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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” – Frank Herbert

    "Right now there is an explosive growth of the number of computers and things they can do. Not only are their numbers increasing at a dazzling rate, but the storage of information in giant data banks is growing in the same explosive way.

    We have no way to control this now and none in sight. In fact, the very nature of this growth says that all controls will lag far behind computer developments. Any attempt to ban them will only drive com- puters underground. Never lose sight of the fact that computers “crunch time.” The speed at which computers can operate tells us that laws cannot keep up with them. The person with a computer can dance rings around you while you react as though you were embedded in molasses.

    What can you do?

    Get your own computer. Learn how to use it. We are here to help you make that first step: how to find the one that fits your needs and your pocketbook, where to put it, how to program it-all of the essentials. If you don’t do this, the Bill of Rights is dead and your individual liberties will go the way of the dodo." – also Frank Herbert

    I hate how much we seem to be slowly careening towards Frank Herbert’s vision like the worse case of collective target fixation.


  • Incredible. All throughout my studies the “bitter lesson”, so to speak, was that analogue circuits just couldn’t hold a candle to digital ones in terms of reliability when operating on small currents, to the point that no one bothered to miniaturize in analogue anymore. Even guitar pedals are almost all transistor-based, because it’s so much more feasible to to manipulate small currents through binary, quantized signals than analogue ones (even though the analogue ones are theoretically infinitely more precise).

    Here’s the publication in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01477-0

    Here is either the pre-print or an accompanying paper on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.05853

    I’m trying to figure out how they get around the compounding imprecision that is inherent to multiple analogue steps and actually manage to rival digital circuit’s precision; seems like a big part come from how they have managed to squash all of the useful “work” down into almost a single step thanks to clever use of operational amplifiers on the “edges” of their resistive random access memory array.


  • Jayjader@jlai.lutoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldRevolt became Stoat
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    2 months ago

    Syntax highlighting for code blocks is the reason I prefer discord over slack for collaborating and just chatting with friends who know how to code. I imagine some irc clients exist that so the same, but at least with discord I know my recipient is guaranteed to see what I see.





  • Empathy and intelligence are not the same. As evidenced by some highly intelligent people displaying a shocking lack of empathy, and some highly empathetic people not displaying the greatest intelligence.

    Personally, I’d rather talk about knowledge and behavior. Intelligence and empathy are hard to quantize.

    Leaning into natural selection, proposing we need to let it “run it’s course”, in a way, to “weed out the weak traits” is eugenics. So is thinking that some traits are “good” and others “bad” without qualifying “for the current social/environmental context”. Stupidity might be a good defense against existential depression.

    Why do you yourself call the thought “scary” if you don’t think it’s eugenics? What exactly is scary about letting “weak traits perish” if not that it’s inviting a certain form of eugenics to decide who gets to reproduce and/or be born?

    You’ll note I didn’t claim you advocate for it directly, just that your arguments are eugenics-flavored.


  • Wealth inequality is returning to pre-WW1 levels and climate change’s effects are becoming visible to the average person, making people desperate for a way out. Education budgets in the US have been steadily slashed, far-right agit-prop by people like Steve Bannon has flooded the internet while the political class that could oppose it are pacified by corporate donors.

    No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.




  • I interpret their comment slightly differently; Factorio as a game is less valuable today then, say, 4 years ago.

    I still disagree with that interpretation, as the game has continued to receive updates and bugfixes, steadily increasing it’s value (or at least counteracting the depreciation). Not to mention the additional value provided by community mods has only increased over the years.

    The game is also one-of-a-kind. Until a “factorio 2” equivalent comes out that is just straight-up better in every way, it’s hard to see how the value would depreciate. Heck, the Space Age DLC is basically “Factorio 2” without splitting the playerbase across 2 separate games.