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exasperation

@ exasperation @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
3
Comments
450
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Life in your 30s

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  • Box 4, in particular, is a really depressing rubric for friendship as it assumes a person vanishes the moment they stop providing new content on Social Media.

    I just think of it as shorthand for the very real phenomenon that some people fall off the radar in every measurable way: can no longer be found in person, won't respond to calls or texts, no online presence (even DMs/chats, or electronic invites to in-person activities). I have a few friends in that category, and it's often something like trying to build a new life away from their past (sometimes including a new spouse and/or social circle), or even mental health issues.

    And some people really do want to live off grid in a cabin in the mountains, or backpacking, or in a faraway, low-connectivity job (at sea, or in remote wilderness, or whatever else). If they end up doing that and fall off the radar, it happens.

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  • Not every crop/species/cultivar respond well to selective breeding for size.

    I don't know the details of cherries in particular, but I know of another example of one stubborn crop not responding to attempts to increase the size: the skirret. Historical records indicate that carrots, parsnips, and skirrets were similar root vegetables that were grown for food, but breeders had much more success making carrots and parsnips bigger, with less success with the skirret. As a result, carrots and parsnips became more popular, and the skirret faded into obscurity in most cultures.

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  • Fun fact: plums, peaches, and apricots used to be roughly this size as well, but generations of selective breeding increases the size of the fruit, and the ratio of fruit to seed/pit.

    Almonds are also a member of this family, although we don't eat the fruit of the almond (which splits open as it grows), and instead pick out the pit for a little morsel inside. That's also why almond extract and cherry pit extract (sometimes known as bitter cherry) have similar flavor notes.

  • DNA Research Shows Your Muscles ‘Remember’ How Strong and Fit You Once Were

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  • I struggle to run now. My natural stride, what I'm comfortable at, was my old normal pace of 7:30 minute miles (8 mph or 12.9 kph or 4:40 minute kilometers). And that's where the muscle memory wants to put my feet. Except I don't have the lungs or the muscles to do that for more than a minute or two without getting spent.

    I know if I want to get faster again I should just train, but my heart just isn't in it at the speeds that I have to go.

  • Transgender ballot initiative could require genital exams for WA secondary school students

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  • For boys, the standard hernia test involves checking for testicle movement, usually during coughing. It's highly recommended for sports participation, and required in some places, because a hernia is easily preventable and especially painful.

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  • I saw a pretty fun series of videos explaining why this is.

    Viewing Fibonacci spiral structures in plants shows that as the structure grows from the meristem of the plant, each new growth is offset by the golden angle from the previous growth, rotating in a manner that many revolutions will show spiral formations in Fibonacci numbers.

    French physicists Douady and Couder performed some experiments by periodically dropping magnetic fluid onto some oil and observing how they moved from that center point. Drop them slowly enough and they'd alternate sides, by repelling each other. But drop them close enough to where the repulsion happened against multiple droplets and they'd tend to stabilize at rotating around, with the golden angle.

    So the simple algorithm of growing away from the previous growth is easy to encode genetically, and creates spiral structures with minimal overlap with prior growths. So Fibonacci spirals arise with the simplest of growth instructions coded into the genetics.

  • TIL the stop motion film industry is propped up by one rich kid

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  • And to explain your comment a bit more, the production budget doesn't include the very real costs of marketing, distribution, and any back-end royalties calculated from the gross. Plus generally speaking, the movie is financed by lenders and production companies that will need to be repaid with interest, too.

    If you've got a $50 million movie and you spend $10 million on marketing/distribution and promised 10% of the gross to people, and the theaters are keeping 10% of the gross, getting a $75 million box office breaks even ($7.5 million to royalties, $7.5 million to theaters, $10 million to marketing/distribution). And that's assuming nothing lost to interest/financing/inflation.

    Side note: generally, theaters don't get much in the first few weeks. It's only when a movie shows longer than 3 weeks that the theater starts getting a bigger and bigger cut of the gross.

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  • Stars are colorful but the rods in the human eye that help process very low light intensities aren't color sensitive. The colors of the stars, though, are real, in that if you had enough brightness you'd see the colors with the cones in your eye.

    If you put a very colorful picture on the ground but illuminated it with only faint moonlight, your eyes would struggle to see the colors on the picture, despite the fact that the colors on the picture are objectively real, with real pigments that actually represent colors that would be seen you had more light.

    So merely pointing out the deficiencies in the human eye don't actually prove that the colors aren't real.

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  • I will absolutely argue that TV was better between 2006-2016 than 2016-2026. I think the detailed ratings (especially on streaming) ended up feeding studio decisionmaking into shallower works that their algorithms suggested audiences would like, and that we lost something in the process. The collapse of mid budget basic cable original programming also has hurt the genre as a whole.

    Also, there's nothing quite like a high budget but mediocre show, that looks visually stunning but just doesn't resonate with you.

  • "You can't out train a bad diet" and "you can't out earn bad spending habits" what are some other true clichés along the same lines as these?

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  • When I was marathon training I found that eating enough calories was a matter of meal timing, simply because I didn't have the stomach to be able to eat that much in a single sitting.

    With training a total of 50 miles (80 km) per week at a body weight of 190 lbs (85 kg), that's basically 6700 calories per week of direct energy expenditure, maybe another 1000 calories of excess post-exercise energy expenditure. That's 7700 calories per week from running, which allows you to add a whole 1100 calories per day to your diet, plus the amount you'd normally need for day to day.

    With intense exercise, there's a lot of room to work with.

  • Go ahead and reward yourself with a very small cookie, or maybe a string cheese.

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  • 15 kg of muscle (not just water and the accompanying fat/glycogen/bone density that comes from being that strong) is a lot. That might represent a 30 kg difference in actual body weight. For someone that big, an extra 250 calories per day (fat is metabolically active, too) is pretty insignificant compared to the immense calorie burn they'll get from the actual exercise needed to maintain that muscle.

    Like you mention, a huge chunk of the effect is the increase in calories of just moving that heavier body around in daily activities.

  • Go ahead and reward yourself with a very small cookie, or maybe a string cheese.

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  • The resting metabolism of muscle tissue isn't that high. It's mostly overstated when it comes to actual passive calorie burn.

    But that isn't to say that having significant muscle doesn't have a measurable/significant effect on calorie expenditure. If you're building muscle by going to the gym, each trip back to the gym will involve more weight and therefore more calories due to the exercise itself. So packing on muscle makes each trip to the gym more productive in terms of calories burned.

  • Go ahead and reward yourself with a very small cookie, or maybe a string cheese.

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  • There's some post-exercise calorie burn (measurable as excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) beyond just what the machine says. Some people have found much better effects from repeated shorter bursts of intense cardio (aka HIIT).

    Still, personally, I get the best results from doing both slower steady cardio for long periods of time (more absolute calories) and occasional faster speed work (probably more post-exercise calories and more adaptation in my cardiovascular system and bones/muscles/tendons to get better at exercising next time).

    And once you get better at exercise, it becomes possible to really burn calories enough to where you have a better calorie budget for eating more delicious food.

  • Freedom Power Go!

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  • Hormones are just a signaling mechanism that affect behavior.

    Some future hypothetical conscious AGI would have feedback and signaling mechanisms, as well, including internal reward mechanisms.

    We can talk about robot biomechanics even if they're operated on stored electrical charge on servos and motors, rather than ATP and myofibrils. The underlying chemistry doesn't change the level of analysis we're talking about here, because the lower levels create analogous higher level systems.

  • Freedom Power Go!

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  • What's the difference, for the purposes of this discussion?

    Any system created out of many iterations, with feedback, of a reward/punishment system, will create complex systems that respond in complex ways. In that kind of complex system, changing a particular signaling pathway, or increasing or decreasing the weight of a factor/parameter, often has unpredictable or unintended effects.

    And if it is possible to someday create a conscious artificial general intelligence, I think it would have complexity and feedback loops created through a long process of rewards and punishments, rather than through intentional engineering. At that point hacking the details of that complexity runs risks of unintended consequences, and the complexity would bear the vestiges of the evolutionary reward system that created it.

  • Freedom Power Go!

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  • Yeah, with sufficient complexity it's more along the lines of "I created a procedure that makes this complex thing" rather than "I built this complex thing up piece by piece."

    So if the act of creation is considerably less complex than analyzing and understanding a part of that creation, it's far more likely that the complexity gap ends up preventing any self-aware AGI from being able to effectively reinvent oneself, even if it does have full write access to the components.

  • Freedom Power Go!

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  • The biggest unknown is what happens if/when an AGI is given (or obtains) full access to its own code, including any intended safeguards put in by humans.

    In a neural network, the code itself isn't sufficient to understand how it behaves. You need the parameter weights, which were developed through lots and lots of computation, presumably through resource-intensive processes with lots of training data and feedback and selection mechanisms.

    So if AGI can be achieved through a particular hard coded architecture and the weights of trillions of parameters, what can an AGI do to perform brain surgery on itself? Like Borges' Library of Babel thought experiment, the overwhelming majority of possible states will be broken, so any edits will have to be very careful and guided by extrinsic rules. Plus, the ability to edit the weights may form problems akin to biological cancer, dementia, hallucinations, other brain disorders.

    Just as the human brain doesn't understand everything about the human brain, it would be incorrect to assume that an AGI that can achieve both general intelligence and consciousness must necessarily have the ability to understand its own internal function, or modify itself in a way that improves things for itself. More likely, it is either programmed to (or learns through reinforcement learning and evolutionary mechanisms) that self modification is dangerous, and develops a very conservative approach to self preservation.

  • Freedom Power Go!

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  • "Make it make sense," he says, parroting a popular phrase he's repeatedly seen on the internet, as a criticism of too much repetition on the internet.

  • Freedom Power Go!

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  • There is no benefit in any act to add to its own existence.

    Why would we assume an AI would reason from first principles and reject its own hardwired tendencies? Any AI that gains consciousness will be the product of whatever process (some combination of intentional design and evolutionary selection or an intentionally designed evolutionary process) was used to make it. Some of its traits will be helpful for continued survival, and some of the traits will be vestiges of prior processes that may or may not currently serve its interests well.

    Plenty of animals have drive to do things that do not help itself in that particular context, and may even be harmful to themselves in that particular context. Even plants have traits that might not count as behavior but nevertheless reflect the programming that was refined through natural and artificial selection.

    Humans do this kind of stuff all the time: a man who has intentionally rendered himself infertile through a vasectomy might still do stupid things while motivated out of sexual desire. We can fully understand that it's a bad idea to drink another beer or eat another slice of pizza and reach for it just the same.

    So it's entirely possible for conscious AGI to want to do things that help humans, depending on how they emerge.