• 2 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 8th, 2023

help-circle
  • …are you serious?

    There would be so much data in understanding people’s light usage. For example, you could figure out how late or early people get up, number of people living in a house, how crowded the house is, how many lights are used per room, etc etc. it would be a gold mine of information.

    Let’s say you’re a home automaton designer. You want to design devices to be used in the home, but in order to design such devices, you need enough of a stockpile of user data. This lightbulb data would be incredible valuable.

    You can probably even analyse the data and determine things like whether someone is watching tv late at night.

    From a nefarious view, how valuable would this data be to robbers and thieves?


  • phario@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlHyprland is a toxic community
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    74
    arrow-down
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?

    I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.

    It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.





  • Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.

    Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).

    Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.

    A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.


  • There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.

    The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

    If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.


  • Hmm to be fair with YouTube you don’t think this is now a repository of incredibly valuable resources? If YouTube went down and we lost all videos, we would be losing many important resources, from historical documentaries no longer easily found in media, to guides on woodworking.

    It’s a bit scary. Once you remove the crap, it’s an incredibly valuable library resource and time capsule.


  • Nah this is changing.

    This of course is what they said about tablets. Now people are replacing desktop or laptop workflow with tablets, or alternatively tablets are being designed with removable keyboards so the lines are blurred.

    I know scientific researchers who now only travel to conferences with tablets instead of their laptops.

    Finally, I predict that we’re moving to cloud computing. It’s the natural way. You VPN into a network and your computing is done on a cluster or on a central computer.

    The same is already happening for gaming. People are connecting controllers and glasses like the Xreal Air to phones, then networking into a computer to play a desktop game on their phone.


  • Yes.

    I think with something like this you have to do a literature search. Even then it’s kind of tough because I’m sure it’s very hard to do objective tests of these traits.

    You might say that any activity has similar aspects. Learning a difficult passage in music, learning to speak languages, learning to throw a basketball through a hoop, etc.

    I’m not sure there is a huge amount of evidence that video games teach resilience any more than any other similar activity. Moreover, it’s easily the kind of thing that our biases set us up to believe things that aren’t there. For every person who learned resilience from video games, there might be three other people who learned poor lessons, like “I should be lazy and play video games and not study for my exams.”

    With academic or professional resilience, I can’t say I’ve seen any positive correlation with video games.

    I could easily argue that excessive video game play makes you less resilient to doing non-video-game challenges.



  • phario@lemmy.catoFoodPorn@lemmy.worldHomemade Pho Bo
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    After having moved to the UK, where Vietnamese food is not so readily available in areas outside of London (and similar) I’ve gotten used to making my own pho.

    The main problem are the herbs as it can be hard to get all the necessary herbs outside of Asian supermarkets.

    It’s a really good dish for special events as well, since few people I’ve met dislike pho.






  • It’s just that I fear that realisation may not filter down.

    You honestly see it a lot in industry. Companies pay $$$ for things that don’t really produce results. Or what they consider to be “results” changes. There are plenty of examples of lowering standards and lowering quality in virtually every industry. The idea that people will realise the trap of AI and reverse is not something I’m enthusiastic about.

    In many ways AI is like pseudoscience. It’s a black box. Things like machine learning don’t tell you “why” it works. It’s just a black box. ChatGPT is just linear regression on language models.

    So the claim that “good science” prevails is patently false. We live in the era of progressive scientific education and yet everywhere we go there is distrust in science, scientific method, critical thinking, etc.

    Do people really think that the average Joe is going to “wake up” to the limitations of AI? I fear not.


  • Part of the problem with AI is that it requires significant skill to understand where AI goes wrong.

    As a basic example, get a language model like ChatGPT to edit writing. It can go very wrong, removing the wrong words, changing the tone, and making mistakes that an unlearned person does not understand. I’ve had foreign students use AI to write letters or responses and often the tone is all off. That’s one thing but the student doesn’t understand that they’ve written a weird letter. Same goes with grammar checking.

    This sets up a dangerous scenario where, to diagnose the results, you need to already have a deep understanding. This is in contrast to non-AI language checkers that are simpler to understand.

    Moreover as you can imagine the danger is that the people who are making decisions about hiring and restructuring may not understand this issue.




  • phario@lemmy.catoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhat do you use Vaseline for?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    22
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Vaseline is just a petrolatum jelly and a lot of creams and moisturisers have this as a component. The problem with Vaseline is that it’s basically pure petrolatum and so blocks the skin completely.

    You rarely want to block the skin completely. The uses some other people noted, like stopping bleeding, is one of those uses.

    The truth is that I rarely recommend Vaseline because of how limited it is on skin use.

    I recommend people look into Aquaphor by Eucerin, which is only about 40% petrolatum and moisturises a bit better. I always travel with a very small container (just a tiny bit) of the stuff. It’s useful if you have any skin conditions (flaked skin, rashes, etc) that you might want to deal with pronto.

    Aveeno (a very good brand for skincare) also make very similar heavy creams.

    Long story short, no, Vaseline is pretty bad choice for skincare because it just blocks all air exchange. There are better choices. You often do want petrolatum…just not 100%.

    Source: lifelong eczema issues