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WolfLink

@ WolfLink @sh.itjust.works

Posts
1
Comments
964
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

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  • A “case study” is more formal than an anecdote, but still has the same issues.

    Here’s a quote from the end of the “Limitations” section of the Wikipedia article on “Case Study”:

    As small-N research should not rely on random sampling, scholars must be careful in avoiding selection bias when picking suitable cases. A common criticism of qualitative scholarship is that cases are chosen because they are consistent with the scholar's preconceived notions, resulting in biased research.

    Another quote from earlier in that section:

    The authors' recommendation is to increase the number of observations … because few observations make it harder to estimate multiple causal effects, as well as increase the risk that there is measurement error, and that an event in a single case was caused by random error or unobservable factors.

    The “Uses” section of that article starts with:

    Case studies have commonly been seen as a fruitful way to come up with hypotheses and generate theories. Case studies are useful for understanding outliers or deviant cases.

    Lower down that section has:

    Case studies of cases that defy existing theoretical expectations may contribute knowledge by delineating why the cases violate theoretical predictions and specifying the scope conditions of the theory.

    Case studies are used to guide experimental and quantitative research, but are not a replacement for that part of the research process.

    Applying that to case studies that appear to involve the supernatural, sufficient convincing case studies should lead to theories about the conditions for supernatural events, which should lead to experiments or quantitative studies to test those theories.

  • me btw

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  • I ran a comparison between libsvtav1 and h264 and h265 and found that libsvtav kinda sucks.

    It does produce smaller file sizes at h265, but it tends to add a visible blur.

  • me btw

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  • Compress video to a broadly compatible format:

     
        
ffmpeg -i input -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 25 -preset slow -c:a libfdk_aac -b:a 128k output.mp4

    This incantation is what I end up needing 99% of the time I do something with ffmpeg.

  • me btw

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  • YouTube and windows movie maker are almost certainly using ffmpeg.

  • Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

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  • I don’t think any one anecdote or even a collection of anecdotes would convince me because of the explanations I layed out.

    I can think of an experiment, which would be something like to hide a box with a computer that displays one of 3 colors, selected randomly and recorded by the computer so nobody can know what color was displayed until inspecting the computer later. Ask people if they had an out-of-body experience, and if they noticed the box and looked inside. Ask people who answered affirmatively to that what color was in the box, and do a statistical analysis of the results.

    Even if you aren’t going to do a controlled experiment, you have to make sure your interviews of patients include every patient who had a near death experience over the course of your study.

    Reviews of anecdotes that were only recorded because they are interesting is not a productive way to answer this question.

  • Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

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  • I’m not saying “rare data in general is not valuable”.

    Not observing hawking radiation in a situation where no theory predicts hawking radiation is neither evidence for nor against the existence of hawking radiation. That would be like taking the lack of NDE in completely healthy people as evidence against NDEs.

    I’ll try to state my problem with cherry picking anecdotes about NDE more succinctly.

    My hypothesis: These NDE stories are the experience of wacky brain activity arising from near death situations.

    Supposed evidence against that hypothesis: Some of these stories involve people knowing stuff they shouldn’t have been able to know.

    My hypothesis to explain that “supernatural” knowledge:

    1. Sometimes people notice things subconsciously, and sometimes other people could have been tipped off about information in ways other people don’t realize.
    2. Sometimes people guess things correctly

    The problem with relying on anecdotes is:

    1. Memory is fallible and people’s accounts of events are often affected by discussion after the fact as well as what they “want” to think about the event
    2. This is the confirmation bias part. If you only record correct guesses, it doesn’t seem like they are guessing.

    Let’s there’s a tik tok trend and 1000 people ask someone to guess the result of 10 coin flips. One of them gets them all correct! Wow that’s amazing that person must have supernatural powers! (Nope it’s just statistics).

  • Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

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  • That’s a number I threw out there to estimate how many near death experiences might have happened, studied or not, and that’s why it’s such a problem to only focus on the anecdotal cases that get recorded because they are interesting.

    A proper study doesn’t need to include 1,000,000 cases, but it does need to ensure that it doesn’t have bias in the cases it does include.

  • Deleted

    Are there programmers that still don't use AI?

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  • I keep hearing “oh this new model is better!”

    I have a test case I’ve been using. A real-world piece of code I needed, that isn’t something super original but has a few tricky steps in it.

    The first time I’ve seen AI able to get even close to finishing the task was recently. Its code worked, and there were only a few minor tweaks I had to make before it was in a condition I’d consider acceptable to merge into my own work.

    It took about 30 minutes to do its task, maybe longer. I spent 5 minutes reviewing it but it would have been longer if I hadn’t previously done the task myself and knew exactly what I was looking for. I think it took me about an hour when I did that task myself the first time. Ultimately using AI for this might have saved me about 15 minutes?

    I guess it might be borderline useful at that rate. I might look into using it more in the future, but I still don’t really expect it to become a tool I regularly use.

  • Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

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  • Confirmation bias is when the outcome could be adequately explained by luck.

    In the topic of near death experiences, if there are 1,000,000 near death experiences and 100 involve someone “knowing something they shouldn’t be able to”, those 100 cases are more likely to be remembered or recorded as significant than the other 900,000 cases. This can lead to an apparent statistical significance in correctly knowing “unknowable” information, when really it’s just people “guessing” correctly.

    The “black swan” scenario is a bit different but it would be something like if you are more likely to record a swan sighting if the swan is black, you will significantly overestimate the frequency of black swans.

    Im not saying the cases of apparent supernatural effects should be ignored, I’m saying they need to be taken in the context of all similar events, including the mundane, to understand if there even is an effect (knowing something that shouldn’t be possible) or if it’s just a handful of lucky guesses.

  • Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

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  • Near death experiences are a tricky thing to study. There are physiological explanations for much of it, such as weird brain activity is likely to be interpreted as a weird experience.

    These people would have no way of having knowing this stuff unless they’ve seen it for themselves, which would have been physically impossible.

    The problem of this argument is confirmation bias. An anecdote of seeing information you couldn’t have seen and being right is going to be more memorable than seeing information and being wrong.

    when you have several hundred of them compiled back-to-back-to-back it becomes harder and harder to find the willpower required to muster up a skeptical response

    The scientific method involves looking at both the cases where it seems like something happened and the cases where nothing happened (e.g. someone said they had an experience but it clearly didn’t match reality). If you cherry pick just the events that “showed” what you want, that’s confirmation bias.

    I did some googling of my own and found some studies on the topic from seemingly reputable sources that suggested physiological explanations might not be sufficient to explain the patterns they saw. Several of these had the same first author. I also found plenty of studies suggesting physiological explanations can be sufficient, as well as some specific criticisms of the couple studies that suggested they weren’t sufficient.

    It’s interesting for sure that there is a doctor or two who seem to believe in the supernatural. The topic of near death experience seems to be of research interest regardless of any supernatural theories because of what it tells us about the brain.

    It seems we will likely arrive at scientific consensus about near death experience in the future. I wouldn’t hold my breath that supernatural theories will survive that process.

    events that transpired when they had no brain activity.

    I think I saw the case this was talking about during my googling. It said “brain activity was not expected” which is not the same as “there was no brain activity”.

    That’s the problem with a book like the one you are describing. It’s deliberately cherry picked, exaggerated, and biased to drive you to a certain conclusion.

    I instead urge you to go read scientific papers on the topic, and specifically not just the ones that seem to suggest the outcome you want to hear.

    Here’s a place to start.

  • Can a reasonable person genuinely believe in ghosts?

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  • chocolate tastes more like coffee than soap

    This is absolutely something you could scientifically test.

    The scientific method is building up knowledge by noticing a pattern, coming up with an explanation for that pattern, then thinking what further effects that explanation would imply, and looking for those effects.

    So when someone claims something is “outside the realm of science”, how could that be?

    Often it’s either because it isn’t reproducible (it’s a miracle that supposedly happened once and never will happen again) or it doesn’t affect anything.

    If it isn’t reproducible, it’s hard to believe that it happened that way. Perhaps you are missing some details?

    If it doesn’t affect anything, why care?

    For the ghost stuff … the book Surviving Death by Leslie Kane.

    I’ve heard of many, many attempts to scientifically prove supernatural effects and none that showed a result. Most ghost stories I’ve heard have other more reasonable explanations if you think about it. Memory tends to be unreliable so sometimes details may be added or changed to fit the expected explanation, even if the person doesn’t intend to be misleading. Of course, sometimes people do exaggerate or make things up deliberately.

    Nevertheless, if you have some decent examples of actual evidence of ghosts, I’m genuinely curious.

  • Agent maxing

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  • Running an AI on a GPU requires enough VRAM to fit the model, otherwise it will fall back to the CPU which is very slow. Mac Minis share RAM between the CPU and GPU, and you can get a Mac mini with a lot of shared RAM for a lot cheaper than a GPU with a lot of VRAM.

  • Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

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  • My locally hosted Qwen3 30b said “Walk” including this awesome line:

    Why you might hesitate (and why it’s wrong):

    • X “But it’s a car wash!” -> No, the car doesn’t need to drive there—you do.

    Note that I just asked the Ollama app, I didn’t alter or remove the default system prompt nor did I force it to answer in a specific format like in the article.

    EDIT: after playing with it a bit more, qwen3:30b sometimes gives the correct answer for the correct reasoning, but it’s pretty rare and nothing I’ve tried has made it more consistent.

  • Couple left with $200k bill after baby born in US

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  • The problem in this story wasn’t actually the US this time, it was the Swiss insurance company.

  • Firefox is ending support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1, and users are urged to switch to Linux

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  • It’s also not as stable as they market it to be

  • Climber on trial for leaving girlfriend to die on Austria's highest mountain

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  • Idk what the original post was because it’s deleted by now, but having internet connection doesn’t make you “rich” in 2026. A lot of homeless people have smart phones. A cheap smartphone is a minuscule one-time expense compared to the ongoing costs of food and housing. There are often plenty of sources of free WiFi so you don’t even need to pay a phone bill.

  • Climber on trial for leaving girlfriend to die on Austria's highest mountain

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  • I’d be curious to hear the other side of the story. The phone on silence is what “police allege”, and mobile coverage maps are often exaggerated for marketing, not to mention being in a big storm could affect service.

    It’s possible his phone was not working, and he kept going until he got service.

  • "Overproduction" (Art by David Revoy)

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  • A lot of corporations sell their used or otherwise no longer needed tech products. It’s not unreasonable to expect a lot of RAM to sell that way.

    However, there is a concern a lot of it will be in the form of RAM soldered to the boards of AI accelerator cards which are basically GPUs without the actual graphics specific features. That won’t be very useful to the average consumer.

  • How can we protect kids from the harms of social media without sacrificing everyone's privacy?

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  • If there are government mandated age verification checks on social media, then even if they're trivial to bypass, at least it allows parents to stand together with other parents.

    Many, if not most, social media sites already have this in the form of a “I assert I’m over 13” button during account creation

  • Bun Alert System @lemmy.sdf.org
    WolfLink @sh.itjust.works

    Floating in the grass!