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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Bombs were falling on civilian targets nowhere near Kosovo. Various bridges, schools, hospitals, a chemical plant in Pančevo that almost destroyed the entire city, the Chinese embassy, a bomb fragment fell literally in my family’s garden. Hundreds of civilians died, my grandma almost impaled on a table from a bomb shockwave and the glass shattered onto the cradle I was in (I was 1 year old at the time), but luckily my mom placed protection around me just in case. This was on the far north of Serbia.

    To be clear, OP is a tankie who shouldn’t be given any attention or a platform (I checkes their post history), but the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was a campaign that caused untold suffering to countless civilians (be it in injuries, deaths, or just going through every day not knowing whether you and your loved ones will be alive tomorrow) that had absolutely nothing to do with Kosovo, something that left scars in society that are still felt. It was not simply “disturbing a genocide”. Not to mention that it was an attack launched without the approval of the UN.



  • Yeah this happened once during the 2020 July protests in Serbia. As we walked, we passed a WW2 memorial and the guy leading the group took a moment to stop, comment on it and chant “death to fascism” a few times. Then out of the blue two guys started yelling “death to communism”.

    To be fair, “death to fascism, freedom to the people” is a communist slogan known by everyone from ex-Yugoslavia, but getting triggered by someone disavowing fascism right next to a statue that shows how fascists murdered civilians in raids in your own city is… worrying.




  • I stopped running with music when I ran a half marathon once and about 17km in I just started getting annoyed by it. I’m out there dying, and some asshole is screaming into my ears.

    Idk, I enjoy running by itself. I ran a full marathon without music and didn’t get bored once. I’d either just enjoy myself, think about random stuff, look around me, play music / sing in my mind etc. But to each their own I guess.



  • AccountMaker@slrpnk.nettomemes@lemmy.worldNot fair
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    1 month ago

    I memorized 100 digits some years ago using physical memory. I would type the digits of pi on the numpad and memorize the movements of my hand, how it feels and which button goes when by position. Then when I would have to recite it, I’d imagine a numpad, move my hand and just say the number that corresponds to the imaginary button I’m pressing.

    Don’t know if that could work for 70k digits though


  • PPS: also, if you just study a lot of STEM in college, your views on humanities may still be atrocious, like elonstans.

    This was very depressing to learn. I know a lot of software engineers, some of them PhD students, who are really smart and clever people, able to abstract concepts, form connections in thought, recall relevant information and make intelligent conclusions every day. And then they say things like masks don’t do anything during COVID, the vaccines don’t work, Russia is defending itself, the wokes are oppressing everyone and destroying everything etc. It’s almost impressive to see someone seemingly intelligent act like the lowest Trump supporter with certain topics like someone just flipped a switch.


  • This was partly explored in Erich Fromm’s work “Escape from Freedom” and “The Anatomy of Human Destruction”, but basically, if I understood correctly, sadistic personalities use it as a means of defence against loneliness and isolation. By exerting power over another, they temporarily lose the painful feeling of being alone. Abusive people tend to be miserable when their victims leave them and they have nobody to control.

    Nobody gains anything from cruelty, it’s a symptom that something’s terribly wrong with the person in the first place. Even animals don’t display acts of cruelty in the wild, they do so only when confined to cages and subjected to other inhumane treatment.


  • Image recognition depends on the amount of resources you can offer for your system. There are traditional methods of feature extractions like edge detection, histogram of oriented gradients and viola-jones, but the best performers are all convolutional neural networks.

    While the term can be up for debate, you cannot separate these cases and things like LLMs and image generators, they are the same field. Generative models try to capture the distribution of the data, whereas discriminitive models try to capture the distribution of labels given the data. Unlike traditional programming, you do not directly encode a sequence of steps that manipulate data into what you want as a result, but instead you try to recover the distributions based on the data you have, and then you use the model you have made in new situations.

    And generative and discriminative/diagnostic paradigms are not mutually exclusive either, one is often used to improve the other.

    I understand that people are angry with the aggressive marketing and find that LLMs and image generators do not remotely live up to the hype (I myself don’t use them), but extending that feeling to the entire field to the point where people say that they “loathe machine learning” (which as a sentence makes as much sense as saying that you loathe the euclidean algorithm) is unjustified, just like limiting the term AI to a single digit use cases of an entire family of solutions.


  • They’re functionalities that were not made with traditional programming paradigms, but rather by modeling and training the model to fit it to the desired behaviour, making it able to adapt to new situations; the same basic techniques that were used to make LLMs. You can argue that it’s not “artificial intelligence” because it’s not sentient or whatever, but then AI doesn’t exist and people are complaining that something that doesn’t exist is useless.

    Or you can just throw statements with no arguments under some personal secret definition, but that’s not a very constructive contribution to anything.


  • What?

    If you ever used online translators like google translate or deepl, that was using AI. Most email providers use AI for spam detection. A lot of cameras use AI to set parameters or improve/denoise images. Cars with certain levels of automation often use AI.

    That’s for everyday uses, AI is used all the time in fields like astronomy and medicine, and even in mathematics for assistance in writing proofs.



  • lol, actually, good science would be on the left side of the image, at least after giving an answer to a question. Good science will actually prove something, then give the answer, then have no reason to continue to find another answer for it (whatever the issue is.) If you are giving a different answer year after year (like say for the age of the earth), then aren’t you admitting that so far you haven’t known the answer?

    That’s not really the take of the modern philosophy of science. All modern schools of thought when it comes to science have the acceptance of falsehoods embedded into their nodels. I’ll give a few examples:

    Karl Popper famously stated that science cannot prove that anything is true, only that something is false. Thus, any scientific theory that’s still accepted is regarded as not yet being proven wrong. Science is just a cycle of giving theories, proving them wrong, giving new ones to account for the problem of the old one and so on, ever getting closer to the truth, but never arriving.

    Thomas Kuhn wrote about scientific paradigms, which are models of the field in question that every scientist uses (for example Aristotelian motion, which was surpassed by Newtonian mechanics, which were surpassed by Einstein’s relativity). During the period of “normal science”, scientists are using their established methods until they end up with too many problems they cannot resolve, at which point it is accepted that the paradigm cannot hold up, and a scientific revolution needs to bring forth a new paradigm, that is incomparable with the old one. Some knowledge is lost in this process, but we move on until the next crisis.

    Paul Feyerabend wrote about countet-induction, which prevents science becoming a dogma. An example he gives is Copernicus going completely against the science of his time with his heliocentric system. The Ptolemaic system was as cutting edge science back then as quantum mechanics is today.

    All in all, findings being continuously disproven and replaced by new ones is not bad science, it is science. Achieving actual, “true”, positive knowledge of the world, documenting it and saying “that’s it, we solved this problem, we’re done” is not something modern science event attempts at.




  • Exactly. Peterson taught psychology at a university (and even the quality of his lectures have been brought into question, but we’ll ignore that), and that somehow makes him an authority to talk about global warming and how all climate scientists are wrong because you can’t model something like that, it makes him an authority to talk about the nazis and how Hitler was actually guided by the people as he spoke only what they reacted positively to, he’s also an authority on economics when he says how the famine in the Soviet Union was caused by the communists killing all the smart and disciplined farmers, etc etc.

    How can anyone seriously listen to a guy who said that women who complain about sexual harassment while wearing makeup are hypocrites is beyond me.

    This is nice read on the topic: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve