• 0 Posts
  • 124 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle

  • These images, while very intricate and pretty, are not fractals, and actually show a very interesting limitation with AI nowadays. Image generation AI tools such as Stable Diffusion or Dall-E don’t actually know the meaning of the words you’re using to prompt them, they just have a pretty good idea of what sorts of things pop up if you search for those words.

    A fractal is, by mathematical definition, self-similar. You can zoom into part of the smaller detail of a fractal and find the original image, and do the same with the details in the zoomed image, and so on and so forth ad nauseum. Computers are pretty good at making these, once they’re given the rules.

    What the image generation bot has given you is an image that looks like a fractal, and that’s what it’s supposed to do. In the same way that large language models like chat-GPT will be very confidently wrong about the information it tells you, and for the same reasons, image generation AI should not be used for important topics that the prompter doesn’t already have some background information about, such as generating a map of some place the prompter has never been in preparation for a road trip.

    Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.





  • when there’s not a recognised disability involved but just health issue/s (which could be “disabling”).

    From the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in regards to the ADA:

    Under the ADA , you have a disability if you have a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity.

    Essentially, if you are disabled, you have a disability, whether recognized or not. If you are not disabled, then you do not have a disability.

    Under this definition, something like asthma, which is fairly common, can be a disability when it comes to strenuous activities, but isn’t something that is immediately obvious to someone just passing on the street.

    As far as it being ablist to assume that someone not showing signs of disability isn’t disabled? No, that’s silly. Not believing them if they tell you they can’t run a mile because they have asthma? Still no, that’s skepticism.

    Ablism would be something like planning a company outing, and choosing the location up a tall, steep hill when other options were available, specifically because you don’t like the fact that your coworker has asthma.





  • Yeah, but only around the time of sports matches. That makes it predictable, and the anti-hooligan magic can be more effeciently focused. It’s actually a little-known fact that Quidditch matches are timed with the solstice so that the anti-hooligan wards are at their strongest.

    The Irish are much more unpredictable with their drunken hooliganism, so in the early days they used to break through the wards by accident and go on drunken rampages across Wales before eventually being segregated to their own, smaller island.


  • It’s not.

    “Hey, look at that girl/car/tree/Chihuahua” isn’t a left nod. It’s eye contact, then you look at the thing.

    “Come here/go there, let’s talk” isn’t a right nod. It’s a weird neck movement where your head is kind of sideways and you’re nodding in the direction of the place you want them to go. You usually use “Hey, look at that tree” first before you try to get them to go to the tree to talk.

    Can confirm up and down are correct enough, though. Up is for people you know, down is for people you don’t.



  • Spuddaccino@reddthat.comtocats@lemmy.worldI YEARN
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    I suppose in that respect, it does mean “I yearn!” but I’ve taken it to mean “Something’s wrong!”, with the nuance being that he’ll want his food bowl filled even if he’s not hungry or me on the couch even if he doesn’t immediately want a lap.


  • Spuddaccino@reddthat.comtocats@lemmy.worldI YEARN
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    63
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    My cat knows exactly what it wants when it yells at me. I just had to learn how to speak cat.

    The meowing is just to get my attention. Once walk over to him, he’ll walk over to the place he wants me to go. At that point I have to figure out what he wants me to do there, but it’s usually food dish/water dish/couch for lap sitting.



  • Spuddaccino@reddthat.comtoMemes@lemmy.mlNo doubts
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    We’d need to find exactly where it “passes over”, which could depend on who you ask.

    No, we don’t. It doesn’t matter when that is, because you and I both agree that it’s out there somewhere, and that at the point in time referenced, a non-chicken laid an egg and a chicken hatched out of it. That’s all we need out of that point, and neither of us are disputing that part of it.

    If you define a chicken as hatching from a chicken egg (“every chicken must have hatched from a chicken egg”), then the egg came first. If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken (“all chicken eggs must have been laid by chickens”), then the chicken came first.

    Agreed. I, personally, use the broader egg definition you reference in the last paragraph, but a definition of “chicken egg” would put the whole thing to rest, and I propose this: Not every chicken egg contains a viable chicken. We all agree that these eggs are still chicken eggs when we buy them at the supermarket, though, so my proposed definition is that a chicken egg is laid by a chicken. Otherwise, we end up with unclassified eggs in our omelettes, and we can’t have that.


  • In such a case, we would simply need to look backward in history until we find an ancestor that doesn’t meet the chicken criteria. Fowl as a clade were separated from other bird clades before the K-T Extinction Event, and many such species before the event had teeth, which means they weren’t chickens.


  • I see what you’re saying, and I agree with it, but the question isn’t asking “Which egg was the first chicken egg?”, it’s asking “Did the egg come before the chicken?” Determining the exact point is a way of answering the question, but is a lot of work that isn’t strictly necessary to do so.

    We can use the Theorem because we don’t care when that point actually was, the question doesn’t ask that. We just need to prove that there was such a point, and the Theorem does that.

    To use that text as an analogy, we don’t care which is the first purple or blue word, we just know there is one because the gradient starts from red, passes through purple, and ends up blue, so it must have a first purple word and a first blue word.


  • Spuddaccino@reddthat.comtoMemes@lemmy.mlNo doubts
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    chicken would also be able to defined as it’s ancestor

    This isn’t the case, and there’s a mathematical theorem describing this called the Intermediate Value Theorem. Basically, if you have a function describing a line you can draw without picking up your pencil, at some point along that line the value takes on every value on that line. Makes sense, right?

    If I draw a line separating Chicken-birds from Not-chicken-birds, and show the evolutionary path leading from non-chicken to chicken, at some point it crosses that line. We don’t have to know where that point is, we just know it crosses the line at some point.

    At that point, wherever it is, we have a bird that meets the criteria of “chicken” hatching from an egg laid by a bird that doesn’t.

    Besides, this is all pretty moot. We actually know when and where chickens originated. They originated about 3000 years ago in China and India after being domesticated from Southeast Asian Red Junglefowl.