zlatiah

joined 2 months ago
 

The nonprofit's scientist co-founder was one of the organizers of a conference I attended, so that's how I learned! From their website:

Darwin’s Ark was founded by two passionate pet lovers—a geneticist and an engineer—who noticed a glaring gap in scientific research. Many people had pets, but surprisingly little research focused on their health and wellbeing.

This sparked the creation of Darwin’s Ark, a nonprofit organization that combines the perspectives of pet parents with the expertise of professional scientists to expand the scale and scope of pet research.

Since then, Darwin’s Ark has helped thousands of pet owners contribute to the scientific understanding of their furry companions. We value pet owners’ insights—you know your animals best—and we believe in the transformative power of community science to drive discovery.

They just launched a new project, Darwin's Cats. And they are seeking out cat owners to submit data on their cats. I believe they also do genetic testing too and the data goes to researchers, instead of some shady startup company

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

... which is why I never considered French press "inconvenient"... but from what I've heard from other coffee enthusiasts, they all found French press inconvenient precisely because they don't just pour the grounds down the drain & had to dispose it in the trash bin (and deal with the mess). Maybe I'm ill-informed somewhere, maybe something else... I'm not against just flushing the grounds though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Currently live in a condo, I think every unit in the building came with one

The biggest advantage I could find is that they are insanely convenient for making French press coffee! French presses are otherwise a pain to clean (since there's no filter to aggegate the grounds), but having an in-sink disposal means I can just flush the coffee grounds directly into the sink. Besides this though I'm pretty indifferent to them

 

As the title goes... Per community rules, I'd appreciate it if we keep politics out of this discussion

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Probably in K-12? Like seriously everyone in my "friend" groups and half of my classes knew something about me was off, and I believe I was known as the eccentric genius throughout middle/high school (and my HS had a lot of smart students). But the broader culture I was in didn't believe in mental health so...

Other than that... there were two people I relate to very well on Mastodon (when I first joined), one of whom is very openly autistic; hence why I got tested. That's probably as obvious as it gets

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Not great... I'm not a US citizen yet so voting isn't possible. Only thing I could do is vote with my feet... so I moved out of Texas for good earlier this year. I think my current location is as safe as it gets in regards to avoiding political violence (since I'm not exactly in a group that the right isn't threatening) so there's that

Other than that? Nothing... If the worst happens I'll just hole-up in the building and ask my boss for permission to work from home

[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 weeks ago (10 children)

This again??

This time once archive.org is back online again... is it possible to get torrents of some of their popular data storage? For example I wouldn't imagine their catalog of books with expired copyright to be very big. Would love a community way to keep the data alive if something even worse happens in the future (and their track record isn't looking good now)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 weeks ago

I am not joking; the only thing I can imagine is for some bizarre reason a bowling ball noise followed by a comical noise of striking pins. I know there is a person but I couldn't imagine that person

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

This is a good point... I strongly prefer nonfiction over fiction, but it could just be Autism. I really only read fiction if it is really, really good... but I read them in the same way as I would read a nonfiction book as well, I'd be more interested in the themes of the book

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (5 children)

Oh my! I didn't know what to expect, and I have to say... I was quite surprised by some of your answers. Also confirmed to me that I am definitely not normal

Not many replies that are indicative of Aphantasia so... here goes nothing. I tried really hard at this okay

spoiler

I don't "see" see anything when I close my eyes. I can create a very vague concept of a ball, a table, and... kind of a person in my head, but I don't actually see the scene, I used to think when people say imagining things they were just making a metaphor. Things get really funk from here... But the overall schema feels more like one of those badly drawn scenes from the hit visual novel Slay the Princess. And yes I imagined it in 2D for some reason

  • Color: the ball doesn't have a color
  • Gender: it wasn't even a real person; it seems like a silhouette of the hand and back of a person
  • Looks: As I said, the person isn't even facing me
  • Size: No idea; in retrospect it's fairly large compared to the table (diameter probably 1/2-1/3 of table?), but the table is also an abstract concept so...
  • Table: no clue, it is a square table but that's it. If anything it looks like the things served on Pizza Hut pizzas
  • Well I spoiled the question for myself so... but I didn't have to choose, heck I couldn't choose even if I know what the questions are

 

This is more of me trying to understand how people imagine things, as I almost certainly have Aphantasia and didn't realize until recently... If this is against community rules, please do let me know.

The original thought experiment was from the Aphantasia subreddit. Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/g1e6bl/ball_on_a_table_visualization_experiment_2/

Thought experiment begins below.


Try this: Visualise (picture, imagine, whatever you want to call it) a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?

Once you're done with the above, click to review the test questions:

  • What color was the ball?
  • What gender was the person that pushed the ball?
  • What did they look like?
  • What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?
  • What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?

And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?


[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I don't believe anyone mentioned this yet so... here goes nothing, there is a suspicion that this is due to A/B testing

This is a bug report from the Invidious project; this is back in June 6 (so four months ago), but the hoster of a fairly large instance noted a very bizarre error message on the Invidious project...

Conclusion is that Youtube is very likely rolling out A/B testing of requiring all clients to login before viewing videos

Refreshing will probably work considering this is most likely result of an A/B test, but unfortunately I don't see a way of this problem going away

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

I genuinely don't know... there doesn't seem to be any ongoing discussion of who or why are these people targeting IA. There are other people who are trying to rescue data stored on IA

Hope this would be over soon...

 

Per their error message, "See 31 million of you on HIBP!"

If anyone can provide a slightly more up-to-date souce (their X post, for example) I'd appreciate it

Hacker News post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41792500

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

So it was the physics Nobel... I see why the Nature News coverage called it "scooped" by machine learning pioneers

Since the news tried to be sensational about it... I tried to see what Hinton meant by fearing the consequences. Believe he is genuinely trying to prevent AI development without proper regulations. This is a policy paper he was involved in (https://managing-ai-risks.com/). This one did mention some genuine concerns. Quoting them:

"AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society. They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance"

like bruh people already lost jobs because of ChatGPT, which can't even do math properly on its own...

Also quite some irony that the preprint has the following quote: "Climate change has taken decades to be acknowledged and confronted; for AI, decades could be too long.", considering that a serious risk of AI development is climate impacts

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A bit off topic... But from my understanding, the US currently doesn't have a single federal agency that is responsible for AI regulation... However, there is an agency for child abuse protection: the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect within Department of HHS

If AI girlfriends generating CSAM is how we get AI regulation in the US, I'd be equally surprised and appalled

 

Forgot what made me think about this topic but I've been considering this for a week or two... Curious what you all think.

When I mean "hardest" "video game", I mean whatever game that you find objectively more difficult than all other ones on the market, as long as it's a video game. I guess exposure to different genres/types of games can influence the answer to this question a lot so... Hence I was curious about your rationale.

I have a pretty solid answer & rationale but I guess I shouldn't share that in the main post to bias results...

 

But how did this name originally come into place in engineering??

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