djtango (u/djtango) - Readit News

djtango commented on Qwen3-Omni-Flash-2025-12-01：a next-generation native multimodal large model qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3-omn... · Posted by u/pretext

potatoman22 · 3 days ago

From what I can tell, their official chat site doesn't have a native audio -> audio model yet. I like to test this through homophones (e.g. record and record) and asking it to change its pitch or produce sounds.

djtango · 3 days ago

Is record a homophone? At least in the UK we use different pronunciations for the meanings. Re-cord for the verb, rec-ord for the noun.

djtango commented on Italy's longest-serving barista reflects on six decades behind the counter reuters.com/lifestyle/cul... · Posted by u/NaOH

Yiin · 4 days ago

many people living simple fulfilling lives die much earlier, it's more an exception than the rule (I don't argue that those things doesn't help, just that they alone is not the reason for long healthy life)

djtango · 4 days ago

I have a pet theory that classical musicians overindex on longevity, and I believe that the fulfilment and community aspects are contributors to their longevity.

No evidence and probably full of bias but seems intuitive enough

djtango commented on The past was not that cute juliawise.net/the-past-wa... · Posted by u/mhb

SpicyLemonZest · 5 days ago

Again, I’m sympathetic to some arguments against unnecessary synthetic products in the food chain. I’m just not sure how you get to the intuition that packing chickens into feces is bad but packing plants into feces is perfectly OK.

djtango · 5 days ago

Because they're not equivalent, in one system there are inbuilt mechanisms to recycle and incorporate feces into nutrients. In the other there is no such system and instead the build up of urea(?) gets so severe it ends up burning off the feet of the chickens who have no means of vacating from their filth.

djtango commented on The past was not that cute juliawise.net/the-past-wa... · Posted by u/mhb

SpicyLemonZest · 6 days ago

I am. I think that organic farming is based around the same kind of fake nostalgia discussed upthread, and there's really no coherent reason to avoid chemical fertilizer. Manure contributes nothing better other than a pile of contaminants and pathogens. (I'm more sympathetic to people who want to avoid herbicides, even if the best evidence is that they're safe.)

Even if you like modern organic farming, it's carefully regulated to control the risks and environmental costs of using crap. The US National Organic Program (https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/5006.pdf), for example, requires 90-120 days between the application of raw manure and harvest; only properly pasteurized manure can be used in the months before harvest.

djtango · 6 days ago

So when I was a chemist at university I saw one of those silly chain mail claims that cigarettes have polonium 210 in them. I thought "that's dumb" let me fact check that; it turns out that phosphates enrich the soil with radionuclides and radon in the soil enters plants and decays to Po210.

So actually yes I am generally in favour of archaic methods for making food because our biochemistry and the environment has had a lot longer to find equilibrium with non-synthetic solutions.

That isn't to say that we should throw away science and give up 200 years of progress on hygiene, but I also don't believe that packing chickens into their own feces then pumping them with antibiotics and washing them in chlorine is all that great either.

Maybe this solves for food scarcity and I'm all for that being available to other people but I'm perfectly willing to pay a premium on alternatives methods that eschew the use of synthetic products in my food chain.

djtango commented on The past was not that cute juliawise.net/the-past-wa... · Posted by u/mhb

nradov · 7 days ago

Most of the goods and services in the past were total crap, unless you were wealthy enough to afford the really good stuff. People have distorted memories of what things used to be like. Or they're fooled by survivorship bias: only the best old stuff is still around while everything else is in a landfill.

djtango · 7 days ago

Au contraire, when my mother was growing up most ingredients were organic and free range by default and all your meals were hand made and free of synthetic additives.

There are charts which show the cratering of nutritional content of fresh produce over time so maybe not all goods and services of the past were total crap.

djtango commented on The past was not that cute juliawise.net/the-past-wa... · Posted by u/mhb

delichon · 7 days ago

Back in 2025 before cheap bots, our grandparents endured lives of servitude. They spent an enormous amount of time doing simple chores like folding clothes, driving, programming, washing and dusting, grooming themselves. They had to walk their own dogs and play with their own children. They sometimes even had to cook their own food, directly over fire. "Hygiene" was a primitive joke. A full day's work usually wasn't even enough to buy a single new car. They wrote checks to the government, rather than the other way around. Life was brutal, desperate and short.

djtango · 7 days ago

Why is UBI assumed as part of techtopia? When the government has access to unlimited labour and military via robots, why do they need citizens anymore? Beyond some antiquated moral obligation, why would a government actually do anything for a population that is net value extracting?

djtango commented on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros about.netflix.com/en/news... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

wiseowise · 9 days ago

> how did these companies drop the ball so bad

Companies didn't, leadership did. For a big, fat check. And they're happily retired now, sitting in their expensive villas with millions on their balance.

They couldn't care less about your happy childhood memories that the content produced by their predecessors engraved in your mind.

djtango · 8 days ago

I am not attached to any memories, I am remarking that a company that is currently 170~B market cap allowed a tiny upstart become a 460~B company when they had all the means and distribution to have stop them or outcompete them at many stages of the ascent.

Really, it is probably an inevitable and somewhat healthy feature of life and the business cycle, but it is also baffling to witness.

When I was at Amazon, I came away feeling that the gap between retail and Amazon was too large and the disruption was warranted. But in the case of Sony, it feels they were so much closer to the space that it feels like a much bigger own goal...

djtango commented on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros about.netflix.com/en/news... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

jimbokun · 8 days ago

> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers.

The answer to that one is simple: they were bad at software.

Apple and then Android killed the market for all those hardware devices and physical media.

djtango · 8 days ago

Maybe but they were still good enough to in house a whole bunch of dev - console OS, games, mobile OS, various forms of content distribution...

djtango commented on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros about.netflix.com/en/news... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

srameshc · 9 days ago

I never imagined that a service that ships DVD via mail would one day buy Warner Brothers. It is amazing how innovation and focus can change the game. Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.

djtango · 9 days ago

More like how did these companies drop the ball so bad. Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.

Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles

djtango commented on High air pollution could diminish exercise benefits by half – study scienceclock.com/exercise... · Posted by u/ashishgupta2209

potato3732842 · 15 days ago

The measurement may very well be accurate but statements like that should set off massive red flags and not be taken at face value. A factor of ten difference for something that just kinda diffuses through the air doesn't "just exist". You don't get gradients like that "naturally" for the most part. It's the result of something. Maybe there's a source something is upwind of and something else is downwind of. Maybe there's conditions causing it to concentrate. Or it varies 10x day to day, but on an average basis it equals out. Etc. Etc.

djtango · 14 days ago

Doesn't it really depend? Like I recall Oxford Street in London at one point was notoriously bad because it was a bottleneck for a lot of slow moving traffic so that one length of road was especially bad. 10x bad I don't know... But it's not hard to imagine some of the quieter roads filtering off like Berwick St or Dean St would be considerably better