dirtyv (u/dirtyv) - Readit News

dirtyv commented on NASA releases Hubble image taken in new pointing mode science.nasa.gov/missions... · Posted by u/isaacfrond

_mlbt · 2 years ago

This isn’t specific to NASA or Congress. U.S. Government agencies will utilize whatever budget they are given, period.

There is no incentive to be efficient. If there is leftover money in the final fiscal quarter you are highly encouraged to use every penny, even if that means buying new furniture and office supplies that you don’t really need. Any leftover money will be given to someone else and you will receive a smaller budget the following year.

dirtyv · 2 years ago

I've have personally seen instances where it is recommended to go over your budget, so it appears your budget needs to be increased.

dirtyv commented on Apple Vision Pro review wsj.com/tech/apple-vision... · Posted by u/fortran77

tunesmith · 2 years ago

One of the aspects of the device that has been under-realized is that when mirroring your desktop/laptop display to the AVP, you can't break out its applications into different areas. You can't pull them away from the desktop window.

This is one of those things that Apple never claimed was supported, and yet there's something about that behavior that feels like such a natural intuitive implication to the technology that a lot of people feel alarmed or even cheated when they realize it's not possible (yet). It's been funny to watch the various discussion threads as people pop up talking about their shocked realization and disappointed feelings.

Update: I did realize when watching the WSJ video that the "mirrored" display actually appeared to have greater "resolution" (more pixels in height and width) than what she had on her laptop. So that's something.

dirtyv · 2 years ago

Appears possible in theory: https://github.com/saagarjha/Ensemble

dirtyv commented on Sam Bankman-Fried is a feature, not a bug joanwestenberg.com/blog/s... · Posted by u/jlpcsl

injeolmi_love · 2 years ago

Because humans have a natural right to movement, helping slaves is not theft even if an evil social institution falsely claims it is theft. Similarly regarding eugenics, humans have a natural right to reproduce and to live, so someone assisting someone to escape that situation is in the right no matter what society they live in.

Extreme moral relativism like you’re mentioning here is just as wrong as utilitarianism.

It’s not preferable to steal than to lose the planet. Some things really are worse than death, and committing an evil action is wrong no matter what the justification the evildoer makes.

dirtyv · 2 years ago

Evil is not a 100% settled matter. For example, some people believe that saving another person's life if you can is a moral obligation and to not do so would be an evil act. I gather from your refusal to even consider stealing something in order to save the planet you are in the other camp.

dirtyv commented on Automata: "Robots" designed hundreds of years ago [video] youtube.com/watch?v=6Nt7x... · Posted by u/jstanley

Animats · 2 years ago

Great subject, poor video. Too much 'wow' and travel photos, not enough explanation of what's going on in those things.

I've seen the Jaquet-Droz automata[1] in Neuchatel on the one day a month they run them. They're demoed by a watchmaker who understands and maintains them.

The three automata are the Musician, the Artist, and the Writer. These were made between 1764 and 1778. The Musician and the Artist are just playing back pre-recorded motions from a set of cams. To increase the length of the recording up, there's a stack of cams, and after one turn, the stack moves vertically to play the next cams. So there are two clockwork trains taking turns - playout, and cam selection. It's a beautiful piece of work, especially when you realize someone made all those cams by hand, with a file.

The Writer, which writes text with a quill, is programmable. There's the stack of cams that move vertically to switch cams, as with the others. But with the Writer, the cam selection is programmable. There's a programming wheel made of little screw-on sections of different heights, and a supply of cam sections which indicate what letter to print next. It's an encoding with at least 26 different levels, probably more. I'm not sure if letter case is encoded on the main cam.

It's all very compact, fitting inside the bodies of the dolls. There's no huge mechanical box hidden away somewhere. Even today it would be tough to make that mechanism work, although there are still watchmaking companies that could do it.

Better video of the Writer.[2] You can see the cam stack and the programming wheel working.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquet-Droz_automata

[2] https://youtu.be/ux2KW20nqHU

dirtyv · 2 years ago

The entire time I felt as if the narrator was aggressively disgusted at me

dirtyv commented on Sam Bankman-Fried is a feature, not a bug joanwestenberg.com/blog/s... · Posted by u/jlpcsl

injeolmi_love · 2 years ago

Most EA adherents focus on process not outcomes. So from an EA position, the fraud outcome doesn’t matter. Imagine if SBF gambles paid off they might say, and that potential outcome must be probablistically weighed against the negative outcome. Since crypto in most EA is viewed as a sin industry, the negative impact is minor relative to the positive impact of SBF political and charity donations, so even a slim chance of success should be taken.

However EA logic is wrong because utilitarianism is wrong. It doesn’t matter whether stealing and fraud create good outcomes or not. Theft and fraud are evil in themselves irrespective of outcomes. To put it in an extreme sense, even if it would save the planet you should still not steal nor defraud others. The fact that some actions are in essence evil is enshrined in the legal system, is commonly accepted, and philosophically sound.

dirtyv · 2 years ago

Theft or fraud would definitely be preferable to the loss of the planet. Utilitarianism aside, sometimes doing the wrong thing actually is the better thing to do. Anyone who helped slaves escape via the Underground Railroad or smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany would not be considered evil for their actions, and those could easily be construed as theft (in a gross way) or fraud.

dirtyv commented on Ask HN: Would you stop eating meat after AI unlocks communication with animals? · Posted by u/amichail

dirtyv · 2 years ago

I would respect the wishes of any animal that can say "Please don't eat me"

dirtyv commented on The most copied StackOverflow snippet of all time is flawed (2019) programming.guide/worlds-... · Posted by u/Decabytes

dirtyv · 2 years ago

This reminds me of when I was in basic training. The drill sgts would give us new recruits a task that none of us knew how to do, purposefully without guidance, and then leave. One guy would try and start doing it, always the incorrect way, and everyone else would just copy that person.

dirtyv commented on On Robots Killing People schneier.com/blog/archive... · Posted by u/zdw

ReptileMan · 2 years ago

>Example: a truck stops in front of the autodriving car, too quickly for it to stop in time.

That is physically extremely rare - trucks have lower deceleration and higher breaking distance than high performance passenger cars. Also why TF is not the autodriving car keeping distance allowing it to break in time. The focus should be on not getting into shitty situations - and because AI attention is unlimited, we can do all kinds of sensors and also mesh the cards, couldn't be bored and is vigilant 24/7 it should be theoretically possible.

dirtyv · 2 years ago

The specific example is beside the point. There are any number of events that can happen outside of a driver's control, human or computer, that could cause this or a similar predicament, e.g. the truck could have just changed lanes abruptly without signaling

dirtyv commented on New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable gamehistory.org/87percent... · Posted by u/coldpie

Freedom2 · 2 years ago

I've read House of Leaves multiple times, a few in paper and a few on my Kindle. There was no discernable difference in enjoyment between the two formats - your conclusion is false.

dirtyv · 2 years ago

If you only read it on Kindle you would miss out on the whole section where the text is printed in boxes that are mirrored on opposite sides of the page. On that note, where did you even find a Kindle version?

dirtyv commented on Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work? resobscura.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/benbreen

dirtyv · 2 years ago

Whenever you create any kind of art, be it a story, a picture, or whatever, I would argue you reveal something about yourself. I remember reading about Philippe Halsman, a photographer who did this series of portraits featuring celebrities jumping. His theory was that when his subjects were in the air they were so preoccupied that they would inadvertently let their guard down and let their true selves out. He did a portrait of Marilyn Monroe like this and afterwards when he told her his reasoning behind it she was so mortified she refused to ever work with him again