You’re spot on regarding how AI operates.

AI is stupid story time!

I recently helped a friend with a self-hosted VPN problem. He had been using a free trial of Gemini Pro to try to fix it himself but gave up after THREE HOURS. It never tried to help him diagnose the issue, but instead kept coming up with elaborate fixes with names that suggested they were known issues, like The MTU Traffic Jam, The Packet Collision Quandary, and, my favorite, The Alpine Ridge Controller Trap. Then it would run him through an equally elaborate “fix”. When that didn’t work, it would use the failure conditions to propose a new, very serious sounding pile of bullshit and the process would repeat.

I fixed it in about fifteen minutes, most of that time spent undoing all the unnecessary static routing, port forwarding, and driver rollbacks it had him do. The solution? He had a typo in the port number in his peer config.

I can’t deny that LLMs are full of useful knowledge. I read through its output and all of its suggestions absolutely would have quickly and efficiently fixed their accompanying issue, even the thunderbolt/pcie bridging issue, if the real problem had been any of them. They’re just garbage at applying that information.

Archive link for anyone who doesn’t want to deal with the “not a paywall”:

https://archive.ph/XeWFy

I would be shocked if he cared. It’s just not amongst his concerns.

The ads seem to be pretty variable depending on usage so I suspect not everyone is seeing the same thing. I rarely use YouTube in any form. When I do and I’m rawdogging it for whatever reason, it seems like I get a few short ads, like 30s or less. They’re annoying but not awful.

A friend keeps YouTube running constantly on his TV in the background while he works. He gets so many ads and they’re so long! Like several minutes of ads, mostly unskippable, over the course of a 15 minute video. I don’t know how people deal with that shit.

Cancer, and Wolf, refers to the old common term for cancer: wolf. It was thought to be a parasite that ate up the afflicted, like a wolf.

It’s the same as chrisomes. Infant mortality was so high, the ones who died without obvious cause just get lumped together by age group.

Chrisomes refers to those who died within the first month, during the time they’d be baptised. The baptismal cloth, the chrisome, would often be just as a burial shroud.

Teeth meant they were old enough to have one or more teeth, 6-24 months. Teething was thought to be potentially fatal because so many infants died during that period. Correlation, causation, yadda yadda yadda.

Just to preface, I’m a scientist: micro- and molecular biology. I’m not saying to take what I say as gospel, just giving context that I might know things. Sometimes.

Outbreeding depression has more possible implications than fertility decrease and infant mortality increase, entirely dependent on the heritable traits responsible for the depression effects. While the probability of persistent outbreeding depression seen in subsequent generationa would be lower due to traits subject to higher selective pressure, like increases in early infant mortality, the overall probability of outbreeding depression itself isn’t influenced post facto by its results, just its persistence.

Given we don’t know the original extent of neanderthal/human interbreeding, what we’re seeing now COULD be the “much lower percentage” you mention and still could come from multiple events. In fact, if these crosses resulted in stronger depression effects, I’d argue a greater number of crossings would be one factor behind the persistence of some genes today.

There ya go. It almost has too many squares.

Two ways.

First, sex chromosomes. In mammals, sex is determined by the sex chromosomes - males have XY, females XX. If interbreeding was equal between the sexes of both species, this would be reflected in the frequency of neanderthal genes on each chromosome in the current human population, but it’s more heavily skewed toward the Y chromosome than we’d expect if equal pairing was true. This suggests a higher proportion of successful male neanderthal/female human offspring.

Second, mitochondrial DNA. While genomic DNA in a sexually-reproducing species is a mix between the parents, in most mammals the inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is purely maternal. This is because only the egg’s mitochondria typically survive, though on rare occasion paternal mitochondria are also passed on. There is no known existent neanderthal mtDNA in the human population. This suggests either female neanderthal/male human crosses didn’t happen much and/or didn’t often produce offspring capable of further reproduction.

Of course, there are many other explanations for all of these. These are just amongst the simplest possible options, and in population genetics, it’s not uncommon that the simplest answers are frequently correct.

Keep in mind heterosis isn’t always the result of hybridization and even then the magnitude of isolation doesn’t always positively correlate. Outbreeding depression can also be the result, increasingly so when two groups are more genetically distant or when one group is already subject to heavy inbreeding depression, as the neanderthals were thought to be.

I can smell both this comment and the people that would seriously say something like this.

Is that an electrophoresis gel?

I did edit the posts. First edited then deleted immediately, the last two tries edited in batches, then deleted weeks later. No dice. I’m sure Reddit has far more than one backup and it’s clearly easy enough to automatically detect and revert mass edits, even done gradually over time.

Another route is to sue them.

That’s going to be pretty difficult and unlikely to succeed. They’re worse than the music industry. Here’s the applicable blurb from their TOS:

You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. For example, this license includes the right to use Your Content to train AI and machine learning models, as further described in our Public Content Policy. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

I did the same. It was all restored within a couple of weeks. I’ve since done it again twice and just checked - it’s all back.

Can confirm. I went on a banana adventure during the pandemic where I ate nearly 10kg of all sorts of different bananas, including the “Big Mike”. I learned the Cavendish is a shit banana and we’ve been cheated out of superior nanners for decades.

Anecdotal, but… I’ve been a musician for 36 years and have fantastic hearing not just for my age but for any age. I know, I have to get it quantitatively tested twice a year!

I can’t tell the difference at all between FLAC and 320 kbps from the same source. I can tell a difference between FLAC and 128 kbps, but it’s not huge. It sounds a bit dull, but I have to be looking for the difference and comparing the two. If you just gave me one or the other with no reference, I might suspect the 128 if it was a simple recording of a single instrument or a song I’m intimately familiar with, and even then I wouldn’t be sure of it. It just sometimes “feels” weird.

So I converted over 4 terabytes of my music stash to 320 kbps and cut the total space into less than 2. Feels good.

I need to start faking computer illiteracy or at least downplaying my level of literacy. Employers notice how quickly I get computer-related tasks done, but then they expect that as my norm while my coworkers are struggling to use any device without a touch screen.

The last new hire I trained was in his mid-twenties and lacked basic tech literacy outside of the iPhone. I asked him to write up a quick protocol using a template I sent him. He typed the text of the Outlook file preview into notepad and went from there. I was baffled.

Don’t get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.

OR

DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don’t die from an aneurysm first. It’ll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.

People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.

Nope.

Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can’t see that don’t go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.

They don’t know, they’ll never know, and they don’t need to know.

Believe it or not, @themeatbridge@lemmy.world is correct, just not about why. It’s to adjust for differences in jug size caused by temperature.

Plastic jugs are made by blow molding, where a tube of plastic is warmed, then inflated within a mold using compressed air to create its shape. In winter, the air and environment are cooler so the plastic is also cooler and accordingly a bit less elastic while getting blown. This results in jugs that contract a bit more while cooling and are a bit smaller. To compensate, cool weather jugs have a shallower dimple. The alternative is either warming the air or warming the molds more, both of which cost more, while this actually slightly saves money by using a bit less plastic. The converse is true for summer jugs - bigger dimple, warmer air - as the warmer plastic molds more easily.

The dimple also adds a bit of structural stability, so the jugs can be made of slightly thinner plastic. These factories pump out millions of jugs, so even a $0.005 saving per jug adds up.

I actually did some work for a company that makes plastic containers, so I got it straight from them. Otherwise I’d provide a source. What I could find online that corroborates is low quality local reporting, so I didn’t bother with URLs.