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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Repeating what some have already said here:

    • PBS SpaceTime is outstanding, and manages to ride the line between informative and accessible very well. Some episodes especially around heavy math/quantum mechanics are impenetrable for me but all the space stuff is great, the scripts are very well written, production value is top notch.
    • Dr Becky provides amazing content mostly geared around recent research and theories - especially with the James Webb Space Telescope being a year old now there’s some amazing insights coming out that she does a great job explaining. A bit less “pseudo lecture” than SpaceTime but still highly informative
    • StarTalk (Neil Degrasse Tyson) is great, but in a different way. It’s less formal and very much more like a podcast than a lecture or report as the prior two are.
    • Sabine Hossenfelder delivers a periodic “science without the gobbledegook” show that covers all areas but generally has a focus on physics and astrophysics. She’s semi-famous for not tolerating nonsense while also considering a sizeable portion of contemporary physics research to be nonsense. I think she’s hilarious in a parchment-dry German kind of way, and her content goes arguably deeper than the other channels listed here in terms of subject matter - I usually leave her videos thinking about things in a different way.
    • SmarterEveryDay is a general science/learning channel but really piqued my interest with a recent video about talking to NASA:

    https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=NrURYGlLii4Dbi1_

    The host has a background in aerospace engineering and missile test flights - so its about as close to rocket science as you can get! He knows his stuff and has a lot more practical, engineering related videos - kind of makes you think about how to operationalise the more cerebral ideas of the other channels.

    Hope you enjoy some or all of the suggestions here and from other commenters








  • I saw one suggestion which was to so away with male and female competitions, and instead have “open” and “restricted” comps. Open would be available to anyone, male or female, while you could set up as many restricted comps as you needed for the particular sport or activity with whatever rules make sense. So the 100m sprint might have Open, Restricted - Testosterone, and Restricted - Height - with whatever T level or height in centimetres decided by the relevant authority. Whereas something like weightlifting might have Restricted - Weight as it’s own class. The idea being any gender can compete provided provided meet the restrictions in place to make an interesting/fair competition within that bracket.




  • Where it gets really challenging is that LLMs can take the assignment input and generate an answer that is actually more educational for the student than what they learned d in class. A good education system would instruct students in how to structure their prompts in a way that helps them learn the material - because the LLMs can construct virtually limitless examples and analogies and write in any kind of style, you can tailor them to each student with the correct prompts and get a level of engagement equal to a private tutor for every student.

    So the act of using the tool to generate an assignment response could, if done correctly and with guidance, be more educational than anything the student picked up in class - but if its not monitored, if students don’t use the tool the right way, it is just going to be seen as a shortcut for answers. The education system needs to move quickly to adapt to the new tech but I don’t have a lot of hope - some individual teachers will do great as they always have, others will be shitty, and the education departments will lag behind a decade or two as usual.


  • I see the most likely outcome being legislated electric charging at petrol stations(like Germany has just done), possibly with subsidies, while the bulk of hydrogen infrastructure is private investment.

    Once a bean counter finds it more valuable to retrofit a truck fleet with hydrogen and set up their own refuelling stations at distribution centres - i.e. for journeys that can be completed in one tank load - you bet the hydrogen will start to flow. From there it’ll be up to the service station network to figure out if it’s worthwhile to put infrastructure in at certain larger truck stops.

    By the time we get there, the trucks will be mostly autonomous and the driver probably just an emergency role - so they’ll run as close to 24/7 as possible and the reduced refuelling time will have a substantial impact. It’ll either be that, or some sort of massive battery bank transfer system the truck can pull into to have it’s battery swapped - but batteries are heavy, and automating that would be inordinately expensive. Hydrogen seems more feasible a fossil fuel replacement when trip length/refueling time are your main concerns


  • It is too easy for most unions to become corrupted by self interested parties. It’s the same with any human endeavour. Relax the boundaries enough and people with less scruples than you will worm their way in.

    There’s needs to be legislative framework that protects the rights of every worker, every industry, everywhere as a baseline. Then construct sensible unions for various industries from there. Otherwise they become fragile, susceptible to personal influence - who’s going to run against a 10 year incumbent union president?- it needs an iron core underlying it to protect workers rights.



  • Way I see it a hammer is a tool, like a paintbrush or a camera or Photoshop or chatGPT.

    If you use the hammer to break a plate and call it art, you get the copyright.

    If you set the hammer up on a machine and feed it a million plates to smash, but with your direction and intent - to choose the types of plates, speed of the hammer, to use the tools to output different results - its still art and you still get the copyright.

    But if your hammer sits inside a Platesmasher 9000 which randomly takes plates as input, selects which plates to smash, smashes them, assesses the results, smashes more, then outputs a perfect smashed plate without you doing anything - that’s not copyright able. You can’t sya you deserve the copyright, as you did not meaningfully contribute to the work - the Platesmasher did everything. You cant point to the output of the system and say “the system made that and deserves copyright” because it’s just an algorithm, it doesn’t know or have intent behind what it’s doing, and can’t be assigned a right.

    What this does is stop corporations from building a million Platesmashers and claiming copyright on a billion versions of smashed plates - human intervention is required as part of the creative process to use the tools in order for there be a right in the first place.




  • I agree, you want bums in seats as quickly and effortless as possible. Your average user coming from reddit just wants an “all” feed they can use to curate their own front page, they don’t really know, care, or want to learn about the plumbing underneath. The ones that do care will figure it out as theres plenty of resources available.

    Knowing very little about the technical side - and speaking only from my experience trying to get my own account set up - I almost think the fediverse need a dedicated, standalone sign up instance (or series of instances) that has no posting enabled, but is automatically federated to the X most popular instances - so that apps and web interfaces can create simple default sign ups for new users without them needing to understand what instances even are.

    Something like “lemmy.gateway” that can act as a home for the user account that then looks at the instances where the content actually happens, that can have high availability and redundancy in the event of server load on the popular instances, and that “just works” for your average reddit migrant so they don’t have to go diving into instance details to dip their toe in the water. That way your “content instances” can go up or down without impacting new user signups, your apps can work to load popular posts even if what would normally be your home instance is down, and you can decouple things a bit - maybe your “gateway” lemmy instance can drop some code to run leaner since it doesn’t have to worry about posting content.

    To fund it you’d need some selfless souls, or perhaps agreement between major instances to shell out some revenue to host the sign up instance network, with the idea that getting users in to the fediverse generically is just as important as getting them on specific instances.

    I have no idea if this is even possible but from a new user flow, if the intent is to maximise active users, you just want to get people “in” so they can eyeball, vote and post - then let learn how lemmy is different. Not the other way around.


  • This is a good summary; as a reddit exile myself who exclusively used Sync, I think it’s worth emphasising that Dawson has done an amazing job of making the transition from reddit to lemmy pretty seamless from an app design point of view. I can set my views and filters up identically as they were in the Reddit version of the app, and the lemmy experience becomes essentially identical to reddit.

    There’s definitely a conflict between “paid closed source app” and “FOSS fediverse”, and there’s arguments to be made about whether user revenue should be directed to server expenses to maintain communities or front end app development to attract more users, which I think will be interesting to see play out. But at the end of the day Sync makes lemmy “useable” in a way that replicates the reddit experience, which is what a lot of migrants were after - other apps (while arguably more feature rich in terms of the fediverse) just didn’t quite hit the dopamine-feed the way Sync does.