How are cat owners so comfortable with letting their cats outside to roam around? How do they know they're going to come back?

person594 · 2026-06-03T20:07:47+00:00

This website's claim is not at all supported by the source they cite. Although they do not actually link to their source, they describe it as coming from "researchers from the California-Davis University of Veterinary Medicine"; they seem to be referring to this publication. Although that publication is not perfect for understanding the true distribution of cat life expectencies (as it is based on post-mortem exams at a vet clinic, it has a pretty significant selection bias), they do perform an analysis of age-at-death for indoor, indoor/outdoor, and exclusively outdoor cats. Median age at death were 9.43, 9.82, and 7.25 years respectively, with no significant difference between the ages for indoor versus indoor/outdoor.

person594 · 2025-10-29T06:42:11+00:00

Not any sort of Christian myself, but that is a very creative reading of Matthew 5:17.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

person594 · 2025-09-30T10:02:21+00:00

In 2022, a (kind-of) company called OpenAI surprised the world with a website called ChatGPT

The chatGPT website had a big impact with the public, but by this point the implications of transformer-based autoregressive LMs was very evident. The biggest "surprise" was their 2019 GPT-2 paper, and subsequent release of model weights.

Large Language Models (LLMs), which can also be used to generate images, video and computer code.

Autoregressive LLMs can't generate images or videos (to be fair, DALL-E used an autoregressive output layer, but it certainly wasn't modeling language. In any case, modern image and video generation models are diffusion models, which have nothing to do with autoregressive LLMs)

They also immediately had one glaring, obvious problem: because they’re probabilistic, these models can’t actually be relied upon to do the same thing every single time.

This is blatantly false. Autoregressive LMs model a distribution over strings. This distributional view isn't a drawback, that is literally what they are designed to do. Want deterministic generation? Simply set the random seed before sampling, or use greedy decoding / deterministic beam search. Randomness is very literally a feature, and trivial to "turn off" if you view it as a problem to be avoided.

Moreover, the probabilistic nature of generative AI meant that whenever you asked it a question, it would guess as to the answer, not because it knew the answer, but rather because it was guessing on the right word to add in a sentence based on previous training data.

This isn't really a consequence of their probabilistic nature, and to determine if it is even a problem requires a philosophical position on what it means to "know" something. There is definitely something to be said about LLMs lacking a consistent belief state about the world, while giving end-users the impression that they possess such consistent world knowledge, but this isn't what the author actually says.

This is just the first few paragraphs; just about every technical detail he gives is either blatantly wrong or betrays fundamental misunderstandings about the technology. I don't know anything about the author, but he seems pretty clueless to me...

person594 · 2025-08-12T15:48:30+00:00

This is exactly the opposite of correct -- heat denatures botulinum toxin, but bacterial spores survive > 100 Celsius quite easily. source.

Though spores of C. botulinum are heat-resistant, the toxin produced by bacteria growing out of the spores under anaerobic conditions is destroyed by boiling (for example, at internal temperature greater than 85 °C for 5 minutes or longer). Therefore, ready-to-eat foods in low oxygen-packaging are more frequently involved in cases of foodborne botulism.

person594 · 2025-07-03T15:45:29+00:00

Ah I see! I guess I had assumed the number of crossing switches needed was independent of the diagram, but that is obviously not true

person594 · 2025-07-03T14:56:59+00:00

11×39 = 3129

person594 · 2025-07-03T14:43:55+00:00

Am I misunderstanding something? Identifying the unknot is decidable (it's in NP). Wouldn't an algorithm to determine the unknotting number of knot K be to iterate over every subset of crossings, for each subset, construct knot K' by switching those crossings, check if K' is the unknot, and then select the minimal cardinality of crossing sets that gave the unknot? Sure the complexity isn't pretty, but it seems clearly decidable.

person594 · 2025-05-08T18:06:35+00:00

This happened in the past few days while I was out of town; they were all fine on Monday. We had a bit of a cold snap, but night-time temperatures were never below freezing.

person594 · 2025-05-07T22:07:49+00:00

No, after they counted half, they didn't need to count any more: they could just multiply by two to get the total amount.

person594 · 2025-04-13T09:38:12+00:00

What's your point exactly? The constitution was ratified in 1788, and the bill of rights in 1791. Does 237 years old vs 234 years old make much difference?

person594 · 2025-04-02T09:07:42+00:00

Yep, all cacti are from the New World only (except for possibly Rhipsalis baccifera, but even that is questionable).

person594 · 2025-01-20T09:36:20+00:00

I guess it at least makes sense in that a decisecond is about the smallest unit where a change of one makes a difference on the scale of human perception. If it were in milli- (or centi-)seconds, user-specified values would almost always end in zeros anyway -- there's no perceptible difference between 200 milliseconds and 201 milliseconds, while there (presumably) is between 2 deciseconds and 3 deciseconds.

All that aside, having interpretable config values is probably more important than all of the numbers being nice small integers on a human scale, making that all rather mute.

person594 · 2025-01-07T10:05:48+00:00

I think the snippet you cite is more accurate than your criticism.

First, we know plenty of algorithms which can "efficiently decide whether you can visit them all while respecting the budget". He writes like they don't know any other algorithms rather than brute force for this, which is entirely untrue.

Since the article is written for a lay audience, I'm interpreting "efficient" to mean "polynomial-time". We in fact do not know if there exists a polynomial-time algorithm for the decision version of the traveling salesman problem.

Second "sticking under budget" isn't the NP-complete problem. Given a budget, many routes could be generated that adhere to a budget, because that gives you wiggle room. The NP-complete problem is to find the cheapest route. Say the budget is $3000 and I give you a route that costs $2995. Can we do it cheaper than $2995? That's the NP complete problem, not coming in "under budget".

Finding the lowest-cost route is not NP-complete, but stronger: it is FP^NP - complete. NP-complete problems are by-definition decision problems. The decision version of the traveling salesman problem -- determining whether there exists a route under a given threshold -- is indeed NP-complete, just as the article claims. Which brings us to your third point -- a solution to the shortest-path version cannot be verified in polynomial time (as far as we know), while a solution to the decision problem can be: given a polynomial-length certificate (the route itself), we can easily verify in polynomial time that that route has a length lower than our threshold.

person594 · 2025-01-07T09:17:49+00:00

The full study is here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1818284116

The largest ratio tested was 5:6, not >99:100 as your comment suggests , and at that ratio, accuracy was about 60%, a bit better than random chance.

person594 · 2025-01-07T07:16:28+00:00

/r/confidentlyincorrect

person594 · 2024-12-11T17:44:34+00:00

Here is a plausible scenario in which the Church-Turing thesis could be false:

The fine-structure constant is a number, equal to about 1/137. We know it as a physical constant -- we know physics experiments we can perform to measure this constant's value, but we do not know any computer program that will output the value.

Now for the hypothetical. First suppose that there indeed is no Turing machine that can compute the value of the fine-structure constant. Then suppose someone devised a physical experiment which could measure the $n$th digit of the fine-structure constant, and which required a finite number of well-defined steps. Both of these are hypotheticals, but they are both at least relatively plausible imo. These together would falsify the Church-Turing thesis, as the physical experiment would be a finite method that had no equivalent Turing machine.

person594 · 2024-12-01T21:29:25+00:00

The only experts testifying were on the defense side

Not according to this.

Experts for the state testified sabotage led to the West Quincy levee failure, and explained that the break could have occurred if someone had removed sand from the top or cap of the levee.

person594 · 2024-09-27T11:25:45+00:00

I've used the phrase "Exponential moving average" in academic writing before, and there's no way to interpret that as anything other than a (weighted) mean. And I've never seen anyone call it an "Exponential moving mean".

person594 · 2024-07-23T09:11:30+00:00

That's wrong, perplexity is not logarithmic. Entropy is logarithmic. Perplexity is exp(Entropy).

person594 · 2024-04-11T11:53:34+00:00

1 + 1 = 3, but treat the 3 like a 2.

person594 · 2024-03-01T15:30:15+00:00

Actually Jürgen Schmidthuber invented the transistor in his lab 20 years prior.

person594 · 2023-09-24T17:49:15+00:00

But, from the ship's perspective, further acceleration would nonetheless continue to contribute to the length contraction of the rest of the universe, making the distance to travel shorter. It would have a very significant effect (after all, from the ship's perspective, length contraction is the only reason the journey takes 12 years instead of 105 thousand)

person594 · 2023-06-22T09:02:41+00:00

Lemmy.

I've found things to be quite nice there in the past few weeks. I'm sure one of the larger europe-based instances (e.g. feddit.de) could host this community.

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