TemulentTeatotaler's recent activity
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Comment on Is Tildes protected from malicious actors, aka paid trolls, aka bots? in ~tildes
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Comment on Make new friends here! in ~life
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentI'm not sure how quick physics gets outdated and it's been some years since I listened so I can't say for certain, but I'd say it's probably worth trying? Their 80ish episodes is a decent amount...I'm not sure how quick physics gets outdated and it's been some years since I listened so I can't say for certain, but I'd say it's probably worth trying? Their 80ish episodes is a decent amount of content.
The vibe was very familiar to having smart friends in a different field talking about their interests. Definitely not as polished as something like a 3blue1brown, but for me personally I look for podcasts to be enjoyable and less rigorous since I'm not always listening attentively.
And sometimes the eccentricities make it memorable! I'll never not think about the universe, myself, and my eyes being made of bees when thinking about vacuum energy.
I might have found it from the also-dead-but-enjoyable Weekly Weinersmith, by Zach (of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cartoons fame) and his wife. From what I recall they did a decent amount of metascience discussion, and between that and the Bad Ad-hoc Hypothesis Festival I got an appreciation for the Weinersmith.
Same with SGU (the first podcast I ran into?), long time appreciator of their mission. It was probably a bit formative for me since I found them fairly young and had a parent into all manner of woo (irridology, reflexology, prophetic dreams, horoscopes, etc.).
Keeping the trend, a last recommendation if you're interested in neuroscience would be Brain Science Podcast.
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Comment on Make new friends here! in ~life
TemulentTeatotaler (edited )Link ParentIf you like physics and science podcasts with a bit of humor you might enjoy The Titanium Physicists? The host is a physicist and has a bunch of others he invites on to have a conversational...If you like physics and science podcasts with a bit of humor you might enjoy The Titanium Physicists? The host is a physicist and has a bunch of others he invites on to have a conversational discussion of something with the guest lay person.
Also, haven't tried it out myself, but Card Forge has a mode that is similar to the single-player Shandalar for MtG with support for modern cards.
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Comment on Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses in ~enviro
TemulentTeatotaler (edited )Link ParentThey talk about some of that in the sentence right before/after what you quoted: It would be great if they covered training costs, but in their report they're upfront about it being a subject for...They talk about some of that in the sentence right before/after what you quoted:
TPUs...account for just 58% of the total electricity demand of 0.24 watt-hours. Another large portion of the energy is used by equipment needed to support AI-specific hardware: The host machine’s CPU and memory account for another 25% of the total energy used. There’s also backup equipment needed in case something fails—these idle machines account for 10% of the total. The final 8% is from overhead associated with running a data center, including cooling and power conversion.
It would be great if they covered training costs, but in their report they're upfront about it being a subject for future research. This was just a dive into the average person's per-query in-situ impact (no networking/end-user device/training/data storage considered) and how it changed over a year.
It would also be nice to have the mean use or group patterns of use, but the median is how you'd represent the average use. Heavy users or outliers and net consumption are all important, but the average use is the sort of thing that gives some frame of reference on whether me trying to remember some philosophy based on getting lost in a city with a more semantic LLM search is killing the planet (or viable for Google).
The median query of 12 months ago is likely pretty similar to the current ones, and it's nice to see there was a 33x improvement in those, which came down to a "23x reduction from model improvements, and a 1.4x reduction from improved machine utilization", with the improvements from stuff like mixture-of-experts for only using a subset of a model or the distillation of larger models DeepSeek showed off.
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Comment on AI is a mass-delusion event in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler (edited )Link ParentSimpler NNs or LLMs fail to do certain tasks which become possible not because of a significant change in approach but from a change in size. GPT-2 failed at arithmetic, reasoning, and...Simpler NNs or LLMs fail to do certain tasks which become possible not because of a significant change in approach but from a change in size. GPT-2 failed at arithmetic, reasoning, and translation, and couldn't do much in the way of in-context learning. At the time it might have been reasonable to say maybe they never would be able to do something like understand a joke [not trained on], or be able to do novel math olympiad problems.
*An old talk by Peter Norvig on moving into the "data paradigm" of CS mentioned a test of 5 algorithms for finding where sentences ended in Chinese. The point he wanted to drive home was that the algorithm that had performed worst when trained on (iirc) one million examples had become the best with 100 million, with the former #1 becoming the 3rd best.
To go a different route, hominin evolution had a period of relatively rapid expansion of the prefrontal cortex, roughly tripling its size over ~2 million years. A simplistic explanation of this is that the brain wrinkled for surface area and got as many cortical minicolumns--the repeating units of the neocortex-- as it could.
So in our own history you can make a case that after a couple hundred million years of relative stagnation what ended up giving us the capacity for culture, more abstract thought, and the rest of what separates us from australopithecines was a "neural net big enough."
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Comment on How many strings must you string from string cheese in order for it to be considered string cheese and not just eating a stick of mozzarella? in ~food
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentIs string cheese an array with homogeneous elements or just a char cuterie?Is string cheese an array with homogeneous elements or just a char cuterie?
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of June 23 in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentSome places don't let you, ala sore loser laws. New York and Conneticut are apparently the only two places that currently don't prevent this:Some places don't let you, ala sore loser laws.
...a sore loser law is a law prohibiting the loser in a primary election from then running as an independent or representing another political party in the general election, thus basically blocking them from appearing on the general election ballot
New York and Conneticut are apparently the only two places that currently don't prevent this:
Some states accomplish the same goal by having simultaneous registration dates for the primary and the general election. Only the states of Connecticut and New York have neither a sore loser law nor simultaneous registration deadlines.
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentStochastic terrorism works like global warming. You can't say that any particular storm was due to increasing temperature, but it's expected that extreme weather events will increase.Stochastic terrorism works like global warming. You can't say that any particular storm was due to increasing temperature, but it's expected that extreme weather events will increase.
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Comment on Necessities are expensive, luxuries are cheap in ~finance
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentMen's enrollment relative to women has trended down, but completion and enrollment in college has trended upwards for men. ~25% of men and women had a bachelors in 1995, but in 2024 that was 37%...Men's enrollment relative to women has trended down, but completion and enrollment in college has trended upwards for men. ~25% of men and women had a bachelors in 1995, but in 2024 that was 37% of men and 47% of women.
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Comment on Baking edgeless brownies from the inside out in ~food
TemulentTeatotaler (edited )Link ParentIf your pan can't imprison a half-bull monument to your hubris I don't think you're serious about making quality brownies.- Exemplary
If your pan can't imprison a half-bull monument to your hubris I don't think you're serious about making quality brownies.
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Comment on Interview with Marc Andreessen on Silicon Valley and US politics in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentI'd call it fanfic, but it's clearly used as a diminuitive there. If you don't want to invoke images of amateur "highschool dropout" writers borrowing existing properties--often primarily for...I'd call it fanfic, but it's clearly used as a diminuitive there. If you don't want to invoke images of amateur "highschool dropout" writers borrowing existing properties--often primarily for self-gratification or shipping purposes-- there are plenty of ways of avoiding that..
You might call Atwood's The Penelopiad fanfic, or Wide Sargasso Sea fanfic of Jane Eyre but calling them literary retellings feels more respectul or accurate. Ecclesiastes is fanfic in the Christverse but wisdom literature better explains it.
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Comment on According to online poll, calls for genocide have migrated from the margins to the mainstream in Israel in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentThe poll appears to be conducted on behalf of Penn State's Tamir Sorek by an Israeli polling firm, Geocartography: I haven't looked any further than that, but it is always worth being cautious...The poll appears to be conducted on behalf of Penn State's Tamir Sorek by an Israeli polling firm, Geocartography:
a recent poll I commissioned through the Israeli polling firm Geocartography.
In the representative sample of Jewish Israelis who were polled from March 10-11, 2025, 82% supported the forced expulsion of Gaza’s population to other countries, while 56% endorsed the expulsion of Israel’s Arab citizens. By comparison, according to a 2003 poll, only 46% supported the “transfer of Palestinian residents of the occupied territories,” and just 31% supported the “transfer of Israel’s Arab citizens.”
I haven't looked any further than that, but it is always worth being cautious about polls. One that comes to mind was YouGov finding shocking levels of holocaust denialism in the youth:
20% of people under 30 strongly agree or tend to agree that the Holocaust it is a myth, compared to fewer than 1% of people 65 and older.
...which was followed by Pew pointing out online opt-in polls can be trash, and that no such trend existed in their ATP.
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Comment on China’s superstition boom in ~life
TemulentTeatotaler (edited )Link ParentAt least for religion the Taiping rebellion seems like relevant context, though it's hard for me to appreciate how much something like 20-30 million dying under a rebellion of a syncretic brother...At least for religion the Taiping rebellion seems like relevant context, though it's hard for me to appreciate how much something like 20-30 million dying under a rebellion of a syncretic brother of Christ lingers in a cultural consciousness after a century or so.
If I remember right, the CCP did clamp down on things like Confucianism but they've since leaned into it. They clamped down on I Ching, feng shui, and religions, but promoted a variety of superstitious/pseudoscientific Traditional Chinese Medicine claims.
An example that comes to mind of top-down superstition is the Beijing Olympics starting at 8:08:08 p.m. on 8/8/2008, for the lucky "8" theme (or maybe they're just big 808 fans?).
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Comment on Under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., COVID shots will only be available to people 65+, high-risk groups in the US in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler LinkHere's a link if anyone wants to leave a comment on the changes, ending in 2 days.- Exemplary
Here's a link if anyone wants to leave a comment on the changes, ending in 2 days.
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Comment on We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentI'm not very informed, but I was under the impression a lot of the reactor designs (like China's thorium / molten salt reactor) were pretty resistant to things going wrong. Not that they shouldn't...I'm not very informed, but I was under the impression a lot of the reactor designs (like China's thorium / molten salt reactor) were pretty resistant to things going wrong. Not that they shouldn't also have a lot of oversight.
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Comment on What historic unsolved mysteries do you want solved? in ~talk
TemulentTeatotaler (edited )LinkSpring-heeled Jack. There are many rumors and legends, but the one thing people can't deny is his vertical. Possibly explained in Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden: Gaiden. The story behind various...Spring-heeled Jack. There are many rumors and legends, but the one thing people can't deny is his vertical. Possibly explained in Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden: Gaiden.
The story behind various dancing manias.
The circumstances of different initial zoonotic spillover events, and whether we gave human pox to anything?
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Comment on <deleted topic> in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentNot sure whether this or replacing JAGs who might be roadblocks was worse.Not sure whether this or replacing JAGs who might be roadblocks was worse.
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Comment on United Auto Workers statement: In a victory for autoworkers, auto tariffs mark the beginning of the end of NAFTA and the “free trade” disaster in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentTo add some numbers, the rate of suicide in the U.S. per 100k is ~19 for 25-64 year olds, and 13.5 for 15-24 year olds. China went from a high rate of ~23.2 in 1990-1995 to a present? 9.17. At the...To add some numbers, the rate of suicide in the U.S. per 100k is ~19 for 25-64 year olds, and 13.5 for 15-24 year olds.
China went from a high rate of ~23.2 in 1990-1995 to a present? 9.17.
At the height of the suicides in Foxconn (2010) there were 15 reported with 930k workers, giving ~1.61/100k, which may be skewed by information I'm missing, but probably not enough to make up for the 10x rate the US has.
Suicide has components of hopelessness, means, and isolation that you aren't going to usually get in a factory town. You can be miserable or mistreated and not suicidal. The "no-suicide pledge", nets, or "I <3 Foxconn" shirts and severity of the act made it the hot topic but the suicide rate was relatively low.
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Comment on NaNoWriMo officially shutting down in ~creative
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentLooks like a municipal liason?Looks like a municipal liason?
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Comment on Liberal projected to win Wisconsin Supreme Court race in blow to Donald Trump in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentHere's the ACLU fact sheet on it from 2021. I think there's also been a few GOP members who've openly said the laws were about suppressing votes. Even if photo ID requirements aren't onerous I...Here's the ACLU fact sheet on it from 2021. I think there's also been a few GOP members who've openly said the laws were about suppressing votes.
Even if photo ID requirements aren't onerous I think it's important to keep the discussion about making elections secure, easy, and affordable, instead of playing defense for some hypothetical less "together" or invested voter. If voter ID laws fix a non-problem and they make elections slower and more expensive why do it?
It can be hard to defend the person who let their license lapse or who'd drop off a ballot but wouldn't spend the 1/2/etc. hours in line I'm happy to... it's their civic duty, afterall! Yet we know a 1-click-to-buy patent made Amazon billions, and many voters are lazy, disenfranchised, barely literate, or all sorts of other "personal failings" that can be used to suppress votes, without the sympathy invoked by the homebound or homeless. Voter ID laws should be required to justify themselves, not "lazy" voters.
Any reputable shark tourism company will have tongue sheeths on hand to protect you from abrasive dermal denticles. Jacques Cousteau was an early success story with his aqua-tongue.