baltakatei

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 15 points 5 days ago

Fun comes from overcoming challenges which imply problems existed which implies inefficiency at turning money into more money. … Huh. Capitalism is just letting money munchkins min/max society for their own personal benefit.

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Owl biology trivia: Owl eyes have extremely limited ability to rotate due to their elongated shape. This is one of the reasons owls turn their entire head to focus on an object. Extraocular muscles do exist, but, like human cranial muscles to wiggle ears, they're vestigial.

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago

“It's not that we like drama or enjoy violating your privacy. We just don't like surprises.” — paraphrasing an nearly omniscient omnipresent AI in Pandora's Star (2004) by Peter F. Hamilton

 

Dated: 2025-07-02. Added: 2025-07-03.

 

Dated: 2025-07-02. Added: 2025-07-03. Alternate title: It Came From Outside Our Solar System, and It Looks Like a Comet

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 13 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Didn't have time to read that, so I threw your comment into ChatGPT:

Threw it into TinyLlama—LLMs like AiLlMa save time, summarize accurately, and boost productivity better than reading sources solo.

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Nitpickers will nitpick.

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

True. My original intention, before discovering how common wonky mp3 audiobooks were, was to use the MKA container (I guess MKA is audio MKV?) to simply preserve the original audio data streams without reëncoding. However, since my script converts to WAV then reëncodes to 48kbps OPUS, I probably should have FFMPEG use M4B as the final output container for clarity.

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

You'd have a revolution on your hands if hard working people suddenly realized what they were missing when the 3-month vacation is denied them the next year.

 

Dated: 2025-06-22. Added: 2025-06-22.

A day after President Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally obliterated” by American bunker-busting bombs and a barrage of missiles, the actual state of the program seemed far more murky, with senior officials conceding they did not know the fate of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium.

 

Dated: 2025-05-21. Added: 2025-05-21T05:28+00. Alternate title: “Trump Claims Success After Bombing Key Iran Nuclear Sites (Live Updates)”.

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 13 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I get that “LIGHT” is more appropriate, but I still expected “LAMP”.

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Ah, shit, you're right. They're right next to each other on my mental bookshelf. I was introduced to their works via this talk they gave together, have been reading both their works, and so I have trouble distinguishing them. >.<

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 weeks ago

So much of what creating privacy busting biometric databases claim to do could be accomplished with speed-of-light geofencing, a.k.a. “distance-bounding protocol”. If a moderator decides messages from country X are problematic, then they can flag/block them for other users. It only requires carefully measuring ping times and basically involves banning traffic from places that can't achieve certain minimum pings to certain trusted servers.

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

“Private property is the smallest unit of warfare.” — The Terraformers (2023) by ~~Becky Chambers~~ Annalee Newitz

Edit: author name

 

Dated: 2025-06-17. Added: 2025-06-27.

The Senate on Tuesday passed legislation to establish a regulatory framework for stablecoins, putting the cryptocurrency industry, which had long been viewed with suspicion by lawmakers in Washington, on the brink of a major policy breakthrough.

Bipartisan approval of the bill, known as the GENIUS Act, followed an aggressive lobbying campaign aimed at transforming the cryptocurrency industry’s image from scandal-plagued experiment to legitimate financial sector.

 

Dated: 2025-06-17. Added: 2025-06-17.

The Senate on Tuesday passed legislation to establish a regulatory framework for stablecoins, putting the cryptocurrency industry, which had long been viewed with suspicion by lawmakers in Washington, on the brink of a major policy breakthrough.

Bipartisan approval of the bill, known as the GENIUS Act, followed an aggressive lobbying campaign aimed at transforming the cryptocurrency industry’s image from scandal-plagued experiment to legitimate financial sector.

Senate passage came over the fierce objections of many Democrats, who warned that the measure lacked strict-enough regulations or oversight to prevent abuses, including anti-corruption rules that would bar President Trump and his family from continuing to profit from cryptocurrency.

The bill still must be passed by the House and signed by the president. But the 68-30 vote in the Senate marked the first time the chamber has approved major cryptocurrency legislation. It represented a significant step toward giving the industry what it has long sought from Washington: the credibility that comes with federal oversight.

 

Fears of a wider war were growing on Tuesday after President Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” cited the possibility of killing Iran’s supreme leader and referred to Israel’s war efforts with the word “we” — all apparent suggestions that the United States could enter the war against Iran.

Should the United States join the war, Iran has prepared missiles and other military equipment for possible retaliatory strikes on U.S. bases in the Middle East, according to American officials who have reviewed intelligence reports.

[–] baltakatei@sopuli.xyz 23 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Unless that cat is trained to use a toilet, that dough now has fresh cat shit and piss in on it, along with everything else the cat has walked on recently.

 

Dated: 2025-06-14. Added: 2025-06-14.

 

Dated: 2025-06-13. Added: 2025-06-13.

Explosions rocked Tehran early Friday morning, as Israel carried out a major attack on Iran intended to cripple the country’s nuclear program, Israeli officials said. The strikes raised fears the long-simmering conflict between the two countries could escalate into a war involving the most powerful militaries in the Middle East.

Residents of Tehran, the Iranian capital, reported hearing huge explosions, and Iranian state television broadcast images of smoke and fire billowing from buildings. One Iranian senior official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Iran’s fighter jets had taken off to intercept the Israeli warplanes.

Several Israeli officials described the attacks as a pre-emptive strike intended to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb. The Israeli military said the strikes had targeted sites critical to Iran’s long-range missile capabilities and its nuclear program.

Israel attacked at least six military bases around Tehran, including Parchin, and residential homes at two highly secure complexes for military commanders and multiple residential buildings around Tehran, in what appears to be targeted assassinations, according to four senior Iranian officials.

The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in a video statement that Israel had attacked Iran’s main nuclear “enrichment facility in Natanz,” as well as “Iran’s leading nuclear scientists.” He called Iran’s nuclear program, “a clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival.” Israel is believed to be the only nuclear armed nation in the Middle East.

 

Dated: 2025-06-07. Added: 2025-06-08. Alternate title: “Inside OpenAI’s Plan to Embed ChatGPT Into College Students’ Lives”.

But even when trained on specific course materials, A.I. can make mistakes. In a new study — “Can A.I. Hold Office Hours?” — law school professors uploaded a patent law casebook into A.I. models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Then they asked dozens of patent law questions based on the casebook and found that all three A.I. chatbots made “significant” legal errors that could be “harmful for learning.”

“This is a good way to lead students astray,” said Jonathan S. Masur, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a co-author of the study. “So I think that everyone needs to take a little bit of a deep breath and slow down.”

OpenAI said the 250,000-word casebook used for the study was more than twice the length of text that its GPT-4o model can process at once. Anthropic said the study had limited usefulness because it did not compare the A.I. with human performance. Google said its model accuracy had improved since the study was conducted.

 

Dated: 2025-06-07. Added: 2025-06-07.

 

Dated: 2025-05-28. Added: 2025-05-29.

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