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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • theneverfox@pawb.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzGolden
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    4 hours ago

    The real issue is that anyone can come up with an economic model, but politicians and public figures get to pick and choose the one that fits their beliefs most closely. The model can be crap and barely hold up beyond an ELIF narrative about why it’s true, and people will base their careers around believing it

    I think there are good economic models out there, it’s just the convenient ones that are spread… Ones that don’t generally hold up against actual observation



  • Ironically, most technology is the opposite. At least when you’re designing and developing things, it’s all individuals - you can have assistants or small teams, but institutions don’t invent new things, individuals do.

    I don’t mean that pedantically, I mean one or two people were the driving force behind near every innovation. A company can sit those people in a room and fund them for a decade, but you have to keep them happy and leave them alone - if they leave or they’re meddled with too much, you’re back to square one

    Big companies can’t innovate (except in monetization)… It’s all done by start ups now. Then they get acquired, and all progress halts

    Just makes me think, in science (or academia at least) researchers are tied to their research to maintain their position, rather than their position deciding their research. It’s still a pretty broken system, but between that and the incentive for open collaboration it just makes me think. If every piece of technology was open sourced, if everyone from phone manufacturers to game designers existed in a world where designs could be improved upon, where would we be now?


  • theneverfox@pawb.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzSmooth
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    7 days ago

    Interestingly, it’s looking more and more like evolution isn’t random, and not only is evolution happy with “good enough”, it seems like it actively stops there

    Based on some recent experiments with bacteria and editing out existing genes, it seems like it chooses one genetic area at a time, and once it makes a marginal increase in an area it switches to another

    It’s possibly a mechanism to avoid a population boom then bust - if you improve too much too fast, you’ll outcompete your environment to the point you destroy your own ecological niche

    However it works (and figuring that out is bleeding edge research), it’s very old. Interestingly, Darwin’s later (unpublished) writings went in this direction, but the theories lost out to the random mutation theory





  • theneverfox@pawb.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnt smell
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    1 month ago

    People used to make fun of me all the time for sniffing and saying “smells like it’s going to rain soon”. Couldn’t even tell you what it smells like… It just smells like the concept of it starting to rain

    I’ve met others who knew exactly what I was talking about, but not many



  • Nah, I’m thinking much bigger. I’ve got an AI that can transcribe video, I’m working on one to summarize and put facts into a knowledge graph, I’ve got one that can hold a conversation, and I’ve got a script that scrapes sites and does natural language processing. I just need an agent to tie the pieces together and some control scripts to manage the containerized pieces

    The idea is, my assistant will go out, read up on programming topics and build knowledge graphs with references to the source, and I’ll fix my biggest issue - shittified searches crippling my work speed

    Then, I’ll send it off to find content. It’ll transcribe/summarize videos and rank them, research topics and come back with reports, and trawl my socials to find new things I might find interesting

    I plan to take all that, then let my assistant create video channels to watch and additional content to read if Lemmy is slow. And if my friends and family show interest, I’ll add in hosting and an internal social media and convince them to run additional nodes at home

    I’ve been working on it for a while because I saw this coming, I’ve got most of the key pieces already.

    And that’s the bubble of Internet I’m building - AI curation of my Internet life, it’ll happily work away the hours deshittifying a bubble of Internet


  • It’s quite possible, although I’m inclined to blame it on turnover and pressures for deadlines

    I’ve come to see software kinda like a plant. If you neglect it, it rots, because all software is contextual and the world moves on. If you keep growing it, it starts to rot from the inside. If you carve out down to something smooth and streamlined, it can last a long time and just need TLC to bounce back

    Ultimately, if you want something to be big and to last, you have to prune it, transplant it, and continuously work on it. There’s no direct money to be made there though

    And it helps a shit ton to have people around long-term. It can take years to learn a big stack, but having someone go “wait, if we do this we need to rexamine how we delete photos” is how you avoid fuck ups like this







  • I think long messages are a good habit. Start with something readable in the history, past that who cares? Most people rarely read past the preview, and if they do they want details

    I think it’s great because it makes you reflect on what the goal was and what you did. I sometimes stop to make a quick change as I’m writing, or just collect my thoughts before mentally dismissing the task




  • I always wondered… So in theory trackers are harmless. But for a bird? They’re freaking huge. Birds fold their legs up tight to sleep. It’s a small fraction of their body weight on one side, all the time, for months or years… That can’t just be a minor inconvenience

    It’s got to be like wearing a work boot on one foot and a tennis shoe on the other every day