenting at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress for a general but technical audience. The congress is still going on in case you're interested, lots of interesting stuff there and don't be afraid of German talks there's real-time dubbing.

Talk blurb:

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is currently under construction in the Atacama desert in northern Chile by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). With a primary mirror aperture of 39m, it will be the largest optical telescope on earth. We will briefly introduce the history and mission of ESO and explain how a modern optical telescope works.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is an intergovernmental organisation founded in 1962 and is based in Garching bei München. It develops, builds and operates ground-based telescopes to enable astronomical research in the southern hemisphere and to foster cooperation in the international astronomical community. In 2012 the ESO Council approved the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) programme and its construction is scheduled for completion in 2028. The 39m primary mirror will make the ELT the largest optical telescope at that time.

It will be located on the top of Cerro Armazones, a ~3000m high mountain in the Atacama desert in Chile. This site provides ideal optical conditions, but also comes with logistical and engineering challenges.

We will walk you through the telescope and along the optical path to the instruments and explain some of the technologies involved to push the boundaries of ground-based optical astronomy.


^1^ Oh boy the "what is it good for" question got them swimming. "I'm not an Astronomer -- Science, I guess? Looking at things?" :)

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submitted 11 months ago by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

Link to talks schedule, times are CET (deal with it)

Streams will show up here and final recordings here. There's generally also rough-cut recordings posted automatically after a talk is over, don't have a link for that yet.

Oh and for completeness' sake the congress' web page.

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submitted 11 months ago by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

Today we're looking at an ion milling machine. This instrument accelerates argon particles to high velocities and then slam them into your sample, acting as an atomic sandblaster. The sample is slowly etched due to the transfer of kinetic energy from the argon gas molecules. It can etch literally any material, even diamond!

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

RyanF9 uses science to explain how Gore-Tex works and why you’re being ripped off.

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submitted 11 months ago by barsoap@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

In the 80s one British firm was working of the future of high performance computing, where not 1 processor would work on a task but many. That company was inmos and the processor was the Transputer.

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barsoap

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