robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
Ok, it seems to have the the old-and-well-known preponderance to just pull numbers and multiply them without regard for what they are: https://you.com/search?q=How+heavy+is+1l+of+air+at+10atm%3F&fromSearchBar=true&tbm=youchat
robryk
boosted
Question: Why has there been nearly 0 media coverage in the US about Enovid and other nasal sprays?
"Most significantly, it showed, specifically for a higher risk population, that a negative PCR was achieved on Day 4 (median) compared to Day 8 for placebo."
That's really good?!
The chatbot-style answers of https://you.com seem impressive.
If asked nonsensical questions, they provide nonsensical answers. However, contrary to chatgpt, when asked very weird but sensible questions or fact lookup questions, it does provide correct answers (also, doesn't refuse to answer questions on fake grounds).
How do client blacklists work with gdpr?
Why do PKP IC (https://www.pkp.pl/) and Blik (https://blik.com/en) put people under time pressure when performing transactions? They teach people to click stuff without reading (and probably also lose some part of ability to claim that customers really know the terms of service, given that they make them impossible to read in the timeframe).
robryk
boosted
I figured out why the #fediverse clicks with so many GenXers. It's "yesterday's tomorrow!"
That is, it's the decentralized networked future we imagined as kids, complete with the billionaire baddies, evil corps, and environmental degradation plot lines all playing at the edge of the screen.
robryk
boosted
Speaking of Zener breakdown, here's a classic #electronics brainteaser. Find a generic small-signal bipolar transistor, e.g. 2N3904, 2N2222. Connect Emitter to +12 V via 1 kΩ, and ground Base. You can then find a negative voltage around -0.4 V relative to ground at Collector. Why can it be negative, when there's no negative voltage anywhere in this circuit?
When the base-emitter junction experiences Zener breakdown, it emits red light, which shines upon the base-collector junction. Photovoltaic effect creates this negative voltage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKlbO5mOZm4
When you don't realize that you've bought disks with quite high vibrations at seek time:
(The doohickeys are from https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1774380. All in all works surprisingly well; apparently ~all the audible seek noise was coming via the case due to impedance matching.)
@lauren Why do most (all?) your posts include an all-white image?
robryk
boosted
Playing with GCP's Confidential Compute stuff, and I feel like the advice in the docs to verify that the VM has confidential compute enabled by (checks notes) asking the metadata service whether the instance has confidential compute enabled is maybe missing the point a little
robryk
boosted
@kwf So what can you do? Well, optical fibers happen to be excellent electrical isolators. Electric currents and magnetic fields go hand in hand. So instead of winding an electrical conductor around the transmission line, you wind some length of Faraday active optical fiber around, send polarized light through it and measure the amount of polarization rotation on the other end: That's an optical current transformer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_current_sensor
robryk
boosted
When I held my notorious/legendary "Jay Ward Film Festival" at UCLA in the early 80s (attended by Bill Scott, June Foray, and more!), Bill (the voice of Bullwinkle and so many more familiar voices) told a story of would-be "censorship" on "Rocky and His Friends" (1959-1964).
Seems that they had done a sequence where Rocky and Bullwinkle are in a pot being cooked by natives. The sponsor went nuts. "You can't have cannibalism on a kids' show!" the sponsor proclaimed.
The reply: "Is it really cannibalism to cook a moose and a squirrel?"
The bit stayed in.
I have an audio recording of the entire proceeding, including a live performance and amazingly prescient Q&A session. I really need to get it back online.
robryk
boosted
has anyone seen a really good guide to writing good code reviews? someone just asked me and I couldn't think of anything
Would you mind adding links to comments (i.e. to the post on the instance the post is from) on your blog's rendering of fediverse comments? That would make it easier to respond to them.
People in Switzerland who want to estimate anything around #covid risks might wish to be aware of https://ibz-shiny.ethz.ch/wastewaterRe/
Writing a description of oneself for one's fedi profile reminds me of the standard responses to "who are you" and the whole discussion on (a) why those reponses are typical (b) what does this question even mean.
robryk
boosted
OKAY so this this the Square Panda spelling thing. The idea is that this interfaces with tablet apps for little kids to spell words, and it can detect what they spelled on it. I'm gonna tear it down.
I'm gonna try adjusting the visibility for this thread after this so you should only see this one post.
chatgpt, --
The faults it has make it a very depressing development for me. It's able to produce very human-sounding prose and is unable not to inject false statements into ~anything it outputs.
First, this is very depressing for people who actually read what they see and remember small tidbits that were mentioned. This makes it way more likely that they're garbage.
Secondly and more importantly, this is asymmetric tool of disinformation creation. It can be used to generate plausibly-sounding wrong statements much more easily than it could be used to generate correct statements. There are people/organisations who wish to do former. Thus, this will remove many of the factchecking heuristics that work today. (This is a fundamental inescapable problem for factchecking of news, and still a bad problem for factchecking of statements about empirically available knowledge.)
I expect us to get way more hard-to-filter spam and not get much in return. I expect Sybil problem to start appearing in places where hardness of simulating a human prevented it from appearing.
robryk
boosted
Just tried ChatGPT. I asked it a series of specific Qs about areas I've studied in detail.
On all Qs, it gave answers that are plausible sounding but wrong. Not obviously wrong: wrong in subtle ways that need deep domain knowledge to grasp.
The ways humans will be practically misled by this kind of tech if trusted with, say, doling out medical, legal or business advice is horrific.
Letting this tech loose on the world will further destroy search engines that are already riddled with SEO BS.
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
