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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I got excited that the paper makes concrete predictions for particle masses - the electron, muon, and tau, the quarks, and the neutrinos. For the moment, particle masses are free parameters in the Standard Model that you need to plug arbitrary experimentally-derived numbers into. A theory that can calculate them directly would be a great theory, even if it were as weird as having 3 time dimensions.

    Buuut… this paper doesn’t actually explain how it calculates all its amazing predictions. It just starts with something like “what if Schrödinger equation, but instead of exp(it) we had exp(it1 + it2 + it3)!” And I agree: yes! Let’s! What if! We should explore all possibilities, no matter how weird, if they lead to better understanding of the world. But then it immediately goes to say “let α and γ be some [unspecified] constants. Therefore the mass of the muon is 105.6583745 MeV”. Like… how?

    I thought maybe this is a paper just to announce the theory, and all the laborious calculations are in the supplemental materials, but at the very bottom it specifically writes “Data Availability: The theoretical predictions and numerical calculations presented in this paper are fully described within the text.” **Frodo mode:** Fine, keep you secrets!

    Until the author shows the actual theory and the calculations outputting all these amazing predictions, they are no more useful than that LinkedIn post that said “what if e = mc2 but e = mc2 + AI





  • You implied it by answering Corngood’s question “You have to rank 5 candidates?” with a link to a general RCV video. You misunderstood Corngood to not know what RCV is. However, within the context of this thread (“NYC elections”), some awareness of RCV is to be presumed. Indeed, Corngood mentions in another comment to have already used RCV before. To me it was clear Corngood was upset about the “have to rank 5”, not about “WTF is RCV”. By linking to a general video you are implying that this is how RCV works, that you HAVE to rank 5, otherwise it won’t count, which is false. That’s not what you meant, but this is how it appears to other readers who would not be aware of your original misunderstanding. Those of us who actually like RCV feel an obligation to step in and correct you, all of us at once, to pre-empt the hazard of somebody else believing in your (unintentional) implication and ending up with the wrong idea that “wow, RCV sucks! your ballot gets thrown out if you don’t fill in all 5 bubbles perfectly!”




  • I know Lemmy hates AI, but this actually would be a perfect use for it. The problem is the idea of what an ad is. Yes, you could try to use secondary characteristics like image color or sound normalized volume (WhyTF do youtube ads still sound 3x louder than content? are we living in cable era again?), but they would be error-prone for any content more visually intense than a podcast. They would also not capture sponsorblock content like “I love showing you all these foreign countries but what I love even more is having my internet connection secure” that match the video flow. A crowdsourced lookup table of all known ad clip fingerprints would go a long way, until ad videos themselves start being AI-generated on the fly for that sweet personalization revenue.

    No, what I really want is to distill the idea of what I want to see into an AI and have it filter out what I don’t want to see for me. I know an ad when I see one, so AI can too. Pre-roll/mid-roll ads? Gone. Sponsorblock content? Gone. Like and subscribe? Skipped as if it didn’t exist. Virtual billboards on the sidelines of sporting events? Overlayed with kittens. Idiocracy banners squeezing the video from either side? Cropped and rescaled. Watermarks? Excised and content-aware-filled.

    The last frontier is when the content itself is secretly an ad, imprinting upon you some idea or point of view. You’ll have to watch out for that one on your own.


  • In the ultimate, you’d need to do something like run a headless browser in a virtual machine, have it play out and record the entire video, then use something like AI to splice out the ad segments and distracting elements (a souped-up sponsorblock will work for a while, but eventually ads will be injected into the raw video stream at random intervals), and present the pristine finished content to you. Basically we are going to re-invent TiVo all over again xD.

    In worst case, you can’t start watching until the pre-roll ad timers expire. This is how adblocking works on Twitch streams currently - you can only see a purple screen even if you block the ads.

    And yes, the headless browser will need to use AI for human-like mouse movement and to solve captchas - basically whatever state-of-the-art technologies spammers and scrapers are already currently using.

    Google is anticipating this future and is trying to implement and force hardware-based DRM for web video before then.



  • It’s a tarpit. If they simply displayed a blocked “no vids for u” message, you’d get outraged, go complain online, look for workarounds, and eventually find a bypass. If everything still works but poorly, you get annoyed, turn off your adblocker to troubleshoot, possibly blame the adblocker for being “buggy” and keep it off. Their help page solution implies they are hoping for just that. There is no “smoking gun” blocked message to go complain online about, even though it is indeed their servers that are degrading your connection on purpose in secret. Or maybe you give up and leave their ecosystem entirely, which is no big loss for them.

    The proper solution is to develop an adblock that they cannot detect is blocking ads. This may require actually downloading the ad video in background, and then lying that the video has played.



  • TauZero@mander.xyztoPrivacy@lemmy.ml[Deleted]
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    1 month ago

    Airplane mode on Apple has two sub-toggles: wifi and bluetooth (the main toggle controls the cellular antenna). With all three toggled off, find-my does not work. The device just shows up as “offline, location unknown, last seen at…” on the map. Something to watch out for though: for some reason Apple will turn bluetooth back on after a couple days without asking, even with airplane still on. Also, an app running in background could in theory record the GPS coordinates and transmit them to home server once connection is reestablished.


  • Then you’d be surprised when you calculate the numbers!

    A Falcon 9 delivers 13100kg to LEO and has 395,700kg propellant in 1st stage and 92,670kg in 2nd stage. Propellant in both is LOX/RP-1. RP-1 is basically long chains of CH2, so together they burn as:

    3 O2 (3x32) + 2 CH2 (2x14) -> 2 CO2 (2x44) + 2 H2O (2x18)
    

    Which is 2*44/(2*44+2*18) = 71% CO2. Meaning each launch makes (395700+92670)*.71 = 347 tons CO2 or 347/13.1 = 26.5 tons of CO2 per ton to orbit. A lot of it is burned in space, but I’m guessing the exhaust gases don’t reach escape velocity so they all end up in the atmosphere anyway.

    As for how much a compute satellite weighs, there is a wider range of possibilities, since they don’t exist yet. This is China launching a test version of one, but it’s not yet an artifact optimized for compute per watt per kilogram that we’d imagine a supercomputer to be.

    I like to imagine something like a gaming PC strapped to a portable solar panel, a true cubesat :). On online shopping I currently see a fancy gaming PC at 12.7kg with 650W, and a 600W solar panel at 12.5kg. Strap them together with duct tape, and it’s 1000/(12.7+12.5)*600 = 24kW of compute power per ton to orbit.

    Something more real life is the ISS support truss. STS-119 delivered and installed S6 truss on the ISS. The 14,088kg payload included solar panels, batteries, and truss superstructure, supplying last 25% of station’s power, or 30kW. Say, double that to strap server-grade hardware and cooling on it. That’s 1000*30/(2*14088) = 1.1kW of compute per ton to orbit. A 500kg 1kW server is overkilling it, but we are being conservative here.

    In my past post I’ve calculated that fossil fuel electricity on Earth makes 296g CO2 per 1 kilowatthour (using gas turbine at 60% efficiency burning 891kJ/mol methane into 1 mol CO2: 1kJ/s * 3600s / 0.6 eff / (891kJ/mol) * 44g/mol = 296g, as is the case where I live).

    The CO2 payback time for a ton of duct taped gamer PC is 1000kg * 26.5kg CO2/kg / ( 24kW * 0.296kg/kW/hour) / (24*365) = 0.43 years. The CO2 payback time for a steel truss monstrosity is `1000kg * 26.5kg/kg / (1.1kW * 0.296kg/kW/hour) / (24*365) = 9.3 years.

    Hey, I was pretty close!