MartianSands

joined 2 years ago
[–] MartianSands 14 points 11 months ago (20 children)

The black box isn't like a modern hard drive, with terabytes of storage. They're often old, and even the modern ones need to put so much effort into protection against things like fire, seawater and collisions that they don't have as much space as you might imagine.

They have to rely on someone going out of their way to take the box out, or shut down the plane, because the alternative would be for them to have some way to decide for themselves to stop recording. If they could do that then a false positive would cause them to miss potentially important data, so they're designed to keep going until someone makes it stop

[–] MartianSands 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is that a thumbprint in blood? I'm surprised they accepted that document at all, rather than disposing of it unread on the grounds it's a biohazard

[–] MartianSands 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It might not make him wrong, but he also happens to be wrong.

You can't compare AI art or literature to AI software, because the former are allowed to be vague or interpretive while the latter has to be precise and formally correct. AI can't even reliably do art yet, it frequently requires several attempts or considerable support to get something which looks right, but in software "close" frequently isn't useful at all. In fact, it can easily be close enough to look right at first glance while actually being catastopically wrong once you try to use it for real (see: every bug in any released piece of software ever)

Even when AI gets good enough to reliably produce what it's asked for first time & every time (which is a long way away for quite a while yet), a sufficiently precise description of what you want is exactly what programmers spend their lives writing. Code is a description of a program which another program (such as a compiler) can convert into instructions for the computer. If someone comes up with a very clever program which can fill in the gaps by using AI to interpret what it's been given, then what they've created is just a new kind of programming language for a new kind of compiler

[–] MartianSands 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

There's not much to expand on. There's no mechanism here for linking to someone else's content to cost money, so it doesn't.

[–] MartianSands 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Not exactly. There are some species which haven't changed all that much for millions of years, and those have certainly managed excellent adaptability.

Others, though, might find themselves evolving to cope with the climate right now at the expense of being vulnerable to some future problem. Say the climate is very hot, but in a few tens of thousands of years there'll be an ice age. An animal which is well adapted to the ice age will probably go extinct before it arrives, having all been eaten by an animal well adjusted to the heat which is here right now.

"In the end" isn't useful if you get outcompeted in the meantime

[–] MartianSands 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No British show is going to discuss a marijuana habit, that's very much an American word. It's called cannabis

[–] MartianSands 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem with an automatic delete is that it's just as exploitable. Anyone can set up 10 accounts on various hosts, or even on one host, and gain the power to instantly delete anything they like

[–] MartianSands 6 points 1 year ago

Perhaps not, but it would make it far easier for any sympathetic brain surgeon you managed to find who was willing to try and fix the problem for you.

The key thing is not needing that specific company to help, but needing generic expert assistance is fine

[–] MartianSands 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The position of the sun isn't really the problem. The problem is that one of its engines seems to have been damaged just before landing, so it landed precisely where it was supposed to, but tumbled over and is now more or less upside-down.

Still a noteworthy achievement, because it landed softly (which is a technical term meaning "didn't hit so hard it got crushed into a pancake", or more specifically "so hard it broke"). They'll have to work on whatever went wrong before landing though, so they can land right side up next time

[–] MartianSands 3 points 1 year ago

One hopes that there's more than a single button involved. Hopefully several, with flip-up plastic covers, and at least one manual valve.

This is not something we want to happen by accident

[–] MartianSands 1 points 1 year ago

I think they were deplatformed for criticizing Israel, rather than for being Jewish. I think that makes it the regular mundane kind of unacceptable, rather than antisemitism

[–] MartianSands 29 points 1 year ago

Yeah, this is fake. The contactless payment system depends on a loop of wire running around the whole card (or, at least, taking up much of the card's area). There's no way a phone could communicate with it after chopping that off

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