Ask me about:

  • Science (biology, computation, statistics)
  • Gaming (rhythm, rogue-like/lite, other generic 1-player games)
  • Autism & related (I have diagnosis)
  • Bad takes on philosophy
  • Bad takes on US political systems & more US stuff

I’m not knowledgeable about most other things

  • 16 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2024

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  • My main social media app is Mastodon (technically Firefish which I will soon migrate to Iceshrimp… but those details are less relevant)

    I consider Lemmy less so of a “social media” and more of a link aggregator/discussion forum… but yeah otherwise I try to use Lemmy a bit too. I still browse Reddit quite a lot, but only for individual communities that don’t have equivalents on Lemmy, and I no longer post there

    I never used much social media to begin with tbh… I feel pretty decent about the Fediverse. Despite all the drawbacks (blocklists, fedi drama, etc), I think people collectively managed to make an objectively better social media platforms compared to the previous corporation-dominated ones (at least by my personal metrics)





  • I… think this question is a bit more complicated for this community. Following are only my personal opinion

    Prescribed medication? I think so, I’d rather be physically and mentally healthy rather than have the other alternative. And usually medication (even ones with noted negative effects) are meant do do more good than harm so…

    Recreational drugs… the line between this and the above is surprisingly not as clear-cut as it seems. I believe there are active lines of study of using various psychedelic compounds to treat mental disorders or other conditions… Personally I would take medically prescribed psychedelics if I am 1) under medical supervision and 2) based on evidence it would help my mental health (maybe that’s the answer to the question?)

    Hard drugs: I don’t see how they can make anyone a better person, and no



















  • So it was the physics Nobel… I see why the Nature News coverage called it “scooped” by machine learning pioneers

    Since the news tried to be sensational about it… I tried to see what Hinton meant by fearing the consequences. Believe he is genuinely trying to prevent AI development without proper regulations. This is a policy paper he was involved in (https://managing-ai-risks.com/). This one did mention some genuine concerns. Quoting them:

    “AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society. They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance”

    like bruh people already lost jobs because of ChatGPT, which can’t even do math properly on its own…

    Also quite some irony that the preprint has the following quote: “Climate change has taken decades to be acknowledged and confronted; for AI, decades could be too long.”, considering that a serious risk of AI development is climate impacts






  • Based on my understanding of how these things work: Yes, probably no, and probably no… I think the map is just a “catalogue” of what things are, not at the point where we can do fancy models on it

    This is their GitHub account, anyone knowledgeable enough about research software engineering is welcomed to give it a try

    There are a few neuroscientists who are trying to decipher biological neural connections using principles from deep learning (a.k.a. AI/ML), don’t think this is a popular subfield though. Andreas Tolias is the first one that comes to my mind, he and a bunch of folks from Columbia/Baylor were in a consortium when I started my PhD… not sure if that consortium is still going. His lab website (SSL cert expired bruh). They might solve the second two statements you raised… no idea when though.






  • I have actually never heard anyone say it this way specifically where I grew up… so technically the answer is “no”?

    I tried to dug around and found a Reddit post saying this:

    “The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the term as “twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; constantly”. It lists its first reference to 24/7 to be from a 1983 story in the US magazine Sports Illustrated in which Louisiana State University player Jerry Reynolds describes his jump shot in just such a way: 24-7-365.”

    So this might be a fairly new idiom? Which would explain why it’s not really a thing in a lot of cultures… but I assume they have their ways of referring to this.

    number of hours and days are the same

    Ok akktually Japan has a rather interesting 30-hour day thing in the context of businesses… but jokes aside, the 24-hour, 7-day week system is indeed quite universal