Fauxreigner

@Fauxreigner@beehaw.org
0 Post – 91 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

There are three drinks you can call a martini:

  • A martini is gin and vermouth, maybe with some bitters if you like
  • A vodka martini is vodka and vermouth, bitters again optional
  • A vesper martini is gin, vodka, and lillet blanc
  • Any of the above can be made "dirty" with olive brine if you want

Anything else is a cocktail in a martini glass. No shade if you like apple schnapps, lemon juice, and vodka, drink what you like, but it's not a martini.

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Nah, these accusations of racism from a company owned by an Apartheid era South African emerald mine heir are too racist.

The lack of an emergency transponder is their biggest problem, followed shortly after by the inability to exit without outside help (which is literally what killed the Apollo 1 crew over 50 years ago). Next up, as pointed out in another thread, is that the sub is made of extremely brittle materials because that makes it lighter. Honestly, using off the shelf components for the controls doesn't worry me nearly as much as those other issues.

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There are reports that acoustic systems picked up banging noises at 30 minute intervals. Until I heard that, I was convinced it had imploded. Now I'm not so sure, and it'll only be worse if they aren't rescued. Implosion would at least have been fast.

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Rather than deal in abstractions, here's the comment thread.

I have no idea if they actually had spares, but there's something to be said for having three $30 off the shelf parts over one $200 custom part, provided that failure isn't immediately catastrophic.

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From the opening page

The Court has long had the equivalent of common law ethics rules, that is, a body of rules derived from a variety of sources, including statutory provisions, the code that applies to other members of the federal judiciary, ethics advisory opinions issued by the Judicial Conference Committee on Codes of Conduct, and historic practice. The absence of a Code, however, has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules. To dispel this misunderstanding, we are issuing this Code, which largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.

So...

  1. Why, if you think the code that applies to all other federal judges is good, did you not simply adopt it?
  2. So the problem is that people think the justices consider them not bound by ethics rules because they don't have a formal code, not the behaviors of certain justices that have come to light in recent years, got it.

The CEO (who is on board) has complained about safety regs multiple times, so it's not that surprising that they're ignoring this one too.

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I strongly disagree with the premise of this article, that it's a tough choice. Appeasement doesn't work. Target pulling merch just tells the domestic terrorists that threats work.

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I'm wondering if this is something he explicitly told them to do, or if this is something the "Elon management team" put in to keep him happy while they try to get their fundamentally flawed system to work in reality.

It's worth clarifying this to "non-consensual", since "ending genital mutilation of children" is the drum pounded by the anti-trans movement.

I think there’s massive untapped demand for things like mini city cars and kei trucks.

Not just that, but even the more middle ground small cars. I'd love to have an EV truck sized the way they were in the 80's/90's (which was more or less comparable to a midsize sedan, just taller). The push to bigger and bigger wheelbases to take advantage of loopholes in the efficiency standards really doesn't need to be reflected in EVs, but it's what all the major automakers are doing.

Yeah, that was my concern when we got reports of regular banging noises.

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If it was actually them, I'd guess they were banging on the titanium end cap.

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Unless you're willing to put in some kind of response that basically says "I'm not going to respond to that" (and that's a sure way to break immersion) this is effectively impossible to do well, because the writer has to anticipate every possible thing a player could say and craft a response to it. If you don't, you'll end up finding a "nearest fit" that is not at all what the player was trying to say, and the reaction is going to be nonsensical from the player's perspective

LA Noire is a great example of this, although from the side of the player character: the dialogue was written with the "Doubt" option as "Press" (as in, put pressure on the other party). As a result, a suspect can say something, the player selects "Doubt", and Phelps goes nuts making wild accusations instead of pointing out an inconsistency.

Except worse, because in this case, the player says something like "Why didn't you say something to your boss about feeling sick?" and the game interpreted it as "Accuse them of trying to sabotage the business."

Current-gen AI isn’t just viewing art, it’s storing a digital copy of it on a hard drive.

This is factually untrue. For example, Stable Diffusion models are in the range of 2GB to 8GB, trained on a set of 5.85 billion images. If it was storing the images, that would allow approximately 1 byte for each image, and there are only 256 possibilities for a single byte. Images are downloaded as part of training the model, but they're eventually "destroyed"; the model doesn't contain them at all, and it doesn't need to refer back to them to generate new images.

It's absolutely true that the training process requires downloading and storing images, but the product of training is a model that doesn't contain any of the original images.

None of that is to say that there is absolutely no valid copyright claim, but it seems like either option is pretty bad, long term. AI generated content is going to put a lot of people out of work and result in a lot of money for a few rich people, based off of the work of others who aren't getting a cut. That's bad.

But the converse, where we say that copyright is maintained even if a work is only stored as weights in a neural network is also pretty bad; you're going to have a very hard time defining that in such a way that it doesn't cover the way humans store information and integrate it to create new art. That's also bad. I'm pretty sure that nobody who creates art wants to have to pay Disney a cut because one time you looked at some images they own.

The best you're likely to do in that situation is say it's ok if a human does it, but not a computer. But that still hits a lot of stumbling blocks around definitions, especially where computers are used to create art constantly. And if we ever hit the point where digital consciousness is possible, that adds a whole host of civil rights issues.

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Worth pointing out that only the end caps were metal (and titanium at that, which is already brittle), while the bulk of the hull was carbon fiber, which doesn't gradually fatigue bend and buckle, it fails catastrophically.

Also, they lost signal at 1 hour and 45 minutes into a ~2 hour dive. I don't know how much their dive rate varied, but if we assume it was effectively constant, that puts them at ~3500 meters at LOS.

Combining those two points, two to three years after building the ship, they identified cyclic fatigue in the carbon fiber that reduced their calculated rating to 3000 meters. Since that's not enough to get to Titanic, they completely rebuilt the ship, two years ago.

So yeah, I think you're right. With the public facts available, I think the most likely scenario is the carbon fiber hull was fatiguing again, they decided to trust their acoustic/strain monitoring system that they believed would give them enough warning to resurface (which the guy they fired in 2018 said might only give them warnings milliseconds before there was a problem), and it failed somewhere below 3000 meters.

Nah, they don't want to interoperate with other companies. They just want to take over the federated space and strangle it.

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Unlikely, implosion makes a very different sound. It could be almost anything. Might have been parts of the wreckage getting moved around by currents and knocking together, might have been some undersea life bumping into the wreck of the Titanic, might have been completely unrelated.

So I guess we’ll see if there’s anything interesting in the corp data…

My guess is it'll get sold, not made generally public.

The pilot may not have been, although anyone described as an "explorer" is pretty likely to be wealthy. Three of the other four (including the CEO) were, and the last was one of the billionaire's 19 year old son.

Edit: Checked, the pilot (Paul-Henri Nargeolet) was also a billionaire.

Beyond that, it'll try to summarize a book, but it often can't do so successfully, although it will act like it has. Give it a try on something that is even a little bit obscure and it can't really give you good information. I tried with Blindsight, which is not something that's in the popular culture, but also a Hugo nominee, so not completely obscure. It knew who the characters were, and had a general sense of the tone, but it completely fabricated every major plot point that I asked about. Did the same with A Head Full of Ghosts, which is more well known but still not something everyone has read, and it did the same thing.

One thing I found that's really fun is to ask it a question and then follow up with something like "Are you sure about that?" It'll almost always correct itself and make up something else. It'll go one step further and incorporate details you ask about. Give it a prompt like "Are you sure this character died of natural causes? I thought they were killed by Bob" and it will very frequently say you're right and make up a story along those lines that's plausible within the text. It doesn't work on really popular stuff; you can't convince it that Optimus Prime saves Luke Skywalker in RotJ, but anything even a little less well known and it'll tell you details that it's making up whole cloth with complete confidence.

No, it's catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber, the thing that keeps the squishy humans inside separate from the tons-per-square-inch of water outside.

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Pretty unlikely. It's easy to dunk on them for the controller, but they apparently carried backups, and it's nowhere near the most concerning thing about their operations. It's much more likely that their extremely brittle carbon-fiber hull fatigued (again), their homegrown acoustic fatigue detection system didn't detect it (or it did and they ignored it), and the ship was crushed in a fraction of a second.

Sorry, I thought my intense sarcasm was clear, it's absolutely a bullshit story.

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Yes, that's correct. The pressure chamber is the hull that separates the 1 atm of pressure inside from the 375 atm of water outside. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

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I'm pretty sure BLM razed Chicago to the ground a couple years ago. Not sure why my coworkers who used to live in the area keep pretending it isn't a smoking crater.

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Probably less dramatic. You're not going to get a spray of water; if water's coming in, it's coming in at over mach 3, and implosion would happen in milliseconds. Cracking like that would also be pretty unlikely. It's more likely that they thought that it was just "an abundance of caution."

And yet, probably second to the billionaire CEO also being in it.

Federation isn't working well, but it's not working well because the big instances aren't able to keep up with all of the inbound/outbound messages, and if a message fails, that's it. Right now there's no automated way to resync and catch up on missed activity.

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Isn't it trivial for bot farms to just spam posts on their home instance? And how does this handle cases where the number of posts is zero?

The really telling thing is, I skipped this article the first time because, "Yeah, we know, this isn't news." Took me another look to catch that this was Alito, not Thomas.

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It's not a few seconds, it's a very small fraction of a second. The Thresher imploded in 1/20th of a second at 730 meters. We don't know for sure how far down Titan was when it imploded, but based on the time they lost signal, I'm guessing around 3500 meters, so we're talking about 4-5 times as much force. Plus the hull was made of extremely brittle carbon fiber, so it wouldn't buckle at all, it would just collapse all at once. It's hard to overstate how much force we're talking about; at that depth, it's about equivalent to building the Empire State building out of lead and sitting it on top of the ship with no other supports.

It's not just that they didn't have time to drown; it would have imploded so quickly that they would have been dead before their brains even had time to process that something was happening.

As I recall, he literally said regulations were holding back innovation for submersibles.

Sure, that's the embrace part of embrace, extend, and extinguish. Get their users to use their platform with all of the pre-existing networks and content, so that it's a viable alternative to Twitter, and they bring such a big community that the major established players want to interact with it.

Step two, declare that they've got some great ideas on how the space can be improved, but activitypub doesn't support them, and they don't want to wait around for the standard to update; we need to bring these improvements to our users now! So they unofficially "extend" the standard, so everyone on Threads is getting the new gee-whiz feature, but they can still talk to everyone else. Meanwhile, everyone else's experience is a little bit worse. And while we're at it, maybe we add something that feels bad for both sides when a non-Threads user interacts with a Threads user. So gosh, I mean, why not go ahead and migrate your account over to Threads? You don't lose anything; you still get to interact with your existing networks, nothing bad happens, just that now you also get the cool features.

Step three (and this one happens much later), the overwhelming majority of users are using Threads, because it does all the cool stuff that Mastodon can't do. So now we've got another great idea, but unfortunately, this one just isn't compatible with activitypub. So, we're gonna give you guys some heads up in advance, if you want to stay connected, you gotta switch over to Threads, and if you don't it's just gonna be a wasteland because all of those users aren't visible to you anymore, and your grandma is gonna be sad that she can't talk to you because you won't take the simple step of signing up for a free account.

This isn't idle speculation. Google did this exact thing with XMPP a decade ago.

If we're going to be pedantic, you mean that it's possible for the median to equal the arithmetic mean. The "average" is a number that represents a set of data, and could be the median, arithmetic mean, geometric mean, and several other values.

More to the point, there are some perfectly suitable rules that every other federal judge is bound to, we don't need a new set of rules at all.

All trained behavior like pushing a light switch to turn the lights on and off are violated in a smart home, even if it’s just because the delay between pushing the button and the lights going on is increased by 100ms.

This is only true if you're controlling bulbs instead of switches. Virtually all of my lights are on z-wave switches that work almost exactly the same as regular switches, the only difference being that the switch paddle doesn't stick in an on or off position. Smart control is strictly in addition to the primary control.

Completely agreed on your other points, though. Absolutely no chance I'd use anything other that a local Home Assistant server that handles all processing locally.

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Well, the CEO of the company, who was the one really pushing hard on the "regulations stifle innovation" mantra, is among the dead. So he ended up paying more than the law would have made him.

Yeah, this is a common cycle of transphobic love bombing pulling people further right. Rowling is a pretty similar story.