saturnV's recent activity

  1. Comment on Tildes Video Thread in ~misc

  2. Comment on An appeal to the community for non-algorithmic recommendations in ~talk

    saturnV
    Link
    an article about irving finkel, a really interesting assyriologist (I don't know quite how to describe him). (warning, this is on substack, but there are also some quite good videos on the british...

    an article about irving finkel, a really interesting assyriologist (I don't know quite how to describe him). (warning, this is on substack, but there are also some quite good videos on the british museum youtube channel and a bunch of articles about him if you want alternatives)

    square wheels is a personal website that I find beautiful, with some cool stories as well!

    marginalia search engine is an alternative small-web search engine optimised for finding interesting, non-seo'd links which are harder to find in google/bing/etc.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Cancelled Powerpuff live-action reboot trailer in ~tv

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    these got dmca'd as well btw

    these got dmca'd as well btw

  4. Comment on Sunday morning musings no. 1. Does anyone really know what’s happening in Ukraine? in ~society

    saturnV
    Link
    Oh also to answer the real q Right now my impression is that movement of the front lines has stalled for a while and it's just a meat-grinder, with worse absolute losses on the russian side but...

    Oh also to answer the real q

    what’s your narrative about the war, and what sources of information are you drawing upon?

    Right now my impression is that movement of the front lines has stalled for a while and it's just a meat-grinder, with worse absolute losses on the russian side but similar/worse per capita on ukrainian.

    Sources I read are mostly the FT and the Economist because I find them in general to be reliable sources of analysis and get them for free through institutional subscriptions, though I think Reuters and BBC are both good as well

    5 votes

  5. Comment on Sunday morning musings no. 1. Does anyone really know what’s happening in Ukraine? in ~society

    saturnV
    Link
    From another outsider just trying to follow the news, my understanding is: No strong consensus, though I think lots of this is predicated upon how good of a deal they might expect No idea, but...
    • Exemplary

    From another outsider just trying to follow the news, my understanding is:

    1. No strong consensus, though I think lots of this is predicated upon how good of a deal they might expect
    2. No idea, but ukraine used to be very corrupt and even after recent big anti-corruption efforts it'd be surprising if there wasn't any, especially given how big the incentives are. I mean if you search any major military + "corruption" you're going to find something online, the important thing is in how much this is occuring. Also, not really sure how corruption would change the pro-ukraine moral argument.
    3. If they're talking about azov batallion, they're sort of hard to understand, but have been talked about a lot and are not a secret. They are also relatively small (wikipedia estimates 1000 troops compared to >1M in active service in Ukraine) compared to how much they're talked about IMO
    4. This doesn't seem very plausible to me given how relatively dovish Biden was (afraid of escalation, slow to send higher-end weapons) and zelensky's refusal to leave kyiv during invasion, but obviously impossible to falsify. Also I have no idea what "dealing with Russia" is meant to entail given the invasion was unprompted (Putin denying it was going to happen till it started), and there were already negotiations wrt 2014- onwards invasion of Donbas
    5. Yes, it is true to a degree that russia has weathered sanctions better than expected (this is mostly due to having very good central bankers among other things), but many analysts think that their economy is basically being propped up by massive gov. spending and is at risk of collapse in the long term.
    6. Can't comment on this, don't really follow this kind of thing that much. The one thing I'll say is that lots of western mil-tech makes assumptions that don't hold in ukraine (i.e. total air superiority) and that there are also lots of issues where they are limited by how many i.e. rockets they can obtain, leading to rationing which also doesn't help. Also, drone warfare seems to be fairly dominant which there isn't much pre-existing mil-tech designed around so is all just being hacked together on both sides.
    7. Idk about this, it's not being shouted from the rooftops but it's not hidden. Ukrainian government, US, UK, ISW (think tank), all output their own (fairly similar within like 10%-ish iirc) estimates. It's just not particularly news-worthy in general I think.
      Bonus: LOL at the bellingcat rumours, those are totally unfounded and are just cope (mostly from people who don't like seeing the conclusions they reach)
    24 votes

  6. Comment on How artificial intelligence can make board games better in ~comp

    saturnV
    Link
    Interesting application of non-LLM based AI (it uses monte carlo tree search), their website is https://www.tabletoprnd.co.uk/

    Interesting application of non-LLM based AI (it uses monte carlo tree search), their website is https://www.tabletoprnd.co.uk/

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Norway's sovereign wealth fund should let other institutions and perhaps even ordinary people invest in the fund in ~finance

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    part of the argument in the article is that they would have lower fees, though I'm not sure how much of a difference a few basis points makes

    part of the argument in the article is that they would have lower fees, though I'm not sure how much of a difference a few basis points makes

    5 votes

  9. Comment on Today I learned that Bash has hashmaps in ~comp

    saturnV
    Link
    speaking of unexpected places where hashmaps are built-in, POSIX C has them

    speaking of unexpected places where hashmaps are built-in, POSIX C has them

    2 votes

  10. Comment on When there’s no school counselor, there’s a bot in ~tech

    saturnV
    Link
    I think the fact that so many young people already use LLMs through services like character.ai or just "vanilla" chatGPT to already do something like this devalues the service (though the issues...

    I think the fact that so many young people already use LLMs through services like character.ai or just "vanilla" chatGPT to already do something like this devalues the service (though the issues are just as bad, maybe worse in some ways for going through 3rd party websites due to not being tied into safety systems, lack of oversight)

  11. Comment on When there’s no school counselor, there’s a bot in ~tech

    saturnV
    (edited )
    Link
    IMO this intuitively feels very wrong, wondering what other people here think? I'm not sure how much of my reasoning about this is just changing norms or something, but LLMs pretending to be human...

    IMO this intuitively feels very wrong, wondering what other people here think? I'm not sure how much of my reasoning about this is just changing norms or something, but LLMs pretending to be human always feels like it's crossing a boundary, and the designers are clearly trying to make it as indistinguishable as possible, not just ambiguous like the chatbots are (where the tells are still fairly obvious). Also, the implied privacy of a texting conversation which is actually being monitored, while obviously useful for the intended purpose, seems not great to me in terms of violating the implicit trust in normal conversations.

    I do still think that on balance LLMs (not necessarily this kind of implementation, something running on-device would be ideal) are probably better than not having a counsellor, but obviously if this became popular it would encourage lowering funding to actual human counsellors, further exacerbating the issue.

    18 votes

  13. Comment on TIFF to DNG converter in ~comp

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    ah thanks makes sense

    ah thanks makes sense

    2 votes

  14. Comment on TIFF to DNG converter in ~comp

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    Normally for this sort of thing I use imagemagick, I just checked with magick identify -list format and it seems to support both TIFF and DNG so it should be able to convert between the two

    Normally for this sort of thing I use imagemagick, I just checked with magick identify -list format and it seems to support both TIFF and DNG so it should be able to convert between the two

    3 votes

  15. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    saturnV
    Link
    Working through cryptopals, attempted it a few years ago but gave up fairly early, it feels a lot more easy now with a bit more programming experience and maths knowledge, definitely a really fun...

    Working through cryptopals, attempted it a few years ago but gave up fairly early, it feels a lot more easy now with a bit more programming experience and maths knowledge, definitely a really fun thing to learn about crypto pitfalls! I was also helped by using cryptohack for a bit which is also fun, just a different style of challenge and a bit more handholdy, though covering more content (including modern post quantum stuff) which is nice

    4 votes

  16. Comment on Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget in ~comp

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    this article is relatively old now (LLM stuff moves frighteningly fast) but I'd assume still quite accurate. tl;dr: "The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), a powerful internet overseer, has...

    this article is relatively old now (LLM stuff moves frighteningly fast) but I'd assume still quite accurate. tl;dr:
    "The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), a powerful internet overseer, has forced large tech companies and AI start-ups including ByteDance, Alibaba, Moonshot and 01.AI to take part in a mandatory government review of their AI models, according to multiple people involved in the process."

    2 votes

  17. Comment on What are some traditional internet forums that you still use? in ~tech

  18. Comment on US DeepSeek users could face million-dollar fine and prison time under proposed bill in ~society

    saturnV
    Link
    "could" is doing a lot of work here, the bill has 0 chance of passing and is not seriously designed to be anything more than a stunt, so why let it attract attention?

    "could" is doing a lot of work here, the bill has 0 chance of passing and is not seriously designed to be anything more than a stunt, so why let it attract attention?

    15 votes

  19. Comment on Book recommendations for regular people living through fascist/authoritarian regimes? in ~books

  20. Comment on DeepSeek’s safety guardrails failed every test researchers threw at its AI chatbot in ~tech

    saturnV
    Link Parent
    llamafiles do this! They also use a really cool trick to be platform agnostic

    You technically could wrap the weights in a binary-only executable

    llamafiles do this!
    They also use a really cool trick to be platform agnostic

    5 votes