drosophila @ drosophila @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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1 yr. ago

I'm more excited about those Frore MEMS airjet chips.

That's actually in at least one consumer product right now.

Why would any of this be about you personally?

Uh, hello? Do you want to think about why I wrote that? Do you need me to explain to you the idea that other users of the extension are mostly self interested but it is in their best interest to cooperate and share information if the extension is bad? That the greater the number of people with access to the source code the less likely it is that some subset of them could cooperate against some other subset? And therefore the more people looking at the source code there are, the less you have to trust any single person? You know, the same reason you won't follow a single person into a dark alleyway but are comfortable standing in a crowded street? Because the first subset being "everyone"' and the second one being "only you" is an extreme case that is basically impossible to happen, just like the Ohio conspiracy? Do you understand what a negative example is or are you gonna comment back "wow I can't believe you think Ohio doesn't exist and everyone in the world is out to get you, you must be a paranoid schizophrenic"?

I honestly can’t take you seriously when this is your view of security

This is the view of the majority of people that work in netsec. There's a general sentiment that we should be reviewing code more, relying less on single-developer projects, and getting reproducible builds for everything, but nobody serious thinks that access to source code is a bad thing and usually it's regarded as a positive.

So in that sense uBlock is kinda bad because Gorhill does the vast majority of the work, but it would be even worse if it was closed source on top of that.

"we caught em once so the system works”.

As opposed to your system where you throw your hands up and say "you're screwed either way, nothing you do matters, just admit it and give up!", which has famously done so much good in the world.

I honestly feel like if this wasn't regulated ketchup would slowly be watered down until it was just weak tomato juice.

I trust a random internet stranger that in theory is doing their work in public

There's no 'in theory' about it.

I've actually had an extension I was using be revealed as spyware (it was hoverzoom, I immediately switched to an alternative afterward).

I don't read every line of every piece of software I use because that would be impossible, but I do actually look at some of it and modify it to suit my needs. It was because there are many thousands of people like me that do this that the problem in hoverzoom was caught. It's been ten years, so I don't have the best memory of the event, but I think it only took a few days to catch it as well, despite the fact that the offending code was left out of the GitHub repo and was only in the compiled extension.

The state of open source isn't perfect (not everything has reproducible builds yet) but in general I 'trust' that every other programmer in existence isn't in on a conspiracy to screw me over specifically.

That's what Google was trying to do, yeah, but IMO they weren't doing a very good job of it (really old Google search was good if you knew how to structure your queries, but then they tried to make it so you could ask plain English questions instead of having to think about what keywords you were using and that ruined it IMO). And you also weren't able to run it against your own documents.

LLMs on the other hand are so good at statistical correlation that they're able to pass the Turing test. They know what words mean in context (in as much they "know" anything) instead of just matching keywords and a short list of synonyms. So there's reason to believe that if you were able to see which parts of the source text the LLM considered to be the most similar to a query that could be pretty good.

There is also the possibility of running one locally to search your own notes and documents. But like I said I'm not sure I want to max out my GPU to do a document search.

How do you know Ohio is real? Have you been there yourself? Have you seen it with your own two eyes? Or do you just trust all the people who claim to live there?

You see, believing in the existence of Ohio is exactly the same as believing that my dad works for Nintendo and I got to play their next game early. It was awesome btw.

That's not just food though, that's literally everything.

A person whose spent thousands of hours making and consuming music is going to notice and value different things than someone who just listens to whatever is on the radio.

A person whose driven hundreds of cars probably has a way better idea about what they like and what they don't like in a car than someone whose driven 3.

That's what having a "developed taste" means. Yeah it's all opinions, but you can't even know what your opinion is of something unless you try it, and you can't develop an in-depth opinion of something unless you've tried a whole bunch of similar somethings.

That doesn't mean you need to do that with everything of course. Not everyone needs to cultivate an appreciation for everything, I don't know or care what good beef Wellington is like for example, but I'm also not going to get pissy with people purely because they have different interests than me.

Being able to summarize and answer questions about a specific corpus of text was a use case I was excited for even knowing that LLMs can't really answer general questions or logically reason.

But if Google search summaries are any indication they can't even do that. And I'm not just talking about the screenshots people post, this is my own experience with it.

Maybe if you could run the LLM in an entirely different way such that you could enter a question and then it tells you which part of the source text statistically correlates the most with the words you typed; instead of trying to generate new text. That way in a worse case scenario it just points you to a part of the source text that's irrelevant instead of giving you answers that are subtly wrong or misleading.

Even then I'm not sure the huge computational requirements make it worth it over ctrl-f or a slightly more sophisticated search algorithm.

There are several games already that have some amount of mandatory ray tracing (with no other lighting technology to fall back to to replace it).

IMO the comment above yours is kinda like being in 1996, looking at Quake, and going "it doesn't even look that much better than Duke3D for the massive performance hit polygonal rendering incurs, and you can do room-over-room in Duke's engine anyway, I don't see us switching away from 2.5D games any time in the near future".

I can tell you right now developers are not going to keep doing all the crazy bullshit they need to do to fake light bouncing around now that we can just simulate it. Just like how devs in the 90s didn't want to keep doing all the crazy bullshit they needed to fake the space being 3D when they could work with an actual 3D engine.

Developers are especially not going to want to keep working with two versions of lightning that work completely differently from each other.

Bigotry is as old as time.

Bragging about how vintage your racism is isn't impressive.

If you can't sell it you might be able to donate it to a thrift store.

Large proteins begin passing through the nephrons en masse and damaging them because they’re too big.

Just in case this isn't enough warning, note that this can permanently reduce your kidney function and harm your body in other ways as well.

I know it's very unlikely for anyone here to do this, but if this happens you aren't just having a "crazy workout" you are giving yourself an injury and possibly permanently affecting your future health. So please don't exercise until you piss blood.

Probably the weirdest kind of lightbulb I've heard of is the electron stimulated luminescence bulb.

They were basically little CRT screens that produced white light instead of a picture. They had about the same efficiency and lifespan as CFL bulbs (which were around at the same time) but better color rendering capability (higher CRI). They also didn't use mercury in their construction.

They never caught on probably because of how bulky they were, with cost probably being a factor as well (though if they were as manufactured at the scales CFLs were the cost may have come down). Today LEDs are better than both of course.

Speaking of cost and LEDs, it's pretty remarkable just how cheap lighting has gotten. Consider this article, where they talk about the cost of producing light with candles vs with incandescent bulbs. But since 2006 we have developed some LED bulbs that approach or exceed 200 lumens per watt. That's a more than 11x improvement over the 17 lumens per watt figure given in that article. That adds another .9 to the percentage cost drop before we even consider the longer lifetime of the LED bulb.

I think I calculated at some point that Philips Ultra Efficient bulbs cost less than $1 per year per bulb to operate if you add the cost of power + the purchase price of the bulb amortized over its lifetime. At this point lighting up a room is almost free.

I have, I like his channel a lot.

It kinda depends on my much IR light your camera lens absorbs.

A certain percentage of the light produced by the lamp (whether it's incandescent or an arc lamp) is infrared light. This is the same as the radiant heat you can feel coming off of a fire, for example.

Whereas with the LED light almost all of the photons it's emitting are going to be in the visible band. High intensity LEDs do produce some amount of waste heat, but this is in the form of heating up the structure they're connected to. So not only do they waste less energy, the energy they do waste isn't shooting out the front in the form of IR.

To be clear, visible light also turns into heat when it's absorbed, but with the LED you'd just be shooting visible light through your lens, whereas with a lamp you'd be shooting the same amount of visible light (same lumen value) plus a bunch of IR. So in the latter case there's a greater total amount of energy flowing through the lens.

All of this is to say that an LED emitter of the same lumen value almost certainly has less of a potential to heat up your camera lens. I guess if IR just passed right through it (and none of it got absorbed in the glass or in the tube of the lens) then it might not be much of a problem, and you'd just be heating up your projection screen slightly more. But I don't know enough about camera lenses to say if that's the case.

My most stereotypical special interest (in that it's something really random that you might assume there's not a lot of depth to) is artificial lighting technology.

But I have a lot of stuff I could infodump about: computers, video games, TTRPGs, world building, neurology, etc.

Even if it takes 100+ years for quantum cryptanalysis to become viable I would rather we start switching over to better algorithms now.

I don't watch TV, not even streaming.

The engines themselves have gotten better at pushing pixels too.

Remember all the hype about Euclideon "infinite detail" stuff back in the early 2010s? How they had a data structure that pre-sorted their voxel data in such a way that they could switch between rendering big and tiny voxels depending on the player's point of view, seamlessly and in real time?

We have that now, just with polygons instead of voxels, which actually makes it even more technically impressive since Nanite has to maintain the mesh's coherence (though I guess in some ways Nanite is a bit worse, since there's only so much it can reduce a mesh before it disappears, whereas you can just keep making voxels bigger and bigger).

The foliage you see in that forest demo is Nanite geometry.