• 0 Posts
  • 67 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

help-circle
  • This video says it both ways I’ve heard. The white people around me pronounce it like the one with the union jack (heavy emphasis on the B), the Spanish speakers pronounce it more like the version with the American flag background (ironic). Most of the other pronunciation videos I could find seem to be made by AI voices and mangle the pronunciation in a myriad of ways. This other video has an actual person speaking well (I can’t speak to the rest of the content of the video).




  • It’s obvious now that you literally don’t have any idea how programming or machine learning works, thus you think no one else does either. It is absolutely not some “black box” where the magic happens. That attitude (combined with your oddly misplaced condescension) is toxic and honestly kind of offensive. You can’t hand waive away responsibility like this when doing any kind of engineering. That’s like first day ethics-101 shit.


  • Whether you call in it programming or training, the designers still designed a car that doesn’t obey traffic laws.

    People need to get it out of their heads that AI is some kind of magical monkey-see-monkey-do. AI isn’t magic, it’s just a statistical model. Garbage in = Garbage out. If the machine fails because it’s only copying us, that’s not the machine’s fault, not AI’s fault, not our fault, it’s the programmer’s fault. It’s fundamentally no different, had they designed a complicated set of logical rules to follow. Training a statistical model is programming.

    You’re whole “explanation” sounds like a tech-bro capitalist news conference sound bite released by a corporation to avoid guilt for running down a child in a crosswalk.




  • I’m very pro real books and as a result was hesitant to jump on the ebook bandwagon. That all changed after finishing a particularly large book early during a long trip, lugging those damn dead trees around the country for a while and unable to find anything worthwile to read in along the way. Now with my ebook any book and every book on my “to read” list taking up the same space, same weight, and I don’t worry about damaging them because the ebook is waterproof with a rugged cover.

    I still buy hard to find and out of print books at used book stores, but those stay home and get gifted to special people when I’m done.



  • This whole idea that they “saved” it is philosophically flawed and deeply problematic from a moral and ecological perspective. Claiming that the mother “abandoned” it demonstrates ignorance of the way these animals live and care for their young.

    Regardless, a proper wildlife rehabilitation program by a zoologist would have actually kept the moose alive and been in a position to judge if the moose was safe to be re-released. Your moose story could have easily ended in the death of people in addition to the moose. This isn’t some kind of vain high horse I’m on. It’s just simple facts learned through decades of direct experience with wild animals in the wild, in rehabilitation, and in zoos. I stand by my earlier statements. I’m sorry this bitter pill is hard for you to swallow I guess. So it goes.


  • Feeding wildlife, even one treated as a “pet”, is a death sentence for them just as surely as if you had fired the gun yourself. Your neighbor killed that moose.

    Other prime examples include: feeding alligators (now you’ve created a danger to others as well, so you’ve not just killed the animal, which will need to be destroyed by officials, you’ve potentially maimed or killed a person); feeding ducks and geese (I once has a neighbor that would feed ducks in the parking island adjacent to the main entry to our apartment complex, no surprise to me that we saw many near misses and a few dead ducks in our driveway); bears (this one should be obvious, same scenario as the gators except bears are faster, climb trees, and are probably smarter than the average person they are going to encounter when they leave the woods looking for human food).

    Undomesticated animals (wildlife/wild animals) are not pets. They’re never going to be pets. They’ve just learned to manipulate some humans for food or shelter. Maybe you’ll get along for a little while with them, but that relationship has poisoned the fear keeping them safe for and from other humans.





  • She already works in GIS and is looking to supplement that work with python. Python is used for more than geojson and web development in ArcGIS Pro. I’ve use it for constructing labels, simple field calculations, symbology, data processing etc. and in general ESRI makes it pretty simple to implement compared to the other terms you’ve listed. All she really needs to get started using Python with ESRI products is an simple python course and googling for some ArcGIS examples, which are pretty abundant. I remember taking one ages ago that ran the code in the browser, but I can’t remember it now.



  • Some people get a lot out of sitting very still and clearing their minds completely. Some people get more clarity in motion, while running, rowing, cycling, or walking. There is another way on meditation that involves almost the opposite of a clear mind, where you focus on experiencing and really noticing absolutely everything around you; every breath, birdsong, machine noise, footstep, squirrel chittering, and insect buzzing. Sometimes while focusing on a puzzle or game like Tetris, Sodoku, or a Rubik’s cube, it feels meditative to me. I don’t know if that’s real meditation. But my point is that everyone’s built differently, find what works for you and stop worrying about failing. If you’re trying, you’re not failing.