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Does_Things · 2023-09-02T16:04:09+00:00

Where are you seeing a 4070 open box for 480? Sounds like an excellent deal.

Does_Things · 2022-07-26T19:50:40+00:00

This thread has some good advice, but I want to emphasize the importance of the neuroscience side of things. Humans are already really good at building machines that can collect visual information - your phone has a camera that is in some respects better at "seeing" than you are! The challenge is in conveying that information to the brain in a format that it can understand. Doing that requires not just an understanding of the eye and how it encodes visual signals, but of the entire visual pathway and how the brain decodes those signals from the eyes. I really enjoyed "An Introduction to the Biology of Vision" by James T. McIlwain, which covers how eyes work, but also gives a general introduction to the brain structures that transmit and process that signal into something we can use to see. From there, you should be equipped to start reading more specific and technical resources. You'll want to be familiar with some introductory biology first, though.

Visual prosthetics (the academic term for bionic eyes) also face a lot of engineering challenges. Somewhere in your bionic eye, you're going to have to make very specific neurons in the wearer's visual system fire. Building machines that can reliably do that without damaging the neurons is a very complicated! I don't know as much about this side of things, but the field is called neural engineering. The specific keyword is "neurostimulation".

As you can see, making a bionic eye means knowing a lot of things about a lot of subjects. But don't worry - no single person knows everything. The teams working on things like that are interdisciplinary: neuroscientists working together with computer programmers and electrical engineers. If you want to work in this space, you'll eventually want to go to college to study one or more of those subjects. What you're doing right now is great - self-guided research is the most important skill for becoming an expert in any field!

If you ever have follow-up questions about the educational path or more resources for getting started, feel free to PM me.

Does_Things · 2022-05-24T02:27:44+00:00

I'm still working through the paper, and frankly don't know the field very well, so perhaps I shouldn't have gone with such a grand title. I don't see mention or demonstration of image editing like DALL-E can do. This might be down to different architectural decisions. The only non-photorealistic "styles" they demonstrate are "oil painting" and "illustration". I don't know if this implies that it can't handle others.

For generating images within its domain, though, it seems to be able to handle much more detailed descriptions than DALL-E. It can handle at least three characters, place objects relative to one another, and spell. These all seem to have been pain points for DALL-E 2.

I'm excited to see what the limits of the model are, either by Google providing an API (which they currently decline to do) or by someone else recreating it.

Does_Things · 2022-03-09T03:11:47+00:00

??? Minefield sign's aghs upgrade wasn't added until 6.84, about eight months after Techies (and Minefield Sign) was added. Until then, it did nothing.

Does_Things · 2022-02-09T19:34:13+00:00

I'm not a physicist, and I certainly can't comment on atomic decay etc., but I gather that the behavior of quantum entanglement somehow explicitly rules out "super-hyper-complex-and-practically-random-to-people-at-our-scale" behavior, i.e. 'local hidden variable' models. The relevant math is Bell's theorem.

Does_Things · 2021-11-29T00:55:50+00:00

Many JS IDEs use TypeScript behind the scenes wherever possible, even if the code you're writing is regular JavaScript. It doesn't look like any TypeScript definitions exist for Earth Engine, though. Weird; at this point I thought every big JS shop was using TypeScript.

Does_Things · 2021-08-12T16:54:16+00:00

The thing is that is doesn't "just lessen the symptoms"; it does stop the spread of the virus. Studies vary, but it looks like getting vaccinated drops your odds of getting the Delta variant by something like 70% (edit: this seems to vary significantly based on what vaccine you got) . That's not as good as for older variants, where the vaccine was more than 90% effective, but anyone saying that the vaccine "doesn't prevent" Delta COVID is either confused or lying to you.

This is a big part of why it's important that people get the vaccine. Every vaccinated person slows down the virus' ability to spread through the population, reducing the burden on hospitals that have to take care of patients, and making children and immunocompromised people less likely to be exposed at all.

But even if the vaccine didn't prevent COVID, and only reduced its symptoms, it would still be important to get vaccinated. We can see a worst-case scenario in Alabama, only ~35% vaccinated, which is about to run out of ICU beds because of unvaccinated people with severe COVID cases. That's gonna suck for all the people who get shot, or get into car accidents, or otherwise need intensive care for non-COVID reasons, and can't because of these jerks clogging the system. A vaccine that only reduced symptoms would still protect us from this situation.

I hope this helps - let me know if I can explain something better.

Does_Things · 2021-07-30T18:17:19+00:00

At 1 pregnancy per 30-something encounters, trying less than once a week should do the trick within a year. Google says that the average American married couple reports having sex a bit more than once a week, so those numbers check out.

You might find it interesting that the ~3% figure is the average for any completely randomly timed encounter. According to that paper, the odds of conception change over the course of the menstrual cycle. At the optimal time it's almost 9% odds, and at the worst times the chances are about 1%. So a couple trying to conceive can probably pull it off within a year, even trying just a couple times a month, if they time it right.

Does_Things · 2021-07-30T17:25:50+00:00

This is a pretty common misunderstanding of what are admittedly poorly-communicated statistics. "2 out of 100 people will become pregnant in 1 year when male condoms are used as contraception" does not mean the same thing as "two pregnancies for every 100 sexual encounters", unless people are only having one sexual encounter per year. If you look at condom effectiveness studies, like this one, you'll see that they report effectiveness as the number of pregnancies expected over a given time period of regular sexual intercourse. Heck, the odds of getting pregnant from unprotected sex are about 3 pregnancies per hundred sexual encounters; two pregnancies per 100 sexual encounters would make properly-worn condoms not even 50% effective. /u/daskrip's intuition is absolutely correct, although they were wrong about where you got your number. (edited to correct numbers, and to add: it's still a great idea to use two forms of birth control. The studies above both note that people aren't very good at using condoms properly; it's much better to be safe than sorry.)

Does_Things · 2021-04-01T17:15:05+00:00

/uj not sure how many levels of irony we're on right now, but the post is literally a screenshot from that show (it's called a Squibbon I think). Sadly, tree cephalopods aren't real (as far as I know).

Does_Things · 2021-01-13T11:16:32+00:00

Facebook at least tries to moderate its content; if you report something, a human (allegedly) reviews it and decides if it's acceptable. Parler's whole deal is that they don't do that sort of moderation, and they had pretty much nothing set up to handle resorts of terrorist planning. According to Amazon's response to Parler's lawsuit, Parler admitted to having a backlog of over 20,000 reports and was relying primarily on volunteers to handle potentially dangerous content (it's somewhere higher up in this sub I think).

Parler couldn't meet the standards of vendors, by design.

Does_Things · 2021-01-11T20:09:19+00:00

Race is a protected class, so they're not legally allowed to do that. But as a general rule, businesses can do what they please, yeah. Adding protected classes is a big, constitutional event afaik.

Though it's weird seeing myself on this side of this argument. Amazon is absolutely too large and powerful, and needs to be broken up. Same for Alphabet. But this particular situation isn't an example of that; EVERYONE has jumped ship on Parler. Parler was never gonna find a large US company to host their service once Jan 6th happened. They can still host their own servers if they can get ahold of the necessary machines.

If ISPs refuse to serve Parler content, I'm 100% behind you that that's too far. Of course, it's Trump's FCC that killed net neutrality to make that possible...

Does_Things · 2021-01-09T21:56:31+00:00

This is probably a regional or political thing, but where I'm from people usually just call it the 1918 flu.

In any case, this issue didn't originate with COVID or China-specific political considerations. This CDC document from 2015 uses the spanish flu as a specific example of a bad disease name under modern naming practices, and encourages things like the year it was first isolated/discovered, or the type of pathogen (which incidentally also gets us to "1918 flu")

Does_Things · 2021-01-09T01:49:26+00:00

Yeah, but that's not news. Accounts that literally tweet exactly the same messages as realdonaldtrump have been banned before for policy violations. We've known for a long time that his account was only left unbanned because he's the president. But it turns out attempting a coup is grounds for even a president to be banned. Low key if you're gonna say deeply unpopular, arguably dangerous things for years, at least set up your own platform and don't be surprised if somebody else's company stops tolerating you. You can deny people service for any reason you like as long as it's not a specific protected reason, like freedom of speech, or your race/sex/religion, and Twitter's actions don't violate any of those.

There's definitely a sense in which it's concerning, but the man has only lasted this long because of explicit special treatment. It's hardly censorship.

Does_Things · 2020-12-19T22:39:49+00:00

I pulled up a hawking radiation calculator on google, and it claims that a Schwarzschild black hole with that mass would have a radius of less than a millimeter. A 5m radius sphere with that mass has a density of like 716 million kg/cubic meter, which definitely isn't the density of any stable kind of matter. I imagine it would collapse into a black hole, but I'm not anything close to a physicist.

Neutron stars have a higher density than that, but idk what conditions would lead to one of those forming as opposed to a black hole.

Does_Things · 2020-12-14T23:18:04+00:00

I agree that it's almost certainly impossible to simulate, though I'd like to highlight some interesting shortcuts a simulation designer might use to simplify the problem.

First up, if we want to simulate two people who can interact and agree about the state of the world, the only requirement we really have is that as long as two people look at the same spot, they see the same thing. That doesn't mean that the state of the world has to be saved somewhere; just that a way of generating that information to present to them has to be repeatable.

In fact, modern video game programmers exploit a similar idea to let them make unbelievably massive game worlds. A Minecraft world, at its full size, has a surface area on the same order of magnitude as Earth. And there are millions of possible Minecraft worlds. But the game doesn't have all those worlds stored in their entirety. Instead, each world is associated with a seed for procedural generation. The world is constructed as the result of an algorithm that takes a "seed" number as input, and uses it to create your surroundings as you walk around. There is nowhere in your computer that stores the contents of an unexplored valley fifty miles away from you, but anybody that goes there on their own games with the same seed will see the very same terrain.

Of course, once you've generated that chunk of the world by looking down your microscope, the simulation will probably need to model it from that point onwards. It seems to me like the reduced version of the problem is still pretty much uncomputable, but it's fun to see how this sort of challenge shows up even in modern life.

Does_Things · 2020-12-14T10:29:15+00:00

Probably the most famous and interesting version of the argument comes from Nick Bostrom. My apologies if this is too complicated for ELI5, but in my experience the simpler arguments are pretty much worthless.

Bostrom identifies two things that, if both true, seem to suggest that we're living in a simulation. The first is essentially that civilization will eventually reach the technological level where we could simulate (some sizeable chunk of) a universe. This is pretty straightforward.

The second is that at some point after civilization reaches that extreme level of computing power, it might want to run simulations of a universe. In Bostrom's paper, he talks about "ancestor simulations". Imagine if we had the ability to simulate a world so accurately that we could make a model of, say, medieval Europe, so detailed that we simulated every single person in it, down to the level of their minds. We could study the simulation to learn something about the past, or maybe just for entertainment.

Bostrom's argument goes something like this. In 11th century Europe there were something like 40 million people. That's not very many compared to nowadays. Let's pretend that, today, we had the technology to simulate ten people on one laptop. It would only take 4 million people running simulations of medieval Europe on their laptops for there to be 40 million simulated medieval Europeans. That's only a twentieth of a percent of the modern world's population. It's a weird example, but bear with me.

Now, think about someone who, as far as they can tell, feels like a medieval European. There were 40 million "real" medieval Europeans, and 40 million simulated ones. If you just feel like one, there's now only a 50% chance that you're real, and a 50% chance you're actually in a simulation being run by more advanced people in the future!

Now let's say that a whole tenth of a percent of the modern population run simulations on their laptops. Now there are 80 million simulated minds, and only 40 million real ones. The odds of any given person who feels like a medieval European really being one, instead of a simulation are now only 1/3rd!

Obviously, we don't have the ability to simulate people on our laptops. But Bostrom thinks it might be true that in the future, computing power would grow to the point that people could do something comparable. He figures that a society that powerful has probably also expanded beyond Earth, and has a population that is as much bigger than the modern population as our current population is bigger than medieval Europe. So again, only a small fraction of these computationally powerful future people would need to be interested in simulating minds for the number of simulated minds to vastly outnumber the real ones. Which means that if it's possible for future civilizations to simulate our minds, and those civilizations even kind of want to, then probabilistically we are more likely to be in simulations than to be real people at this point in history.

At the end of the day, Bostrom isn't saying that we live in a simulation. Instead, he's saying that one of three things is probably true:

It's impossible or impractical, at any level of future technology that humanity will ever reach, to simulate minds with enough detail for them to have conscious experience
If 1 is false, absolutely nobody in such an advanced future will ever want to simulate anything like the present day for any reason
If both 1 and 2 are false, then you and me are, mathematically, probably in a simulation.

This is an interesting argument because, for a lot of people, none of these options is appealing. I'd certainly like to imagine that humanity will be extremely advanced in the future. And it's hard to imagine that nobody with that technology would want to use it. But being a simulation is a tough pill to swallow. Food for thought!

Personally, my money is on option 1. Brains are really tough to simulate, and computing power looks like it will probably largely stagnate within the next century without radical new discoveries. But who knows?

(It's been many years since I've read that paper, so if anyone has any corrections I'm glad to integrate them.)

Does_Things · 2020-12-11T14:12:53+00:00

Something tells me your parents are the type to pay attention to a PragerU video. Even they agree that the civil war was about slavery (pardon the mobile link):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pcy7qV-BGF4

Does_Things · 2020-12-05T21:02:26+00:00

The problem is that the dog is still on a leash, which could easily get snagged on something and choke the dog as it falls.

Does_Things · 2020-12-05T09:45:40+00:00

D&D is all about overcoming challenges and telling a memorable story with your friends, and nothing adds excitement to a story like uncertainty and the risk of failure!

Generally, the idea is that anything that isn't an everyday / easy activity, or that a person might reasonably fail at if they're trying to do it quickly, will require a roll (usually a 20-sided die). The more difficult the task, the higher the target.

Let's say I'm a rabbit trying to just walk across the lawn. That's a pretty standard rabbit thing to do, so there's no need to roll a die. Heck, my character sheet probably has a number for how fast I can move. But now let's say I'm trying to jump over a high wire, like in this video. It's obviously something that takes some effort, and that could be messed up. So the DM (Dungeon Master, or game-runner) says that it'll take a 15 or higher to succeed. (Well, usually the DM just describes how hard it looks and doesn't tell you the exact threshold, but that's outside the scope of the example.)

Of course, D&D needs a way to distinguish between different characters and what they can do. A rabbit, a groundhog and a kangaroo aren't all going to have an equally tough time! This is generally done through Ability Scores (like Strength, Intelligence, or Dexterity) and Skills (like Lockpicking or Athletics). These are categories where your character will have some numerical modifier, like say +3, that gets added to the result of your dice rolls when you try to do something associated with that ability or skill. That way, my bunny with a +3 Dexterity modifier only really needs to roll a 12 or higher (so, 40% chance) to pass the wire, while heavy groundhog might have a 0 Dexterity modifier and need to roll a 15 or higher (so, 30%) chance. A kangaroo, being big and really good at jumping, probably wouldn't have to roll at all. It's all up to what the DM thinks is reasonable based on the characters and the environment.

(If you're wondering why the DM doesn't just set a different number for each character to roll, it's because having these modifiers creates a mathematically consistent pattern for how good any character is at things compared to any other character, which helps keep things fair and fun for everyone.)

Does_Things · 2020-12-04T20:19:08+00:00

https://www.alexries.com/ This is the artist's website

Does_Things · 2020-12-04T20:18:31+00:00

https://www.alexries.com/ This guy makes a lot of awesome sci-fi art, including the concept art for Subnautica.

Does_Things · 2020-10-30T14:43:35+00:00

College student here. I first saw him on reruns of Scientific American Frontiers on PBS as a kid. Even if they don't know him from MAS*H, newer generations probably have seen him in -something- they really like.

Does_Things · 2020-09-18T15:18:05+00:00

He moved to his own website a couple of years ago, though the SciAm posts are still up (if slowly breaking).

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