woodenghost [comrade/them]

Usenet came long before torrenting.

And maybe the real potion was the therapy we went to along the way along the way

But what’s even on the y-axis? Aspect ratio? X is probably weight?

Yes, that’s when coal comes from. There were giant global fire storms, because of all the dead trees and also because there was more oxygen. The oxygen also caused insects to become gigantic. They don’t have lungs, just random holes in their body so the airs oxygen content limits their size.

Probably much more even, if multiple people live in one apartment.

Yes, for example ublock origin.

Very cool!

Yes, there are entire companies full of lawyers doing nothing but sending out these letters to people who torrent. They also use harmless looking paid ads on piracy sites (including streaming and direct download) to place trackers on the site and track down users.

Outside of mating season, birds definitely do sing just for fun.

And even in mating season, I wonder if birds really consciously try to “get laid” or if they just sing, because it feels like the right thing to do in the moment and then getting laid happens. I mean, some start singing very young. How would they know what it’s for the first time? Not all birds are as smart as crows.

This review paper looks at the motivation for both kinds of singing: intrinsically motivated (just for fun, all year round) and singing that attracts mates. In the latter, it’s unclear, what triggers the motivation. The author supposes, it might be a combination of socially reinforced behavior and the vicinity of a mate, rather then the act of copulation, that triggers the reward.

Without medication

💊 🐦‍⬛ Just flying over to the ant drug store to get some fresh HCOOH.

Well, he should consider himself lucky, since he’s still in one of the early rooms. In fact, almost as good as the first one, since the amount of rooms with numbers smaller than 2×TREE(3) as a percentage of all the rooms, is zero. Almost every other guest has it worse.

Thank you ☺️

Yes, new technologies in capitalism are adapted, because they shift the organic composition of capital towards fixed capital, initially increasing profits for individual firms but inevitably contributing to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, leading to crisis eventually. A technology, that doesn’t lower the socially necessary labor time will inevitably fail. So any technology that does succeed in capitalism is a technology that has the potential to be freeing us from labor under communism. Until then, it’s impact depends not on the specific technology, but on how it changes the power dynamic between capital and labor. I agree, that for AI, this could go both ways.

To recycle my own comment from another thread: Take software development for example. It’s a a field with unusually high wages despite almost no unionization. That’s because it’s organic composition of capital leans towards variable capital. The tools of the trade are cheap. Like a skilled artesian, a software developer can just take their laptop and walk, if their wage is too low. An engineer in a car factory might be just as skilled, but can’t take the robots and assembly lines and walk out, their field has much more fixed capital. So labor in the field of software development has high individual bargaining power, even without collective bargaining.

But like almost every technical innovation ever, AI will shift the organic composition of capital towards fixed capital. This could lower the bargaining power of workers and drive down wages. That’s why they push it. For example, if huge server farms to drive closed source, centralized AI models become the norm, software engineers won’t be able to just take those with them and walk out as easily as before. On the other hand, small, cheap, specialized, easy to train, open source models (like China develops) might actually benefit labor power. It will be necessary to fight for democratic control over AI to decide whether it’s a blessing or a curse.

It’s a math thing, more than a physics thing.

With Newtons law of gravity, there is a big, but seemingly solved problem that’s been known for a long time: things must not touch. Potential energy is calculated by dividing a term by the distance of two objects. You can’t devide by zero, so if the distance goes to zero, energy goes to infinity, which doesn’t make sense. The solution is to prevent the centers of mass of things from touching. This isn’t a problem, because in real life, masses aren’t points, but solid objects and the centers of mass are in the middle, so they can’t touch, because the outer parts collide first. And in simulations you can just make a rule that says no touching.

This kind of gap in a formula, where it stops being defined, is called a singularity in math. And to deal with them, you just have to know, when to expect them. For hundreds of years, people thought, collisions were the only singularities in Newtonian gravity. Easy to avoid, so not a problem. Now in this paper, they prove, that there are other, non-collission singularities and give an explicit example.

The arrangement in the picture has the middle mass going back and forth between the two binaries faster and faster and it reaches infinite speed in finite time. It basically leaves the universe, like a glitch in a video game. Also the reverse is allowed too: you just need the four masses from the two binary systems and there is nothing in Newtonian gravity that says a fifth mass can’t randomly appear from out of nowhere with infinite speed, slow down and settle between the too binaries.

Since only five masses were necessary to create this problematic constellation, it’s likely that there are many more possible.

Luckily, we have Einsteins theory of gravity now, so don’t have to worry about Newton too much. However, this does have its own, completely different kind of singularity, where the curvature of spacetime goes to infinity. People initially thought, that would be a problematic, unphysical behavior, like Newtons singularities, but it turns out that’s just a real thing that happens: black holes. Here the annoying singularities are mercifully shrouded in an event horizon, so at least we don’t have to look at them. Unless… But there is a solution for that too.

Now just add a second binary star system and you get infinite energy and momentum in finite time*:

*if Newtonian physics were true and stars and planets were points and everything was perfectly aligned

Yes, compression algorithms work, because they are tied to a specific file format, that everyone knows exactly how to read. That’s not exactly the case with language, but it’s similar. We share context during the speech act, but often not enough for communication to work. Rather, the context is culturally and situationally embedded. What language does is not to communicate meaning by directly referencing the world (compressed or not), but to affect certain acts by it’s use in context. That’s why Wittgenstein, who came up with these ideas long before AI, sais, that human communication consists of moves in a shared language game. Another funny comic about this.

Okay, I’ll be the silent part

Juggling. I’d find some nice stones or pinecones and teach everyone how to juggle and do some tricks. I also know an ancient game you can play with stones or knuckle bones. And I know some songs. And stories. People in the stone age had lots of free time to pass, so all of these would come in handy.

I think, Venice is still the only city literally charging an entrance fee. They do that, because they got more tourists, than the city could handle. But I think what you have heard might be about tourist taxes. Many cities charge those per night. But you won’t notice it directly, it’s just that, if you’re staying in a hotel, they’ll automatically add it to the price of the room.

I second Prague. It’s beautiful and worth it whether you come for the history or the culture or the atmosphere.

Crows are so shy, it’s too cute! They’re like cats, if you stare at them or lock eyes, they get really nervous. So slowly close your eyes and look away to put then at ease. If you pull out food they like, like peanuts in their shell, you can almost see a little exclamation mark appearing above their heads, like 🥜 ❗ 🐦‍⬛