unkz's recent activity

  1. Comment on Giant sinkhole in Chilean mining town haunts residents, three years on in ~enviro

  3. Comment on DoorDash’s new delivery robot rolls out into the big, cruel world in ~tech

    unkz
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    Pretty cute robots. I do wonder a little about how disruptive this will be economically, and how much this sort of technology is going to move the needle towards more serious contemplation of...

    Pretty cute robots. I do wonder a little about how disruptive this will be economically, and how much this sort of technology is going to move the needle towards more serious contemplation of Universal Basic Income.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on Donald Trump says Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to US-sponsored Gaza peace proposal in ~society

    unkz
    Link
    Quite the callback to the Trump plan for Ukraine/Russia peace. Hey, why doesn’t one side accept unconditional surrender?

    Quite the callback to the Trump plan for Ukraine/Russia peace. Hey, why doesn’t one side accept unconditional surrender?

    4 votes

  6. Comment on Donald Trump says Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to US-sponsored Gaza peace proposal in ~society

    unkz
    Link Parent
    Doesn’t it call for complete disarmament of Hamas? I think that’s a deal breaker — I have a very hard time picturing Hamas ever agreeing to something that goes against the fundamental nature and...

    Doesn’t it call for complete disarmament of Hamas? I think that’s a deal breaker — I have a very hard time picturing Hamas ever agreeing to something that goes against the fundamental nature and goal of Hamas.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on Donald Trump suggests using ‘dangerous’ US cities as ‘training grounds’ for military in ~society

    unkz
    Link Parent
    I am beginning to be a bit concerned about military troops on the ground interfering with that election and intimidating voters though. Normalizing troops doing things, such as “enforcing”...

    So the proper place for a "coup" is still at the ballot box.

    I am beginning to be a bit concerned about military troops on the ground interfering with that election and intimidating voters though. Normalizing troops doing things, such as “enforcing” electoral laws or “protecting” the voting process is where is see this going.

    7 votes

  9. Comment on Scientists unlock secret to Venus flytrap’s hair-trigger response in ~science

    unkz
    Link
    Interesting research on Venus flytraps. The short version is, it uses calcium ion concentrations as a form of memory to determine how many stimuli it has received which in turn determines when it...

    Interesting research on Venus flytraps. The short version is, it uses calcium ion concentrations as a form of memory to determine how many stimuli it has received which in turn determines when it will shut (2 stimuli) and when it will start trying to digest a bug (5 stimuli).

    It goes into more detail about genetically engineering variants of the plants to glow green in response to calcium and knockout plants that disable the signal channel and other details.

    4 votes

  11. Comment on US President Donald Trump shares seemingly AI video amplifying 'medbed' conspiracy theory in ~society

    unkz
    Link
    Slightly surprised nobody posted this one. It’s pretty weird, but with a likely simple explanation. My assumption is he is a senile old man who saw his face and Lara Trump’s face and thought he...

    Slightly surprised nobody posted this one. It’s pretty weird, but with a likely simple explanation.

    My assumption is he is a senile old man who saw his face and Lara Trump’s face and thought he would do himself and her a favour by rebroadcasting it without realizing that it was a deepfake of himself. It would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

    I mean it’s also kind of funny, but still.

    17 votes

  13. Comment on British Columbia Premier David Eby announces new Prince George, Surrey involuntary care facilities in ~health.mental

    unkz
    Link Parent
    I do wonder what the work environment is going to be like in these facilities. Like today, the people here are making things hard for health workers all over the province. How much harder will it...

    I do wonder what the work environment is going to be like in these facilities. Like today, the people here are making things hard for health workers all over the province. How much harder will it be with them all in one place?

    Maybe there are provisions for the staff to cycle out back to regular hospitals for their own mental health? I had a friend who was a prison nurse and she burned out in about a year. I would imagine this facility will have similar challenges.

    2 votes

  14. Comment on British Columbia Premier David Eby announces new Prince George, Surrey involuntary care facilities in ~health.mental

    unkz
    Link
    100 beds being opened in the province for involuntary mental health related custodial care. Rather local news, but maybe of general interest as the topic of asylums is in the news. I can see the...

    100 beds being opened in the province for involuntary mental health related custodial care.

    Rather local news, but maybe of general interest as the topic of asylums is in the news.

    I can see the potential dangers under certain administrations, where trans people being labelled as mentally defective, or indeed just anyone who disagrees with Trump.

    On the other hand, the community I live in has a significant number of dangerous mentally ill people living on the street who are uninterested in voluntary treatment. I don't know what other options are available to deal with this kind of problem.

    16 votes

  16. Comment on Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted by a federal grand jury, an extraordinary escalation in US President Donald Trump’s effort to prosecute his political enemies in ~society

    unkz
    Link Parent
    Comey or Trump? Comey is how we ended up here to begin with when he blew up Hillary’s campaign.

    Comey or Trump? Comey is how we ended up here to begin with when he blew up Hillary’s campaign.

    10 votes

  17. Comment on Announcing the seventh annual Tildes' Make Something Month (Timasomo)! in ~tildes

    unkz
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    You’ve actually inspired me to teach my kid how to make a. PICO-8 game. It’ll be a good excuse to get some Lua practise too.

    You’ve actually inspired me to teach my kid how to make a. PICO-8 game. It’ll be a good excuse to get some Lua practise too.

    4 votes

  18. Comment on British AI startup beats humans in international forecasting in ~tech

    unkz
    Link Parent
    I think there is some confusion out there stemming from the true fact that an LLM produces a vector that a sampler can interpret as a probability distribution and the mistaken idea that LLMs are...

    I think there is some confusion out there stemming from

    • the true fact that an LLM produces a vector that a sampler can interpret as a probability distribution and
    • the mistaken idea that LLMs are effectively massive full context Markov chains that provide a probability distribution that matches the training corpus
    2 votes

  19. Comment on British AI startup beats humans in international forecasting in ~tech

    unkz
    Link Parent
    They have been doing a quarterly cup competition since 2023. This latest one is just a slightly different format (summer rather than Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4) , so it’s the “first” of the new format. There’s...

    Maybe he meant something else, no clue

    They have been doing a quarterly cup competition since 2023. This latest one is just a slightly different format (summer rather than Q1/Q2/Q3/Q4) , so it’s the “first” of the new format. There’s absolutely nothing incorrect about any of the statements.

    https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/17700/quarterly-cup-tournament-q1-2025/

    3 votes

  20. Comment on United Kingdom, Australia and Canada officially recognize a Palestinian state in ~society

    unkz
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    It's a cute rhetorical trick, but I don't think your edit accurately accounts for Israel's actions because Israel and Hamas are not symmetric players. In my view, Israel basically has two goals:...

    It's a cute rhetorical trick, but I don't think your edit accurately accounts for Israel's actions because Israel and Hamas are not symmetric players. In my view, Israel basically has two goals:

    • prolong the status quo by stalling and false negotiations until no living person in Palestine has a personal claim to east Jerusalem or any of the illegally occupied territories of Palestine by having lived there pre-Six-Day War.
    • kill Hamas and all other armed resistance factions (Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa, etc), to a level where they put up nominal resistance but aren’t a genuine security threat
    2 votes