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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Pascal’s Wager, as well as other “logical proofs” for God like the Kalam Cosmological Argument, never get Christians or other religious people anywhere they want to go. Even if we accept their conclusions as given, it tells us nothing about the nature of that god. They want their god to be the one, and that doesn’t follow from any of these. Which is what the comic in OP is getting at.

    As far as the conclusions go, worshiping the Flying Spaghetti Monster is as good as any.













  • The US is allergic to it, but needs to get over it.

    Aluminum wire was tried in the 1970s due to a spike in copper prices. The problem was that they just tried to swap it right in. Aluminum and copper have different rates of expansion. Over time, that would slowly loosen the connectors, and the wires would pop right out and cause a fire.

    You can design connectors to handle both, and you’ll see many electrical things today specify that they’re good for aluminum or copper wire. It still has a bad reputation among electricians; they haven’t unlearned the problem yet.

    Now, one place it’s more of a problem is in things like transformer windings. There are kilometers of wiring in any of them, so the higher resistance of aluminum is a problem.



  • Have you seen videos or pictures that have dark sections, and there’s “banding” where there’s a noticeable difference between something black and something very black? Like a sharp border where it’s obvious the conversion process from the camera to your screen didn’t fully capture a gradient of darkness?

    That’s due to the process not being able to handle darker areas compared to very bright areas. It’s not enough to have an HDR display; the whole chain before then has to support it, as well. When it’s done, not only does it get rid of banding, but finer elements in darker areas can pop out and join the rest of the scene.


  • There’s a thread of thought that pops up in pro-AI posters from time to time: technology can’t go backwards. The implication being that the current state of AI can only improve, and is here to stay.

    This is wrong. Companies are spending multitudes of piles of cash to make AI work, and they could easily take their ball and go home. Extending copyright over the training data would likely trigger that, by the industry’s own admission.

    No, self-hosted models are not going to change this. A bunch of people running around with their own little agents aren’t going to sustain a mass market phenomenon. You’re not going to have integration in Windows or VisualStudio or the top of Google search results. You’re not going to have people posting many pics on Facebook of Godzilla doing silly things.

    The tech can go backwards, and we’re likely to see it.