AbouBenAdhem @ AbouBenAdhem @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Do most public libraries have holocaust denial works?

Legally, you could buy a used copy if you could find one.

Any “people” talking about simple ways to detect AI are actually AI bots trying to throw us off.

Little Red Riding Hood could become a fable about identity theft and the need for public-key cryptography.

Maybe Trump thinks “South Africa” is everything south of the Sahara.

Or white robes instead of colorful ones. And a “fancy hat” with a point and two eye holes.

The contact lens technology uses nanoparticles that absorb infrared light and convert it into wavelengths that are visible to mammalian eyes

Sounds like florescence—but with florescence, the light is re-emitted in all directions, not the same direction as the incident light. So the contact would glow in the presence of infrared light, but it wouldn’t maintain an image.

when the mice were given the choice of a dark box and an infrared-illuminated box, contact-wearing mice chose the dark box whereas contact-less mice showed no preference.

That’s consistent with the mice seeing a glow but not an image.

the pupils of contact-wearing mice constricted in the presence of infrared light, and brain imaging revealed that infrared light caused their visual processing centers to light up.

That still doesn’t imply that the mice are seeing an image.

In humans, the infrared contact lenses enabled participants to accurately detect flashing morse code-like signals and to perceive the direction of incoming infrared light.

Hmm, the directionality is suggestive—but is it just a result of turning their eyes or head?

Because the contact lenses have limited ability to capture fine details (due to their close proximity to the retina, which causes the converted light particles to scatter), the team also developed a wearable glass system using the same nanoparticle technology, which enabled participants to perceive higher-resolution infrared information.

Ok, now they admit the limitation, but I don’t understand how glasses would help... unless you used a lens in front to focus light on a translucent film that would act as a retina which you’d then look at from behind. But that would be more like holding a pinhole camera in front of your face than like using conventional glasses.

That doesn’t define a whole species, it just establishes that a pair of organisms belong to the same species. And most randomly-selected pairs of conspecific organisms would fail this test: if both organisms are the same sex, or if either one is immature or infertile.

And in order to define species unambiguously, this pairwise test would have to be transitive, but IRL it isn’t: there are cases where a member of population A can produce offspring with members of population B, and members of B can produce offspring with members of C, but members of A can’t produce offspring with members of C.

That depends on whether the angels in question are bosons or fermions—which in turn depends on how they’re spinning (so the dance they’re performing may also be relevant).

That’s basically the Euthyphro dilemma.

I think it’s Staten Island.

Yeah—I picked 90 years because that’s about when t-shirts started to be acceptable as outerwear, but the actual garments are older.

Most people are probably at least aware that there are contexts where their basic plain-text formatting (like asterisks for bullets) will get cleaned up to a prettier format when they post it.

They may not know the name of the format or all the available features.

“Better at news than the news” is a trivially low bar.

Jeans and a plain t-shirt must be the preferred outfit for time travelers—you could fit in during any period in the last 90 years.

Sure—the sales slump is due to tariffs that hadn’t even taken effect yet, and not to their highly-publicized repudiation of diversity initiatives.

The Star Wars arcade game.

How generative natural language works has been highly debated for over 60 years—there’s certainly no consensus most linguists would agree with. And while we have a pretty good idea how the process of facial recognition works, we know that process isn't conducive to extracting a conventional explanation of how to recognize a particular face. (The best you could do is to make a list of features that would allow someone to eliminate all but one candidate from a small group, but that’s distinct from the process of actually recognizing someone.)

Can you explain how you recognize someone’s face? Can you explain how you balance your body and move your feet correctly as you walk? Can you explain how you speak in grammatically correct sentences without consciously thinking about the rules of grammar?

The vast majority of our experiences are fundamentally inexplicable—basically, everything that isn’t part of our internal narrative.

Or conversely, applause is just an orgasm with your hands.