• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2024

help-circle


  • It’d be interesting to see how much this changes if you were to restrict the training dataset to books written in the last twenty years, I suspect the model would be a lot less negative. Older books tend to include stuff which does not fit with modern ideals and it’d be a real struggle to avoid this if such texts are used for training.

    For example I was recently reading a couple of the sequels to The Thirty-Nine Steps (written during WW1) and they include multiple instances that really date them to an earlier era with the main character casually throwing out jarringly racist stuff about black South Africans, Germans, the Irish, and basically anyone else who wasn’t properly English. Train an AI on that and you’re introducing the chance for problematic output - and chances are most LLMs have been trained on this series since they’re now public domain and easily available.


  • The watermark is noticeably more readable in the Facebook image I linked though, and it does say photography (even there it is somewhat blurred though, so assuming it was actually clear in the original source that copy is a few recompressions along the chain).

    The dates of the other sources however are what really convinces me it’s not AI. After all, who was doing good quality photorealistic AI image generation in 2021?



  • Seems legit enough to me. The next rack of tomatoes would only be ~2m away after all given the gaps between rows aren’t going to be massive. Pretty sure the sharpness issues are primarily from repeated JPEG recompression data loss - you can find a better quality version of the image by searching ‘carmine spina tomatoes’ which both looks less compressed in the far ground and dates from at least 2022 (so before mass popularity of AI generation).




  • A trebuchet primarily transforms downward motion (of the counterweight) into forward motion, so it would actually work - the trebuchet doesn’t push the ship back as much as it pushes its load forward. This is particularly so if your trebuchet has wheels and you have room on your ship to accommodate it rocking back and forth when firing.

    Edit: Thinking about it this technique would work even with something that does impart equal backwards force on the ship when firing a projectile, because there is considerably more force involved in winching the ship towards the anchor than what is involved in actually moving the anchor. You aren’t pulling against the inertia of a free floating anchor after all, you’re pulling against the ground the anchor has hooked into.



  • All cars could last a lot longer if people kept maintaining them and - importantly - didn’t damage them. Electric cars are not going to be immune to this, I can’t see them lasting much longer on average than ICE cars.

    Keep in mind that even when you change out the engine for something with less parts the rest of the car still remains and contains things which will eventually cause issues. For example I bought a cheap van a few months ago and here’s some of the reasons it was cheap that are not ICE specific:

    • Steering wheel lock mechanism sticking
    • Air distribution flap cables kinked/binding so A/C only blew at feet
    • Central locking on side door sticking
    • Rear shocks leaking
    • Front strut mount bushings worn
    • Head unit not functioning

    Presumably the previous owner just didn’t want to spend the money on fixing these issues as they arose, and eventually it added up into a lot of potential expense (if you have to pay someone to fix it for you) and more reasons to sell the car. Such behaviour seems pretty common in my experience and I fully expect it to continue with EVs. It’ll be hard enough to get people to even maintain their brakes and change the motor coolant considering the natural reluctance of people to spend money on maintenance and this unfortunately prevalent idea that EVs don’t need it.

    Funnily enough the main ICE specific problem with that van was just as much an electrical issue as part of the petrol engine - an intermittent secondary air injection error code which ended up being down to a combination of a sticking valve and a fuse with a hairline crack causing an intermittent connection.