modulus

u/modulus@lemmy.ml
30 posts · 119 comments

Recent posts

Recent comments

Two things I found interesting:

Effects are concentrated among users who seek direct solutions: Persistence costs were concentrated among participants who prompted AI to solve tasks for them directly. Using AI for hints or clarifications did not produce significant impairments.

So that's a major caveat.

Another interesting thing would be to know if this is an AI effect specifically, or a technical aid effect generally. For instance, would a calculator produce similar results?

I'm also not thrilled about the obsession with copyright. I was against copyright in the 90s. I was against copyright in the 2000s. I was against copyright in the 2010s. And now these people want to call integrity lack of ethics just because I'm not willing to endorse yet another extension to a legal monopoly forbidding me from running arbitrary algorithms on data supposedly owned by someone else?

I'm sympathetic to the environmental arguments. Though I also would point out there are much greater areas of marginal waste to cut on. Online advertising uses more energy than AI. I look forward to the day it's banned.

But the whole "we're going to play pretend that I can ban you from transposing text I wrote through a matrix" thing? Absolutely not. Nothing good comes out of that.

Is it me or this plan is just unhinged? Not just politically bad, or imbalanced, or whatever. But actually fantastical, not meant for implementation. In fact I can't think of anyone who'd accept it, not the zionists either. It seems headline-driven policy. It's just intended to make noise.

At least Oslo was shitty but conceivably workable for some values of workable.

This is talking about tariffs and SEZs in the middle of rubble.

Good news on nuclear, awful news on gas, but considering the German fake energy transition is powered by it, it's perhaps inevitable.

Also this just annoyed me more than it should:

Nuclear power is a carbon-free source of electricity but it is not typically labeled as green energy, like solar, wind and other renewables. Generating power this way requires mining and processing uranium to create nuclear fuel, an energy-intensive process that produces emissions.

Unlike wind turbines and solar panels, which are made from butterfly shine and faery sighs.

on Can we talk about Anathem? · c/books · 2 pts · 351d

Oddly, I have a friend who's not much into SF but absolutely loved Quicksilver (and the whole Baroque Cycle). She also enjoyed Anathem. But Cryptonomicon or other Stephenson's books left her uninterested.

on Can we talk about Anathem? · c/books · 8 pts · 352d

I liked Anathem a lot. I think I enjoyed all of Neal Stephenson's books up to (but excluding) Seveneves, whereupon I gave up on him. Anathem is one of my favourite books.

::: spoiler spoiler However, it's true that Neal Stephenson somewhat recycles the same themes and concerns. For example, the whole "radioactive storage under an academic institution" thing was used in The Big U as well. The theme regarding Platonism appeared in different forms, for instance in the exploration of the organ in Cryptonomicon. That didn't stop me from enjoying it though. :::

The whole notion of monks in space seems absurd because of how people see monks. But this is both ahistorical and contrary to the way they work in the book. Copernicus and Mendel were monks. And these particular ones were all about learning maths and theorics (physics). They didn't optimise for technology, because they weren't allowed, but they optimised for learning, for extracting information out of tiny details. I think they'd do alright in a scientific(ish) mission.

on NVDA 2025.1 Released · c/main · 2 pts · 1y

It's an NVDA add-on. It substitutes role announcements with specific 3d located sounds. And fortunately it does work. I should change the manifest to indicate it.

on NVDA 2025.1 Released · c/main · 2 pts · 1y

I'm going to be trying that today. I hope my Unspoken version still runs on this.

I've tried deep research from ChatGPT for legal issues. It's almost right. But still requires significant human oversight. For example I asked it for a set of norms that govern an issue and some of them were out of date.