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rowinxavier

@ rowinxavier @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
321
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Is it likely that we’re underestimating the extent of metamorphosis in the fossil record because we’re mistaking different stages of the same organism for different species?

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  • This is a legitimate concern and has been addressed to some degree in some areas. Unfortunately we don't have a perfect way of knowing that a specific specimen is from a specific species. Two very similar skeletons could be from the same or closely related species. The same goes for development over the life history of a specific organism. Adult humans have a different skull to height ratio to babies, but the ratio between toddlers and young chimps is very similar.

    Fortunately we have many different aged animals of the same species in the same context to compare. We can see the infant, child, adolescent, adult, and aged forms for many species and this acts similarly to transitional fossils, they help close the gap. We can be more sure with more hints like sharing a space, being buried in the same context, having the same nitrogen isotope ratios in teeth, and eating the same prey. Lots of other things can act as clues to the relationships and make us more or less certain of a given relationship.

    That said, fossilisation is rare. Not all that many individuals will be fossilised. Different types of tissue fossilise to different degrees and in some cases not at all. If an animal is mostly spongy material they may degrade too fast to fossilise and preserve structure. Other examples may only leave their imprint as a hollow or pressing of one material into another. I think the record is very sparse and will remain so, but adding more example allows more connection and conclusions to be made.

  • Why is Minecraft able to be forced to put restrictions on online servers, but web browsers aren't held accountable for providing access to the web?

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  • Yeah, so for Bedrock it is hosted by Microsoft and they are responsible. For any hosting infrastructure they will need to manage things themselves, but Microsoft seems to be taking things a step further. They seem to have blocked chat for Java users who are not verified to be adults. This means you may have to use a third party provider to verify your account by providing them with various details and trust that they won't sell that information on.

    Honestly, it is not something required by the law and it fits with a pattern I have noticed over the last few years. VPNs are being banned, age verification is being required on more and more sites starting with porn but now moving to things like video games, and the third party companies who can verify your age seem to be able to either sell that data on or sell things derived from that data. If I were planning to use authoritarian methods to control a population, similar to what ICE is doing in the USA, I would choose this strategy. Given the information in an age verification check I can train my AI systems to recognise specific faces and link them to the IMSI from a mobile phone present at a protest. This would identify the protestors and allow retribution at scale. Is that what is happening? I don't know. But does it look exactly how that would look? Yes.

  • How does ICE track people???

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  • To expand on this a little, there are tonnes of options for spying on people but the key is tying your face to your identity. If you have a phone with you at a protest and they capture your IMSI (unique identifier for that handset) they can place you at the scene. They then only have to narrow down a little which face is tied to that phone and they know who you are. If they have a way of making a large database of faces and names, for example requiring ID and facial scans to access porn, then they can make this process much more rapid. It's almost like there is some sort of overarching plan here, some sort of seizing of power through multiple fronts which are all connected and share interests, like how people who are all rich share the interest of further concentrating power in their own hands, just as an unrelated example.

  • Why is Minecraft able to be forced to put restrictions on online servers, but web browsers aren't held accountable for providing access to the web?

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  • If you provide the server, the actual computer used to provide a service, you are responsible for that server. Minecraft Bedrock servers are operated directly by Microsoft and as such are something they are responsible for.

    The browser accesses any and all servers for web pages. Regulating the browser would not work as they have no control over the content, nor do they have the ability to effectively filter.

    The confusion comes from you running two similar programs on your computer and having one of those behave differently to the other. The key is that the game client is a client only for that game, but the browser is a client for any web server out there. The client is not regulated at all, the server is. Anyone can access any web server from a browser, but only one server from a game client.

    Interestingly WoW has custom servers which are not operated by Blizzard and as such Blizzard is not responsible for what happens on them. The operator of the server is the responsible party here and has to control their platform.

  • To my fellow ADHDers, how do you make yourselves engage with your hobbies?

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  • I have a small SSD on my laptop. Only 500GB, so I can't install all of the games. I move ROMs to my external when not playing them and move them to the internal to play. I also package games up from Steam/other sources and do the same. That limits how many games I have installed at any time and helps make some friction to getting stuck in choice paralysis.

    That said, for other thing is multiplayer. I an playing Hytale with my partner and we were playing Minecraft before that for a while, so playing together becomes playing that game together and is therefore simple.

  • How much do you pay for food each month?

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  • January was $1262 in AUD. I eat a fairly meat based diet with ribs, pork belly, eggs, butter, and good coffee. I would consider it reasonable for myself, my partner, and my cat. That also includes other household things like cling wrap, dish liquid, and so on, so actual food cost is probably more like $1000-1100. In USD that is $697-767, so well under $200 per week. Also my meat is top grade Australian beef, widely considered some of the best in the world, and the butter is grass fed cow butter. I work 20-25 hours per week and can support my partner and myself on my pay and my partner's disability payment.

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  • Lol, yes, though they secretly love the attention and love. Mine is absolutely clear about wanting pets and cuddles at all times and will even come sit on my chest when I lay down to be gently rocked by my breathing just like he did when we was a tiny kitten. Nothing is better than giving a cat what they need.

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  • I like to think of it as saving the brush for when the replacement breaks. It is a spare now, having a lovely early retirement with the possibility of returning to work depending on circumstances.

    That said, I have found that putting things back where they go is the second best tool. The best for me is to literally tie it to myself. My belt bags have all the important things including a first aid kit, phone, headphones, power bank and cables, nitrile gloves, pen, notepad, car keys, and so on.

    For your cat I would recommend buying a few of the brush, identical ones are what I would go for, and place them where you would expect to find the brush. Maybe try looking for the brush and just note all the places you check in order. Then load each up with a brush and you will never be without.

    The most important thing in life is to pet the cat so anything we can do to ensure we pet the cat is good.

  • Should I replace my laptop battery, and are third-party batteries safe?

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  • https://www.foxbatteries.com.au/c22n2107-battery-for-asus-zenbook-14-flip-oled-up3404va-kn060w-ux3402va

    That is a suitable replacement. It is a simple pouch battery with an easy connector so the actual physical work to replace it is fairly simple and the cost is very low for the convenience of using your system for long hours. It should also prolong the life of your laptop delaying replacement for a fairly long time.

    The big question is about the quality of the internals of the battery. Is the material consistently folded? Are there overhangs or under hangs? Are there areas where the anode and cathode are close and will short in a few years of usage? I honestly don't know how to actually check for this.

  • Where to volounteer if I don't have time?

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  • I don't know about your local area and associated limitations but I can speak more generally.

    Volunteering your time is a really rewarding thing and it can feel better than donating money. But that is feeling better for you. If you have specific skills, for example web development, then volunteering your time in that expert capacity can be very helpful. If that skillset is not needed then using that skillset to generate funds to donate is more effective. Your efforts are not fungible, but money is, meaning the organisation can use the effect of your efforts in the most beneficial way for their goals, even if it is not a good match for your skills.

    Considering specific hours of your work as volunteering hours and donating those hours of earning may help you get the feeling you need, feeling like you are helping and involved, while turning that effort into something useful for the cause you care about.

    "On Saturdays I volunteer for my favourite charity by working my normal job and donating the proceeds"

  • With all this talk about Ai not being profitable why aren't we using it in video games? I dont mean replacing developers I mean in NPCs in the game. I make them more realistic.

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  • People have tried this a bit and it doesn't work well. Remember that most games have some sort of plot which needs to move forward without deviating too far and this is not easy to manage with AI. AI systems are predictive text tuned up, so they tend to wander in the conversation and this can be disastrous for something like a video game.

    The world is there to support the illusion but also to direct the player to game material. An AI agent going off on a tengent about some random thing that kind of fits the world could lead to users running around wasting their time and being frustrated.

    Add to that the risk of the AI system stepping into awful places like reproducing Nazi ideology and it is a nightmare for developeds. Imagine getting your game rated when it can randomly start telling your character not to worry about saving those people over there because their skin tone is darker and that makes them less than human.

    Now as a tool for building scripts quickly? Maybe, but it does produce slop now and if that will change I cannot predict when. Maybe it could be used as part of the process but I think it is so toxic now I would not bet on it. I also think it should be labeled as the use of AI comes with moral issues around the environmental impact and theft of content from other people. If a game has AI generated content I won't be playing it, and I am not alone. Just the push back from audiences could be enough to discourage the use of AI systems.

    Now on the other hand using a neural network design for making character behaviours more believable, for example using a series of needs and having the algorithm decide what to do next and so on, that could be cool, but we have that already and it isn't considered AI.

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  • I still occasionally open up Alley Cat which is much easier now that you can do it in a browser.

    https://www.playdosgames.com/online/alley-cat/

    That's from 1984 so fairly old, but it just feels amazing. Amazingly clunky, but amazing. I love the fish bowl so much, the mice are evil, and dating is hard for a cat.

    I also regularly replay SNES games and recently finished The Legend of Zelda, a Link to the Past. So much fun, such a well balanced game.

    For most played it would have to be various solitaire games, especially Fourty Thieves. I have played these so much my phone has burned in card shapes, but that's fine for me, worth it.

    If I exclude cards it is Creeper World 3 which has at least 50 full days of play, but probably much more by now.

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  • Gotta try ZyEl, such a good mod, cranks everything up to 11

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  • Check out Open Arena. It is based in the source for Q3A but it is fully fleshed out with new characters and weapons. Absolutely frenetic and great fun.

    +1 for micro machines, though I prefer v3.

    And older GTA, GTA2 was my favourite. I play it every so often and always enjoy it, but it is hard to play GTA 1 with modern expectations, they really improved for 2. "And remember, respect is everything"

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  • And fun. It is actually quite fun. The graphics are really nice, right in that midrange of not too low quality to be ugly but not too pretty to cook your machine.

  • In a study of identical twins, Stanford researchers have found that a vegan diet improves cardiovascular health

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  • Man, I really don't like this study.

    First, this is 44 people, 22 pairs of twins, followed for 8 weeks. This in not enough to be meaningful and the researchers knew this at the start. A sample of 44 people is so small you would only use it for a pilot study to show your study design and get funding.

    Second, 8 weeks? That is an insanely short time. Again, pilot study, not real study.

    Third, they didn't measure heart disease, they measured LDL cholesterol. This is a proxy marker, not a measure of heart disease. It would be like measuring how many fires a city has by counting firefighters. It doesn't measure how many actual fires there are, just how many resources are available to fight them. What if there is low funding? What if there is an issue with training? What if there is another disaster which is more urgent than the fires? LDL is not a good measure on its own for heart health.

    There are lots of other issues but they all boil down to this being bad science. We know what questions should be asked and how to ask them. They chose not to ask questions correctly and get meaningful answers. This is not worth the paper it was printed on and means close to nothing.

  • Australians could soon live and work in EU freely, with the same rules applying for EU citizens in Australia, as part of long-awaited trade deal

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  • If we get enough countries over time and the EU ends up encompassing the whole world it could become the Everybody Union and that would be cool.

  • ‘Make America Go Away’: The red hat that’s all the rage in Greenland

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  • What is crazy is this was actually a huge problem for frontier settlements. Tonnes of people would meet the indigenous population, be exposed to their society, learn enough of their language to communicate, and then go "fuck this" to all the European culture and just move in with the locals. They brought whatever skills they had including metalworking and so on and joined up and for the most part it went really really well for them, until the westerners came and killed everyone. Behind The Bastards had a great episode a few years ago about it, through the lens of one particular bastard, and yeah, faced with a culture where individuals were not exploited for every last shilling of value to the shareholders people wanted out.

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    COVID's "new normal" = safety hysteria, digital dependence and "expert" obedience?

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  • First, the term hysteria is from a fairly mysoginist root, so maybe consider whether that is the best word here.

    Second, for all the 8 million plus people killed by COVID it wasn't hysteria, they died. They didn't have the sniffles, they died. Dead. Not alive. There isn't really a lot that is worse as an outcome from a respiratory infection, however we have that too! Tonnes of people who didn't die have long covid symptoms, strokes, heart attacks, various thrombotic events, loss of function, and additional complications in the rest of their medical issues. On top of that plenty of people had parents, siblings, children, friends, or other people important to them die or become disabled.

    Third, digital dependence? I mean, we were moving in this direction for decades before covid. It used to be nobody had phones at all. My partners grandparents remembered the house down the block getting a telephone and went over to see it. They didn't have electricity. That was less than a century ago. The ramp up of technology over the last century has been insane and accelerating that whole time. In 2004 the coolest phone was a Motorola RAZR flip phone with a terrible 0.3 megapixel camera but a stunning 176x220 pixel display. In 2024 a Pixel 9 has a 1080x2424 display and a 50, 48, and 10.5 megapixel camera. The comparison of a rifle and a spear feels appropriate. We were already heading towards more technology in our lives, it just because super noticeable during lockdowns as it accelerated a little more for a couple of years and it was more obvious.

    Fourth, why the quotes around expert? There is such a thing as an expert. Someone who knows more than me doesn't have to know everything to keep knowing more than me. They can be wrong and learn new things and change their mind all while remaining more informed than I am. In fact, being an expert in a field means doing that constantly. Being at the frontier of knowledge means holding your beliefs more tentatively as you are more likely to change your understanding than an uninformed average person. The fact that they didn't know how good masks would be at the start isn't an indictment of their expert status, it is their first guess given previous knowledge. What they did after that is what makes them experts, namely changing their minds when new evidence came about.

  • You Should Know @lemmy.world
    rowinxavier @lemmy.world

    YSK that you can/should budget yearly for long term purchases

  • Lemmy Shitpost @lemmy.world
    rowinxavier @lemmy.world

    Bream meame