apexys

[apexys]

How many dead fish did they put into the MRI this time?

much less alarmed by the 'cognitive impact' of LLM use than I am by the fact that so many people apparently believe your brain can atrophy or permanently lose function in the space of four months because you used fancy sparknotes to write a couple of essays

[apexys]

j'adore le franglish content le code switching c'est tellement fun je sautille from a language to another like a gazelle et toi aussi tant que tu voudras :)

OUAIS baby we are so fucking back. franglais est parfait parce que americans get mad AND it sends evil psychic vibes à l’académie française. The phrase “qu’est-ce qu’y’all doing aujourd’hui” came out of my mouth this evening and i think that might be the pinnacle of human language. i love being annoying

[apexys]

Soft boiled eggs are also the reason this thing exists: The Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher

(from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eierk%C3%B6pfer?wprov=sfti1#)

Because, you know, the egg is already in a shell, so if you cleanly divide it into two halves, your Eierbecher doesn’t become dirty.

You put the device on the egg, raise the metal ball and let it drop. The cup has a sharp, folded-in-corner around its inner rim which, with the impulse from the drop, flexes over the shell, cuts it, and holds on to the upper half so you can lift it off.

To the regional thing: I’m from Schleswig-Holstein and both me as well as many people I know eat soft-boiled eggs. I also haven’t noticed the eggs being softer-boiled the further south I went. But that’s just anecdotal.

The issue of Americans vs Soft-Boiled eggs has come up so: if you are (US) American, tell me how familiar you are with soft-boiled eggs

[apexys]

I’m literally planning to get into bookbinding because of this.

A lot of foundational texts in comp sci are creative commons or MIT licensed and yet the books cost upwards of 80€.

Plus, a leather bound copy with gold lettering just looks nicer on my shelf, you know?

recently printed out a paperback copy of a very lengthy pdf i generated, comparing that to the cost of recent academic book i ordered thru the mail, and it really does hammer home the all but totally parasitic nature of academic publishing. a full order of magnitude difference in price, for the (roughly) same amount of text printed and shipped by some print-on-demand vanity press vs printed and sold in bulk by a respectable university publishing house. passing on, ofc, zero of the profits to the author (who can generally be expected to typeset shit on their own given that latex exists). not that id rather those profits be passed on either, thats a terrible system. the point is that we could be getting the SAME FUCKING PRODUCT for LITERALLY HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS LESS PER ITEM if it were not for these rent seeking thieves plundering academia for profit. pure societal drain

[apexys]

For your consideration

What is a bonbon?

I was listening to an american podcast and they were talking about bonbons being chocolates which - as a german - confused me, so I decided to look it up.

Apparently the word bonbon in english means what we call Praline??? Huh????

So now I am asking once more: Tumblr what is a bonbon to you?

A: a type of hard candy

B: a type of chocolate

[apexys]

The example also made me think of this quote, from Douglas Adams’ “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”:

‘Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion.

Reached a point in Nate Silver's new book, On the Edge where he talks about what ChatGPT told him:

"More than forty years I've been doing innovation. I can't think of a single example of a large innovation that came from an expected player or a large player," Vinod Khosla told me. Taken literally, this is an exaggeration - a ChatGPT query turned up counterexamples of products like the Sony Walkman, the IBM PC, and the iPhone that were developed by well-established brands.

Nate. Come on man. Why are you asking ChatGPT this? Why is this a ChatGPT question? Why are you telling me that you're getting answers from ChatGPT? Why are you writing in a book that this is where you're getting your information from?

I don't think there's a problem with asking ChatGPT stuff per se. It's like a worse, more expensive Wikipedia that lies to you sometimes. But you then have to go actually think about the answers and whether they fit the question, and do research to see whether those answers actually comport with reality, and be ready to say "well, the machine was full of shit again", which is often the case.

I guess I'm just baffled by referencing ChatGPT as a method of investigation, like its an admission that Nate Silver would rather go to the machine than sit and think to himself about the issue for five minutes, or go to a contrary source to get their quote. I don't necessarily think that he should have lied about where he got that list from, but ... I don't know. It felt really lazy. I think if you're writing a pop science book, I want more from it than "I asked ChatGPT and here's what it told me".

(The book is full of interview snippets and anecdotes and halfway through, this is the first time that ChatGPT has shown up, but it does raise my skepticism levels of everything that's come before.)

[apexys]

[apexys]

guy who is negatively polarized into being optimistic and upbeat because all the doomers on social media are just too annoying

[apexys]

I think my favourite thing about the deep sea is just how hard it is to fathom from above.

Sonar reflects off any change in density, first you get the thermocline, when the warmer surface water gets replaced by colder subsurface water, then at some point the salt concentration changes and you another density change.

Go further down and you find a false bottom when your sonar reflects off myriads of lanternfish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_scattering_layer).

And at some point you actually get down there.

If you’re lucky, you hit rock.

You might also get a few new layers of thermal or haline density changes.

Or you get a layer of mud that’s slowly increasing in density and where the change between water and soil is somewhat fluid. The depth your sonar shows then depends on the frequency range you use.

Also, we don’t even actually know where the seafloor is for ~75% of the sea, we just estimate from satellite measurements.

And actual temperature or salt concentration measurements that you need to accurately calibrate your sonar are even rarer.

Here’s an interactive visualization of the most of the data we have so far: https://digitalearthviewer-glodap.geomar.de/ (doesn’t work on mobile)

Every dot on that globe is a temperature measurement collated by the GLODAP project (https://glodap.info).

And that’s just sonar and temperature, think about how little has been photographed!

A bit of Moby-Dick oceanography context:

Up until the mid 1870s, it was generally accepted that life could not exist below a depth of 550 meters. This is why some of Ishmael's whale theories are so off and why Ahab pictures the sea floor as a vast wasteland of bones and shipwrecks. 🌊

[apexys]

training a flock of starlings to precisely emulate the forward pass of the VGG-19 convolutional neural network architecture with their murmurations

[apexys]

[apexys]

The same way some people think it’s only work if you hit things with a hammer, maybe elements should only count if you can hit them with a hammer.

the elements at the end of the periodic table barely feel like real elements to me. idk, if you can't hold a lump of it in your hand without it exploding due to radioactivity--man, radioactivity is barely the right word, it's a loose mass of neutrons and protons that only just holds together for a few microseconds--you can't do chemistry with it. it's not a chemical element, in the sense it is not found as part of any compounds on Earth or in space, because it does not exist long enough to form chemical bonds. i get that you wanna finish out the last period, make the bottom right corner nice and square. but you're not doing chemistry. you're doing Stupid Particle Accelerator Tricks.

[apexys]

I can eat glass, it does not hurt me.

21.5%, even though I’d have thought it to be a lot lower.

[apexys]

I tend to prefer oat milk, but soy just foams better for cappuccinos and the like!

I literally buy this by the case and just use it like milk

[apexys]

Also libsnorble, a thin C wrapper around SNORBL which is also used by everyone but depends on an ancient macro preprocessor that you need to build from sources.

That is of course used by the snorb tool, which is a set of CLI tools written by a now-retired professor in the early 80s and which for some reason contains the only valid build-script for libsnorble.

But fear not, there’s a Java JNI binding for snorb that only works with Java 1.6 and below and while it works, you need to navigate ten layers of SnorbFactoryBeans.

Usually there’s also two to three abandoned Rust implementations written by PhD students before they gave up and used snorb like everyone else.

And if you’re really lucky, theres snorbew-rs, a modern reimplementation written by the AWS team, which works, but completely reinvents all terminology and in one percent of the cases produces files that are just incompatible enough to crash snorb (though only after a few seconds for that false sense of security).

every software is like. your mission-critical app requires you to use the scrimble protocol to squeeb some snorble files for sprongle expressions. do you use:

libsnorble-2-dev, a C library that the author only distributes as source code and therefore must be compiled from source using CMake

Squeeb.js, which sort of has most of the features you want, but requires about a gigabyte of Node dependencies and has only been in development for eight months and has 4.7k open issues on Github

Squeeh.js, a typosquatting trojan that uses your GPU to mine crypto if you install it by mistake

Sprongloxide, a Rust crate beloved by its fanatical userbase, which has been in version 0.9.* for about four years, and is actually just a thin wrapper for libsnorble-2-dev

GNU Scrimble, a GPLv3-licensed command-line tool maintained by the Free Software Foundation, which has over a hundred different flags, and also comes with an integrated Lisp interpreter for scripting, and also a TUI-based Pong implementation as an "easter egg", and also supports CSV, XML, JSON, PDF, XLSX, and even HTML files, but does not actually come with support for squeebing snorble files for ideological reasons. it does have a boomeresque drawing of a grinning meerkat as its logo, though

Microsoft Scrimble Framework Core, a .NET library that has all the features you need and more, but costs $399 anually and comes with a proprietary licensing agreement that grants Microsoft the right to tattoo advertisements on the inside of your eyelids

snorblite, a full-featured Perl module which is entirely developed and maintained by a single guy who is completely insane and constantly makes blog posts about how much he hates the ATF and the "woke mind-virus", but everyone uses it because it has all the features you need and is distributed under the MIT license

Google Squeebular (deprecated since 2017)

[apexys]

Well what did you think öffentlicher Nahverkehr stood for?

while we are on the topic of unfortunate denglish marketing: my citys train station has a free parking offer for 20 minutes - you know, enough time to drop someone off, say goodbyes, hugs and kisses, then awkwardly half-running through the crowds to catch your train. bestie. you wont believe what they call it.

do not leave me in suspense?? am i actually supposed to guess-- wait...it's not...

die fast ??

they COULDN'T--