[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 weeks ago

it’s actually designed to slow down typing speed

This is a myth

[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

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.

[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Nerds don’t just want to teach people to drive. They want to teach them about the engine, the drive train, the underlying transportation infrastructure, and how to change their own oil and tires.

Maybe if more people knew how combustion worked and where the gasoline they burn comes from we wouldn't have as much global warming denialism.

Similarly, if people knew how their posts were served though Facebook, what server costs are, and what their revenue model was, it wouldn't come as such a surprise to them that their privacy was being violated.

But I think you're right though. I've given up on trying to convince the general public of literally anything, at least in the US where it's clear the cult of ignorance has soundly won. How can I tell someone that it's better to use an electric car if they're not willing to understand the carbon cycle? How can I tell someone it's better to be vaccinated if they're not willing to understand herd immunity? How can I tell someone that federated social media is better if they're unwilling to understand what federation even is?

[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That's a veritasium clickbait video.

While it's true that no voting system is completely perfect that's a little bit like saying that no one's body is completely perfect, so trying to be healthy is pointless. The efficacy of voting systems can in fact be quantified and compared based on baysian regret, and some are better than others.

That's for single winner elections. Almost any proportional system is going to be better than any single winner system, with the added benefit of eliminating gerrymandering. Presumably the best proportional system available is proportional score voting, but I don't know if there's been rigorous mathematical analysis of that yet.

[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 months ago

I've successfully used a 1050 Ti and a 3060 Ti with Linux Mint and the proprietary drivers (selected through the GUI driver manager). So if anyone reading this is in a similar situation it might be worth it to try that.

[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 3 months ago

I think you may have misread their comment.

[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

You live on the edge of the developed area, with suburb on one side and countryside on the other.

And more homes went up, transforming the area that you're in into more suburb, and cutting you off from nature.

Do you think the people who moved into those houses also wanted to live with suburb on one side and nature on the other? Conversely, how do you think the people living near the previous edge of the suburb felt when your house went up?

Do you see the problem with this kind of development?

[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

While things like merging movements and so on is part of the story, it's not the whole story.

You see, by saying "traffic jams are caused by merging mistakes and so on" it kinda implies that if everyone drove perfectly a highway lane could carry infinitely many cars. In actually a highway lane has a finite capacity determined by the length of the vehicles traveling on it, the length of the gap between them (indirectly determined by how fast they can start and stop), and the speed they're moving.

There are finite limits for gap widths and speed determined by physics and geometry. As the system approaches these limits it becomes less and less able to deal with small disruptions. In other words, as more cars move on a freeway a traffic jam becomes more and more likely. The small disruption which is perceived as the cause was really just the nucleation point for a phase change that the system was already poised to transition through. If it wasn't that event then something else would trigger it.

It is interesting to note that once a highway has transitioned from smooth flow to traffic jam its capacity is massively reduced, which you can see in the graphs in the above link. Another interesting thing to note is that the speed vs volume graph, if you flip it upside down, resembles a cost / demand curve from economics, where volume is the demand and time spent commuting (the inverse of speed) is cost. If you do this you see something quite odd, which is that the curve curls up around itself and goes backwards.

This is less like a normal economic situation (the more people use a resource the more they have to pay, the less people use it the less they have to pay) and more like a massively multiplayer version of the prisoner's dilemma. For awhile the cost increases only slightly with growing demand, until a certain threshold where each additional actor making a transaction has a chance to massively increase the cost for everyone, even if consumption is reduced. Actors can choose to voluntarily pay a higher time cost (wait before getting on the freeway) to avoid this, but again, it's the prisoners dilemma. People can just go, trigger a traffic jam anyway, and you'll still have to sit through it + all the time you waited trying to prevent it.

Self driving cars are often described as a way to eliminate traffic jams, but they don't change this fundamental property of how roadways work. It's true that capacity could potentially be increased somewhat by decreasing the gap between cars, since machines have faster reflexes than humans (though I'm skeptical of how much the gap can really be decreased; is every car going to weigh the same at all times? Is every car going to have tires and brakes in identical conditions? Is the condition of the asphalt going to be identical at all times and across every part of the roadway? All of these things imply a great deal of variability in stopping distance, which implies a wide safety gap.), but the prisoner's dilemma problem remains. The biggest thing that self driving cars could actually do to alleviate traffic jams would be to not enter a highway until traffic volumes were at a safe level. This can also be accomplished with a traffic volume sensor and a stop light on highway on-ramps.

Of course trains, on top of having a way higher capacity than a highway lane, don't suffer from any of this prisoner's dilemma stuff. If a train car is full and you have to wait for the next one that's equivalent to being stopped at a highway on ramp. People can't force their way into a train and make it run slower for everyone (well, unless they do something really crazy like stand in the door and stop the train from leaving).

[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

the production of highly processed foods

Source?

The US congressional research service thinks EU subsidies are more spread out among all types of crops, including fruits and vegetables, whereas US policy focuses more on grains, sugars, dairy, and oil seeds: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46811

That's not a direct subsidy of food processing of course, but the crops the US chooses to support ends up incentivizing it.

And this paper also makes it sound like subsidized crops in the US end up in processed foods: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2530901

So we were talking about supply, not consumption. But regardless, yes americans choose to eat processed foods more on average. So?

Cultural factors are a thing but I think they're used far too often to explain away trends at the population level and the effects of public policy.

[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Maybe their management shouldn't be consolidated but their funding absolutely should be, into a single country-wide fund. The districts should then be paid an equal amount on a per-student basis.

You might say that this doesn't account for differences in the cost of living between different areas. I say that it's all the better that it doesn't, because if the funding is set such that it is sufficient to fund education in the most expensive areas (and it will be because these areas have the most political power), the relatively increased funding will allow the poorer areas to catch up.

[-] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

"For [the 6 measured conditions], the health outcomes of White US citizens living in the 1% and 5% richest counties are better than those of average US citizens but are not consistently better than those of average residents in many other developed countries, suggesting that in the US, even if everyone achieved the health outcomes of White US citizens living in the 1% and 5% richest counties, health indicators would still lag behind those in many other countries."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2774561

Overall the US spends way more per capita on its healthcare than any other country (both in absolute terms and as a percent of GDP), and yet has the worst healthcare outcomes of any developed nation.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2021/aug/mirror-mirror-2021-reflecting-poorly

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/jan/us-health-care-global-perspective-2022

https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low

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drosophila

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