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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • My position has always been that AI is useful given these conditions:

    1. Both the input and output of the AI are defined and limited in scope (ie, designed to serve a specific purpose rather than be multi-purpose)
    2. It is difficult or impossible to come up with an algorithm that can do the same thing (ie, too many variables to be easily analyzed)
    3. How the output is derived is unimportant or less important than the final output itself

    This is a genuinely good application of AI:

    1. The AI is designed to identify and read text in scrolls
    2. The combination of low signal in the scan and requirement for image recognition capabilities makes AI perhaps the only feasible solution for the problem
    3. We care about the text itself, not why we think the text is what it is




  • Beyond that, it’s not even a social concept. People naturally attribute more weight to their first time doing anything. That’s not a social pressure or a social concept, that’s a logical conclusion of the fact that, till that point in their lives, they have not experienced anything resembling it.

    People remember their first time riding a bicycle, their first time leaving home, their first job, etc. Are all of these social constructs too?



  • Not entirely true. Vaccines induce the adaptive immune system, which is slow but precise. Getting sick for real induces the innate immune system, which is god awful and you should not be relying on it. S. pneumoniae causes pneumonia because the innate immune system goes overdrive and kills you before it kills the bacteria. COVID-19 induces cell-innate inflammasome activation and leads to a cytokine storm, which then leads to even more damage to the lungs as the immune cells come in. Both diseases have effective vaccines that do not do anything close to this.

    Deadly diseases tend to be deadly not because of the microbe itself, but because the innate immune system overreacts and kills you in the process of fighting off the disease.

    Getting vaccinated diminishes the role that the innate immune system plays when you get sick, since the B cells responsible for producing antibodies for the disease are already mature. Having available antibodies also allows the immune system to rely on the complement system, which allows it to detect and kill invading microbes way earlier than otherwise.







  • Lemmy.world, by political ideology, is most similar to old Reddit. Namely, you’re most likely going to find generally-left-of-center people. Several other instances (namely lemmy.ml) are known for being significantly more left-leaning, basically hard communist.

    As is tradition for left-leaning people, there’s a lot of infighting. .world people think that .ml people are tankies. .ml people think that .world people are corporate bootlickers. Both sides accuse the other of heavy-handed censorship.

    Basically, I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s just your standard leftism infighting.


  • I think people tend to have a very narrow view of what goes on around them. And frankly, I don’t think that’s really a bad thing. Everyone does it. It’s just a fact of life. But we have to account for it. Talking about big-picture issues doesn’t work when people are focused their narrow view of the world. Even if they agree with the issue, they won’t be riled up and take action. I think there’s 2 takeaways to this:

    First, regarding talking to the people around you: narrow your focus. Focus on things that affect them directly, or frame things in a way such that they interpret it in a way that affects them. Don’t talk about concentration camps, talk about Trump retroactively rescinding birthright citizenship and how that might affect their lives (especially effective if that person happens to be an ethnic minority or is in a relationship with one). When talking about anti-immigration policies, focus on ICE arresting American citizens because they didn’t look American enough. You don’t have to convince people of everything, you just have to convince people of enough that they feel personally concerned.

    Second, regarding yourself: it’s easy to think that all Americans are similar to the people that you’re with. Society is a bell curve. You don’t need to shift the entire bell curve to the left to exact change. You just need to stretch it out leftward - pull the left leaning people more to the left. Trump didn’t win by convincing leftists to be right-leaning, he won by convincing the right-leaning moderates into shifting right. Consider the audience and pick arguments that would be most effective against that particular audience. Be more direct toward more left-leaning people. Republican? Sow seeds of suspicion toward Trump. Moderate? Make them fear for their way of life. Left-leaning moderate? Maybe we should punish the rich. Leftist? Hell yeah socialism baby




  • To give more detail: Proton uses a hacky workaround called fsync. Fsync was developed by the Wine developers but was explicitly not merged into Wine because, by their own admission, this is a really hacky workaround and it’s definitely not the right way of doing things.

    For games, using fsync is far better than not using anything, and so Proton uses fsync. Apparently there’s recently been concern that the fsync workaround is going to become a bottleneck in modern games (not entirely sure the reasoning why), and so the Wine developers pushed for the development of NTsync, which is basically fsync if it weren’t a hacky workaround. NTsync alleviates the bottleneck that fsync creates, making it more robust, less hacky, and more futureproof.

    In short, don’t expect any noticeable performance increases, but Proton might work more consistently and it might improve performance for future games