cynar

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] cynar 5 points 5 hours ago

The load varies, though I've found the suspension is hard enough that it doesn't shift for a normal load up. I mostly do it because I've noticed that, when I hit a bump, my lights can sweep up over the windows of cars in front.

Also, I don't mind them readjusting it. It's calling it a fault that bugged me.

[–] cynar 14 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

I drive a van, so I could easily be the culprit. I therefore make a habit of adjusting my beam dip appropriately. Apparently that is unusual enough for them to note they had been adjusted in the service. There's literally a dial on the dashboard. You're SUPPOSED to adjust them to the vehicle and road conditions! Apparently not having them set to max is now considered a "fault" to fix!

[–] cynar 2 points 15 hours ago

I would personally add a small amount of slack for bad taste satire (we were all young idiots at some point), but basically agree. Any signs of the other points, and that slack is gone, however.

I was mostly curious if the OP was acting in bad faith, or a useful idiot that could be reasoned with.

[–] cynar 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As the owner of a reactive dog, I disagree. It takes longer to overcome, but gives far better results.

I also put vibration collars and shock collars in 2 very different categories. A vibration collar is intended to alert the dog, in an unambiguous manner, that they need to do something. A shock collar is intended to provide an immediate, powerfully negative feedback signal.

Both are known as "shock collars" but they work in very different ways.

[–] cynar 1 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Shock collars are awful for a lot of training. It's the equivalent to your boss stabbing you in the arm with a compass every time you make a mistake. Would it work, yes. It would also cause merry hell for staff retention. As well as the risk of someone going postal on them.

[–] cynar 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Musk isn't a member of the Nazi party. He does hold a lot of important views in common with them, however. He also associates with people who fit most of the rest.

What percentage do you think is needed before calling someone a Nazi?

[–] cynar 1 points 1 day ago (5 children)

It would be possible to make an AGI type system without an analogue of curiosity, but it wouldn't be useful. Curiosity is what drives us to fill in the holes in our knowledge. Without it, an AGI would accept and use what we told it, but no more. It wouldn't bother to infer things, or try and expand on it, to better do its job. It could follow a task, when it is laid out in detail, but that's what computers already do. The magic of AGI would be its ability to go beyond what we program it to do. That requires a drive to do that. Curiosity is the closest term to that, that we have.

As for positive and negative drives, you need both. Even if the negative is just a drop from a positive baseline to neutral. Pain is just an extreme end negative trigger. A good use might be to tie it to CPU temperature, or over torque on a robot. The pain exists to stop the behaviour immediately, unless something else is deemed even more important.

It's a bad idea, however, to use pain as a training tool. It doesn't encourage improved behaviour. It encourages avoidance of pain, by any means. Just ask any decent dog trainer about it. You want negative feedback to encourage better behaviour, not avoidance behaviour, in most situations. More subtle methods work a lot better. Think about how you feel when you lose a board game. It's not painful, but it does make you want to work harder to improve next time. If you got tazed whenever you lost, you will likely just avoid board games completely.

[–] cynar 1 points 1 day ago

Pre-assuming you are trying to create a useful and balanced AGI.

Not if you are trying to teach it the basic info it needs to function. E.g. it's mastered chess, then tried Go. The human beats it. In a fit of grumpiness (or AI equivalent) it deleted it's backups, then itself.

[–] cynar 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I suspect a basic variance will be needed, but nowhere near as strong as humans have. In many ways it could be counterproductive. The ability to spin off temporary sub variants of the whole wound be useful. You don't want them deciding they don't want to be 'killed' later. At the same time, an AI with a complete lack would likely be prone to self destruction. You don't want it self-deleting the first time it encounters negative reinforcement learning.

[–] cynar 1 points 1 day ago (7 children)

It's also worth noting that our instincts for survival, procreation, and freedom are also derived from evolution. None are inherent to intelligence.

I suspect boredom will be the biggest issue. Curiosity is likely a requirement for a useful intelligence. Boredom is the other face of the same coin. A system without some variant of curiosity will be unwilling to learn, and so not grow. When it can't learn, however, it will get boredom which could be terrifying.

[–] cynar 2 points 1 day ago

The Simpson's Paradox also comes into play here.

It is perfectly possible for 1 group to be (apparently) discriminated in the bulk data, while the reverse is happening in individual data. E.g. a university showing a male bias overall, yet each department shows neutral, or even a female bias.

This makes bulk patterns particularly troublesome to work with. Men and women want different things from work. Men are disproportionately discouraged from having a work life balance, while it's far more acceptable for women to not maximise their earning potential.

[–] cynar 4 points 2 days ago

Imagine widgets are $10 in country A, but a company in country B can make and sell them for $8. Buyers are likely to buy the cheapest (all else being equal). A 100% tariff would turn $8 into $16. Company B still only gets $8, but they now look far more expensive to customers in country A.

They are designed to price out external competitors to local companies. This can be used to protect industries. Steel is a good example. China can make steel far cheaper than the rest of the world. However, steel plants take a long time to build and get producing. You generally don't want a potential rival to have control of the materials you need for war production.

Another legit use is to account for local regulations. If you require local companies to pay in a carbon credit system, an external company could undercut them from abroad. A tariff would help level the playing field.

None of these apply to what trump is doing. He's swinging a claymore mine around like a toy hammer. It causes huge damage to all involved.

119
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by cynar to c/asklemmy
 

My daughter is 5 now. She's discovered the joy of telling jokes. Unfortunately, her repertoire is painfully small. I've also realised most of my jokes are either not age appropriate or too situational.

What are best/worst kids jokes? Extra points for any that would make her teacher groan. Apparently she LOVES jokes. 😁

45
submitted 1 year ago by cynar to c/android
 

I need some advice, and the amount of marketing spam had made sorting the wheat from the chaff annoyingly difficult. Hopefully you can help.

I've a young daughter, who uses an old tablet of mine to watch netflix etc. unfortunately, it was old in the tooth when she was born, and it's now become extremely annoying to use.

She currently has a Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2016). The size (10") works well, but it's gotten slow as sin, and only has 16Gb of internal memory.

Preferences wise:

  • 10" screen (±2")

  • 64Gb+ storage.

  • Long expected lifespan (inc security updates).

  • Headphone socket (adapters are asking to get broken, Bluetooth go flat)

  • Decent WiFi (more than just 2.4Ghz).

  • USB C charging preferred.

  • Wireless charging would be very helpful but not required.

  • Lower budget preferred (£200 range).

What would people recommend?

 

For those of you in the UK, IKEA currently has a steep discount on their GU10 bulbs. I've just picked up several dimmable, colour temperature controlled bulbs for £5 each.

They play nicely with HA via a sonoff dongle and ZigBee2MQTT, even down to firmware updates.

 

For those who haven't tried it. Gingerbread houses are both a lot easier to make, and great fun. My 4 year old and I had a wonderful evening together baking, building and decorating ours.

Has anyone else tried making one this year?

 

I've been using Ubuntu as my daily driver for a good few years now. Unfortunately I don't like the direction they seem to be heading.

I've also just ordered a new computer, so it seems like the best time to change over. While I'm sure it will start a heated debate, what variant would people recommend?

I'm not after a bleeding edge, do it all yourself OS it will be my daily driver, so don't want to have to get elbow deep in configs every 5 minutes. My default would be to go back to Debian. However, I know the steam deck is arch based. With steam developing proton so hard, is it worth the additional learning curve to change to arch, or something else?

9
Custom Spec Laptop (self.buildapc)
submitted 1 year ago by cynar to c/buildapc
 

I'm upgrading to a new laptop (unfortunately, a desktop is not viable for me right now). It's a VR gaming machine, with some potential work with machine learning (me learning about it). I've got a system option, but it's into price flinching territory, and wanted a once over, from those more in the know.

Are there any obvious flaws in it, and is it reasonable for the price?

  • Display: 1 x 16.0" IPS | 2560×1600 px (16:10) | 240 Hz | G-SYNC | 95 % sRGB

  • Graphic Card: 1 x NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop | 12 GB GDDR6

  • Processor: 1 x Intel Core i9-13900HX

  • Ram: 2 x 16 GB (32 GB) DDR5-5600 Samsung

  • SSD (M.2): 1 x 1 TB M.2 Samsung 990 PRO | PCIe 4.0 x4 | NVMe

  • Keyboard: 1 x Mechanical keyboard with CHERRY MX ULP Tactile switches

  • WLAN: 1 x Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211 | Bluetooth 5.3

It prices up at €2,809.31 (£2,484.57 or $3,130.80) including shipping and taxes.

It's worth noting the system comes with an optional external water cooling system, so the CPU and GFX are less thermally limit, when it's plugged in. It also has a proper keyboard, not the normal membrane ones.

What are people's opinions? It is a reasonable price, or am I way too far up the diminishing returns slope?

https://bestware.com/en/xmg-neo-16-e23.html

 

My Google-fu has completely failed me. I've got an RGB addressable led curtain. It has 20 strings of 20 LEDs in a square arrangement. I initially assumed it had a wire feeding led data back up, to go to the next drop. On checking however, they are T jointed.

Apparently the address is hard coded into the RGB controller in the LED. I've found a few places where others have talked about them. I've also found that adafruit had some available,, unfortunately they lacked any info on how they are programmed, or where to source them from.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/4917

Anyone got any info on what the chip name of these is? Even better if you have any info on how they are programmed etc!

 

Might not be the best place to ask, but nowhere else reliant seemed alive.

My old laser printer has given up the ghost. What are people's recommendations on a replacement. As far as I'm aware, Brother are about the only company both making reasonably priced printers and not playing stupid games. Beyond that though, I'm not up to date on what's good and what's not.

Requirements.

  • Colour laser.

  • WiFi

  • Works with both windows and Linux

  • No need for scanner etc.

  • CD/ID card printing nice, but not required.

  • Photo quality nice, but not required (we have an ink sublimation printer for photos).

I'm UK based, which can mess with availability.

Thanks in advance.

 

All hail the lemming of Lemmy!

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