a_bonobo

38 ms·

481.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
Most Australian wood is also ultra-hard, you can't have a bendy bow from there. People used to build streets from blocks of Jarrah wood [1]. A much more popular Australian weapon was the combination of spear thrower and spear; that&#x2
482.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
>McClintock was unfazed by academia’s rejection. She simply stopped publishing and waited for science to catch up. Scientists nowadays are judged mostly by how many papers they publish per year, this would be career suicide nowadays. Or
483.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
Yeah that's post-publication peer review, which I tend to gravitate towards myself; un-peer-reviewed papers in my field, posted on biorxiv, are generally of pretty high quality. (this might change as preprinting becomes a fully establi
484.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
I work in biology and plopping DNA into GPT-style models kind of works, but there are many long-distance interactions within genomes that are more distant than current GPTs can encode. In some plants there's linkage (~gets inherited to
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
Isn't that the solution they came up with in Dune? The Butlerian Jihad?
486.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
I stumbled over this quote in a different context but I feel like it applies everywhere: the optimal amount of fraud is not zero [1]. Now that Pandora's box is open, we will always have some AI-generated content. If we try to stamp i
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
and then what? it can't be original, it will forever recycle/regurgitate past SF. Nothing new will appear.
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
I'm actually surprised at the value of this piece seeing that it's fairly famous. Just $42,000, is that a typo?!
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
'a_bonobo, you're lying to yourself.' I am an overly optimistic person and I was talking about how I believe my career will pan out and develop. They just stopped me and said that I was lying to myself, being way too optimist
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
It's a bit like 'whoever moves first loses', isn't it? So many big corpos who could pay, but if one would pay, it might be enough. So why should it be your corpo?
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
>It's not like when a company the size of Spotify uses core-js they just add it to their project without thinking. No, they know how important the project is. The devs at Spotify know how important that project is. But the people
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
Yep :)
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
>It feels like the broader trend is for academics to move towards applied research, instead. Funny enough it was the opposite in my niche, a few years ago I could not get any applied research published. The CS reviewers would write thing
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
I have submitted PRs to Github repos that had proper, strict code review in place. That was as closest I've gotten to code mentoring
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
Two potential counter-arguments: 1) When artists 'steal' from others, they generally build something 'new'. AI can't really create anything 'new'. Case in point: Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose ste
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
There are no plants engineered to not produce plantable seeds. There's a long-standing moratorium on terminator genes that is generally observed. The reason why you have to rebuy your seeds from the companies is because of hybrid vigor
497.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
I feel like AI-scientists themselves are partially to blame for this. For starters, AI does not 'learn' like a human learns. But still many of the main terms of the field are based on learning: terms like 'learning rate'
498.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
Then again, there's a million evil things in my news-feed every day about which I can do precisely nothing, usually because they're in a different country. What does me knowing (in depressing detail!) about The Evil Thing I Have N
499.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
There's a story from the introduction of the potato into Germany. People would not eat the 'new' potatoes as dogs would not eat them. >The things have neither smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what use a
500.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
There's quite a few startups in this space that use computer vision to some degree, I'm aware of Bilberry which uses their own cameras to get on-field images, segment into invasive/non-invasive and spot-sprays from there. ht
501.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
>so it is unusual for a gauge to come apart like this one has There's a famous Australian sketch about an oil spill from 1991 that uses very similar wording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E8LW7qaDG4
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
I've moved to Tidal for the same reason; can't find any difference in the music library in my taste-niche
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
Cory Doctorow recently coined 'enshittification': >When switching costs are high, services can be changed in ways that you dislike without losing your business. The higher the switching costs, the more a company can abuse you,
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
>FOSSBro There's a similar term in science: bropenscience (bro + open science). The behaviour is strangely similar, people on the nerdier side who have been doing 'their' niche-thing for a while and are often condescending
505.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
The three biggest contributors on Github [1] are https://github.com/Ms2ger - at Igalia in Spain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia https://github.com/emilio - still at Mozilla? http
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
The difference to trains in Musk (and Silicon Valley's overall view) is that with automated cars, you don't have to share your personal space with other people (the poors!). It's easy to make fun of the overall project but th
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
You'd be surprised how many students turn in Wikipedia-articles run through software that replaces words with (often wrong) synonyms. I've tutored students who paid such find-and-replace services. Zero effort for the majority o
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
I feel Germany is a slightly different beast as a large part of the anti-vax crowd in Germany seems to recruit itself from left-ish/Green corner of politics, the people who've been anti-Monsanto for decades. It's not a far ju
509.
by a_bonobo 4y ago
I think Covid (and all the anti-vax grift around it) was the last straw, exploiting fears that were constructed by a cutthroat for-profit health system. It reminds me of this recent quote from Cory Doctorow: >We’ve had massive institutio
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by a_bonobo 4y ago
>4) Investors are genuinely concerned about the behavior of the Twitter CEO, who as we all know is the Tesla CEO. Is it really surprising that making bad decisions in one arena will affect outcomes in another? Is he even doing any work a

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