Thomas Dickerson @elfprince13@mumak.app

@inthehands @conniptions @mekkaokereke and due to the fact that cd quality audio is outside the bounds of human hearing, we’ll never actually notice that quantization noise. 16-bit audio has a 96dB dynamic range (well enough to blow your eardrums out), and 44.1kHz accounts for nyquist-shannon at the maximum of human hearing plus a bit for the high pass rolloff at the top. audiophiles who claim otherwise are victims of pseudoscience and placebo marketing

Threw together quick and dirty program that gives me a counterexample to the claim that sets with the Jaccard metric are embeddable in Euclidean space: https://gist.github.com/vhxs/6c01f4093e5492cc606d840dfa052038

Program halts almost immediately. I would expect that most such spaces can't be embedded in \( \mathbb{R}^n \).

Gosh. The opportunities for trolling are endless.

From #politics to #AI, one of the defining aspects of the time we live in is #bullshit.

Which is why I highly recommend this #book (essay, really) of #philosophy by Harry G Frankfurt. It really will help lead you to an understanding of where we find ourselves.

In Frankfurt's model, bullshit is not about lying, it is another axis of #morality entirely. Whereas a lie is constructed with knowledge of the truth, and is directly in opposition to it, bullshit has no concern with the truth. Bullshit can be true, or it can be false. The creator of bullshit does so without regard to these things.

When an LLM tells you that the human population of Mars is ten billion, it is not lying to you, it is bullshitting. Even if it correctly tells you that the population of Mars is zero, it is still bullshitting. Either way, its "concern" is with the text it is generating, and not with the truth or falsity of that text.

Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite, but you should go read the whole thing. https://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf It's not very long, it'll take you 20 minutes. I like the hard copy, I re-read it frequently and the physical book helps me feel like I am Thinking Serious Thoughts.

"For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. "

"Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need requires."

This was originally written, by the way, in 1984, but it sure reads like it could have been written in 2016. Or late 2022.

Who named it FoundationEssentials and not

Error: Your password must contain at least two characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.

Case in point. I have been photographing ants intensively, across multiple continents, since the start of digital photography 22 years ago. I have a PhD in ant taxonomy. I’m pretty sure I by now have photographed more living ant species than any other person.

And yet, I have not surpassed even 10% of the world’s ant species. Decades in. Less than 1 in 10, of just ants.

https://www.alexanderwild.com/Ants/Taxonomic-List-of-Ant-Genera