if I win, you have to give me your name. If you win, I will tell you mine
The distinction here between “give” and “tell” had me in mind of fey deals, where you accidentally lose your name—you’ve given it away, so now it’s their name.
noggin-scratcher
Karma: 948
If the number is larger than 2, subtract 2 until it’s in the range 0-2
Think there might be an off by one error in here; I’m not seeing a way for it to ever return 0 as the answer
You sometimes see multi-colored Jack-o’-lanterns, even though pumpkins only come in one color.
Naturally occurring pumpkins might not come in garish neon primary colours, but they do come in more than just orange
I tried freezing some, but unfreezing frozen lentils turned out to be way too annoying
I make what sounds like a similar lentil/tomato sauce, and freeze it as individual portions in small foil trays (they measure about 15cm by 12cm and hold about 400g or so of food). Those trays can go directly from the freezer to the oven, and 30mins at 180°C will generally suffice to defrost whatever.
Can of course defrost in the fridge overnight then heat the sauce through in a pan, but that requires forethought so I mostly don’t. Have at times defrosted a frozen brick of lentils in a pan (adding a splash of water to help moderate/circulate the heat) but it is indeed quite annoying that way.
I have several other meals that similarly go from batch-cook to freezer to oven in the same foil trays, including a vegetarian lentil+mushroom shepherd’s pie and a roast vegetable tagine (and also meat-eater options). Can supply recipes if interested.
For “Springfield”, is this just based on the Simpsons or is there some other context that I’m missing (coming from Norway)?
If memory serves, they chose that name in the Simpsons because it’s an oddly common name, with a small town by that name in 30+ different states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_(toponym)
As it mentions there, “Fairview” and “Midway” are even more common, but I guess there’s more of a meme about “Springfield” being very common (sometimes inaccurately said that there’s one in every state)
We make efforts with the automod, but it’s a fairly rudimentary tool. Mostly a keyword/regex matcher.
So we can have it automatically look for some of the common repeated phrases (relatively few of our human users say “That’s a great question”). If it’s a weak signal maybe it only highlights them for mod review rather than fully automatically removing them.
But otherwise it relies on the human eye to spot them being weird. Especially when the comments are too short for AI detectors to get a good read on it (deciding what’s suspicious enough to run through a detector is itself done by eye).
NB: suspishously good grammer is now becuming an AI sign in itself
I moderate for a subreddit where, despite our best efforts to purge them with holy fire, AI spambots are rife (trying to act inconspicuous and get some karma). In addition to the “suspiciously good grammar and bullet points and em dashes” type, there’s conversely also a strain of them that use a gimmicky level of slang.
Where most of the tone of the subreddit is explanatory/informative, and most people are using standard spelling/grammar, they drop in with “ngl bro honestly the vibes are wild fr”
At acknowledged risk of sounding like an evil robot, what’s the theory of change that links this action to the desired outcome?
Traditionally the logic of a hunger strike is that it applies pressure to the target because they have sufficient conscience that they don’t want to watch you die, or at least don’t want to be viewed as responsible for your death, or don’t want to create a “martyr”. If you openly say from the outset that you don’t intend to fast to death or detriment, what motivates the relevant decision makers to change their actions?
My first thought was that the “ground beneath your feet”, that might move around more than you initially expected, would be the libraries and dependencies you call on; other people’s code that your code relies on. You might see old methods become deprecated in ways that break your use of them—or new methods introduced that you want to switch to, for efficiency gains or other reasons.
Which can be mitigated by some forethought to put in a layer of abstraction that wraps around the library, so that you only have to change how you call the library in the wrapper, without changing the rest of the code. But can also be taken too far (if you put a wrapper around all kinds of really basic functions, just creating extra cruft for no good reason).
Can also suffer from “leaky” abstractions, if your wrapper makes assumptions about the library that don’t hold up, or if the code calling the wrapper needs to still know about the underlying library to work right. Not sure quite what the analogy to a building foundation would be there—I guess if you thought your big concrete slab was trustworthy as an immovable foundation, but then it turned out that big concrete slabs on top of dirt behave importantly differently to big concrete slabs on sand.
and we adhere to these principles
Do we though? As a species? I suppose we can claim to, as part of a transmission to try to persuade aliens of our niceness. But if they’re able to receive and decode a transmission it seems like there’s reasonable odds they’ll also have other observations of us that demonstrate our less worthy aspects.
I would be concerned about the risk that details fabricated by the AI come to be confused with the actual organic memory. Memory can be malleable and an invented image could well somewhat overwrite what you remember.
Wealthier people have different concerns and interests than poor people. So any system making voting power proportional to wealth is liable to result in the upper class voting through changes that defund various forms of assistance/subsidy for low incomes. Including things that are broadly socially desirable, but the wealthy aren’t using.
Like what already happens by way of representatives paying more attention to wealthy constituents, business owners, and donors—but even moreso by formalising their ability to simply directly vote with their money.
Cool service/feature, but would it be worth defusing the “jumpscare” with an interstitial that explains the function of the button? At least the first time any given user clicks it.
How should we speak about “stressful events”? Maybe instead of, “buying a plane ticket is stressful”, something like, “buying a plane ticket made me stressed.” But the word “made” implies inevitability and still cedes too much power to the event
“I am feeling stressed about buying a plane ticket” would acknowledge that the stress is coming from within you as an individual, and doesn’t foreclose the possibility of instead not feeling stressed.
Pretty sure I’ve seen this particular case discussed here previously, and the conclusion was that actually they had published something related already, and fed it to the “co-scientist” AI. So it was synthesising/interpolating from information it had been given, rather than generating fully novel ideas.
Per NewScientist https://www.newscientist.com/article/2469072-can-googles-new-research-assistant-ai-give-scientists-superpowers/
However, the team did publish a paper in 2023 – which was fed to the system – about how this family of mobile genetic elements “steals bacteriophage tails to spread in nature”. At the time, the researchers thought the elements were limited to acquiring tails from phages infecting the same cell. Only later did they discover the elements can pick up tails floating around outside cells, too.
So one explanation for how the AI co-scientist came up with the right answer is that it missed the apparent limitation that stopped the humans getting it.
What is clear is that it was fed everything it needed to find the answer, rather than coming up with an entirely new idea. “Everything was already published, but in different bits,” says Penadés. “The system was able to put everything together.”
That was concerning the main hypothesis that agreed with their work. Unknown whether the same is also true for its additional hypotheses. But I’m sceptical by default of the claim that it couldn’t possibly have come from the training data, or that they definitely didn’t inadvertently hint at things with data they provided.
Technically it’s still never falsifiable. It can be verifiable, if true, upon finding yourself in an afterlife after death. But if it’s false then you don’t observe it being false when you cease existing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatological_verification
If we define a category of beliefs that are currently neither verifiable or falsifiable, but might eventually become verifiable if they happen to be true, but won’t be falsifiable even if they’re false—that category potentially includes an awful lot of invisible pink dragons and orbiting teapots (who knows, perhaps one day we’ll invent better teapot detectors and find it). So I don’t see it as a strong argument for putting credence in such ideas.
Looks like #6 in the TL;DRs section is accidentally duplicated (with the repeat numbered as #7)
Solid point. I realise I was unclear that for face shape I had in mind external influences in utero (while the bones of the face are growing into place in the fetus). Which would at least be a somewhat shared environment between twins. But nonetheless, changing my mind in real-time, because I would have expected more difference from one side of a womb to the other than we actually see between twins.
Even if I’m mistaken about faces though, I don’t think I’m wrong about brains, or humans in general.
Reminds me of CGP Grey’s “mostest closest” video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SumDHcnCRuU
Which doesn’t show the working, but does present a similar answer.