MeetMeAtTheMovies [they/them]

I’ve started taking a medication that completely changed my life and it felt like this. Then I did it with another one. And another one. Now I’m working on a fourth one.

Turns out there was a lot wrong with me.

It’s a root vegetable that only exists in the blockchain

Never thought of the keys in the tote trick. Thanks!

Could you point me to some reading on uses of AI for disabled people? I’m familiar with a variety of aids and the general idea of “if it looks useless, it’s not for you to use”. I’m just not familiar with what the use cases are.

if AI can exist, it will inevitably exist

Unrelated to the question of ableism, this specifically logic that’s pushed by tech companies in general, that their decisions were inevitable and therefore there is no point in questioning them.

Look at how modern LLMs work. They’re trained in large data centers owned by private companies using giant corpuses of data that were largely obtained without the permission or knowledge of the people who created it. Then, to use them, the weights are loaded into an amount of memory that’s out of reach for most consumer desktops and users must call into the LLM using an API. Working memory of a conversation doesn’t persist in between messages or tool calls, so the entire history must be loaded into its context window on every call. In other words, all the “learning” for these models must take place up front in training and outside of taking context into account, it doesn’t actually adjust to learn new things about the world. There are workarounds for this, of course, to simulate the experience of interacting with something that can learn, but they have their limitations and aren’t reliable yet. I could go on. Running probabilistic process on deterministic hardware is an area that we may see more work on soon.

Every single step of that description had alternatives that would be more likely to be chosen outside of a capitalist system. They could be more eco friendly. They could be more efficient. They could be more powerful and learn from your interactions in way that persists. And a lot of these changes would delay the exposure of LLMs to the general public and see them spending longer in academia. But that would be okay because we wouldn’t have the profit motive at the center of this inflating a giant bubble that’s poised to pop and flatten the economy. Bottom line is this stuff was pushed out and hyped up well before it was ready and well before it was able to be scaled up ethically and with the working class in mind. None of this was inevitable.

does not cause gonorrhea

[citation needed]

bigotry is out of step with British values

Is that so, TERF island?

The chicken at BK just isn’t as good. Chick fil a is more tender and better seasoned. I’d argue a better texture overall. Better sauces as well imo.

Isn’t there a difference between “the most squares fit into a square” and “a collection of squares optimized for maximum small-square area inside of a larger square”? If there’s a difference in solutions, what would the solution for the latter actually be?

Mathematicians halp plz

The most competent white collar workers I know use exclamation points to the near exclusion of all other pronunciation. This is wild

According to the APA website, it’s more about accessibility and the cost of printing color vs grayscale

https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/tables-figures/colors

God forbid women have hobbies.

Tall back pain person here. Gonna try this

Okay so sounds can be broken down into individual tones called sine waves. The math that lets us do this doesn’t care about how tonal or noisy the sound is. It takes arbitrary input. However, human brains and ears (as well as those of many other creatures) seem to optimize for tonality of some type.

The simplified explanation is that we like when the frequencies of the tones that make up a sound are in whole number ratios (the harmonic series). However, there’s a tolerance for frequencies which are close to those ratios but not perfect. And when harmonics don’t fall perfectly within the harmonic series, we can instead prefer intervals between notes which are slightly “out of tune” compared to what the harmonic series would dictate. For instruments like strings and woodwinds where the vibration of the air happens along a more or less straight line, the harmonics tend to be close enough to the harmonic series for this not to matter a ton. But for instruments with different resonant features (bells are a common example), the effects of this are more pronounced.

There is also some math which makes tuning instruments solely to the harmonic series impractical. This combined with the tolerance for consonance I mentioned before has led to a rich sea of different traditions which play around with tuning in different ways. The western tradition alone has a long history with how a twelve note chromatic scale ought to be tuned. It turns out that equally diving the octave into twelve notes just so happens to be a good approximation of a lot of harmonic series intervals, but some intervals are less perfect than others. It’s all a series of compromises.

And it turns out that there’s a defining feature of this cluster of symptoms: a lack of attention (and hyperactivity)

Except hyperactivity is not a defining feature of the cluster. This belief, in fact, has historically biased practitioners against correctly diagnosing women with ADHD because ADHD tends to present differently in women. And to call the relationship of a person with ADHD to their attention a “lack” is a massive oversimplification. Sometimes we have too much attention and hyperfocus on a single thing for what neurotypical people consider an unusual amount of time. That’s just as much a part of my ADHD as are the moments where I “lack” attention. The defining feature is a disorder in dopamine regulation.