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If your world view consists of white cowboy hats and black cowboy hats you may want to check whether your white cowboy hats aren't just black cowboy hats that have been spray painted white.

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#JamesWebb #Space Telescope's 'little red dots' come into focus

npr.org/2025/01/14/nx-s1-52589…

> A #cosmic object spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope has flummoxed #astronomers. Now, a research team has studied hundreds of these "little red dots" and found clues about their identity.

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the only social media platform that operates out of the EU


Except for all the other ones.

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I genuinely believe we’ll look back on this era of the web and think we were all just collectively insane.

The best technology of our existence for reading is ubiquitous yet there’s never been a worse reading experience.

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And it's that resource usage for training that is my problem with it, so I'm not happy about AI subtitles in VLC. I also suspect it doesn't work, but that is maybe just me.


So, here is the first concrete technical info about VLC AI subtitles:

* it uses OpenAI whisper model.
* you'll have to download that bit separately [1].
* vlc will use that on your computer, so it is not using the paid for API version.

So still using all the water and power to train models, and to run on your computer when you watch something that need translation.

#VLC

[0] numerama.com/tech/1879712-vlc-…

[1] github.com/openai/whisper


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I’m not sure who made this t-shirt but I think I need to have it.

Edit: It would seem to be @heydon (webbed-briefs.teemill.com/prod…)

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Why are people so proud of their religion and class and caste instead of, you know, being proud of themselves as a person? I'd think that's something a whole lot valuable.

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The oldest surviving deck of 52 playing cards (1475 AD), made in the Netherlands 🇳🇱

The concept of playing cards is thought to have originated in Asia, making its way to Europe by the late 14th Century AD, likely through trading routes.

In the Netherlands, cards became popular during 15th Century AD, as both a pastime and a means of socialization among nobility and the growing merchant class.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

#archaeohistories

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in reply to Archaeo-Histories

The aces are just ones, otherwise it's pretty much what we have today. You could play Poker or Gin with that deck.
in reply to Archaeo-Histories

This reminds me of one of my favorite poker quotes:

"A split pair board is what started the Greco-Persian War."



I've been there! (It was already broken)


Temple of Poseidon is one of the most important monuments from the Golden Age of Athens. It is perched on the edge of a cliff, located 70m above the sea, located at Cape Sounion 🇬🇷

Built in 5th Century BC, the temple is in the typical Greek hexastyle - featuring six doric columns on the front portico. 16 out of the original 38 columns are still standing today, and they were 20ft tall.

#archaeohistories


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Whether you like the direction that things are going with AI or not you need to stop deluding yourself into thinking that you'll always be able to tell it's fake, you are going to eventually get scammed.

There are still some tells if you really know what you're looking for, but we're not at Will Smith spaghetti, 6 fingers or 2 left feet. Pretending like this is not a real problem you have to deal with isn't going to make the problem go away anymore.

This girl is not real

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in reply to Stefano Marinelli

Might be worth doing by state as there is such a high level of repetition of place names in the US? Americans usually include the name of a state when describing a city for this reason. (The disambiguation page for Miami is a good example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_(d… )
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Cracking #aurora here in #lapland to end 2024.
Happy New Year everyone.
May 2025 see a bit more peace and harmony 🤞

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Happy New Year, everybody! Here we've started already.

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no - thank you for saying it. it's important, and we agree with your analysis and we didn't have spoons or words to say it ourselves.

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I kept trying to explain to cis het white people what I was scared of. I kept having a problem where whenever I made a specific prediction (even a prediction like "Trump will keep this widely publicized campaign promise"), they would come up with a reason why my specific prediction would not happen exactly as I laid it out, and therefore I have nothing to worry about.

The stuff you're saying is the stuff I'd been saying. It's refreshing to see someone else say it instead of dismiss it.

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the counter-argument to this is to say that in large parts of the country the people that would feel empowered by trump being president already feel empowered, and in the parts of the country where they're not already empowered (to the extent such places exist) they have to fight the state and local people that are also there on the ground
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right I think we're actually agreeing except I'm skeptical there would have actually been such a cap under Harris (Trump's monstrous immigration policy was an extension of Obama's monstrous immigration policy)
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1/ On this last day of 2024, I thought this might interest those of you following our progress in detail. Here is a summary of all the One-Way Light Travel Times of the Voyager spacecraft over 2024.

The first thing to note is that the plot lines have different vertical axes! While the times are _offset_, the scale is the same. If you plot both these times on a single vertical scale, you can barely see the sinusoidal shape. Remember: green with green, blue with blue.

OK, why is there this shape? Because the distance measurements are being made from a moving platform: Earth. The sinusoidal variance is because of Earth's orbit around the Sun. At certain times of year, the Earth is actually moving towards the Voyagers faster than they are leaving, so the distance _decreases_.

Continues...

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Looks like Google did a not so nice thing. The Google Authenticator app no longer will generate the codes for some items, including Google's own account. This happened after they offered to backup all items to their cloud in case you lose your phone; if you don't do that, their app will break itself like this.

Two-factor authentication is about 'one thing you know and one thing you have'. The first thing is your password, the second thing your phone. The generated codes on your phone prove that you have your phone. Backing up the app in your Google account renders the latter useless and puts you back at one-factor authentication.

Of course you can and maybe should backup the secrets stored in the app. But that must be on 'something you have' and not somebody's cloud.
#GoogleAuthenticator

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I went to the Christmas market in Maastricht today. It was nice and cold and crowded. It gets dark quickly this close to midwinter.

Photos taken with Canon EOS R10 and Canon RF 28 F2.8. Cc-by.
#ChristmasMarket #Maastricht #Photography


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Over six decades, Jill and I had the honor of calling Jimmy Carter a dear friend.

But, what’s extraordinary about Jimmy Carter, though, is that millions of people throughout America and the world who never met him thought of him as a dear friend as well.

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As long as I live, I will never understand why America would rather elect a singularly worthless white rapist as president than an exceptionally impressive black woman.

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in reply to Andrea Junker :verified:

*really* don't understand? or just wish it (racism, misogyny, disinformation) wasn't true?
in reply to Andrea Junker :verified:

Racism, mostly, but also sexism. And sadly, it really is no more complicated than that.


My dishwasher was like 'hold my beer' and didn't hold its water anymore. Meanwhile my tablet seems to be fixed for now by uninstalling the TikTok app (it literally caused the display to flash, have interference, etc).


Insider trading tip for people trading in Samsung shares: both my tablet and phone are showing near-end-of-life signs and I may soon need to be buying new ones. With the insane device prices nowadays, this sure is going to raise their shares.

(Just to be clear, the above is obviously sarcasm. I have no inside knowledge. Just a consumer.)





Insider trading tip for people trading in Samsung shares: both my tablet and phone are showing near-end-of-life signs and I may soon need to be buying new ones. With the insane device prices nowadays, this sure is going to raise their shares.

(Just to be clear, the above is obviously sarcasm. I have no inside knowledge. Just a consumer.)


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in reply to David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

your experience is how I expected mine to be if I had actually given the technology a chance.

Machine learning has been useful for decades, mostly quietly. The red flag against LLMs for me (aside from the authorship laundering and mass poaching of content) was there scramble by all companies to shoehorn it into their products, like a solution looking for a problem; I’ve yet to see it actually solve.

in reply to Mx Autumn :blobcatpumpkin: Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: reshared this.

@carbontwelve I used machine learning in my PhD. The use case there was data prefetching. This was an ideal task for ML, because the benefits of a correct answer were high and the cost of an incorrect answer were low. In the worst case, your prefetching evicts something from cache that you need later, but a 60% accuracy in predictions is a big overall improvement.

Programming is the opposite. The benefits of being able to generate correct code faster 80% of the time are small but the costs of generating incorrect code even 1% of the time are high. The entire shift-left movement is about finding and preventing bugs earlier.


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I try to scroll through photos shared on the Fediverse a few times a day (obviously, not all of them). It’s amazing to see the incredible work photographers are creating - not just the pros, but everyone. So many of these shots are true masterpieces. Browsing through them is a relaxing experience and makes me incredibly proud of all of you. It’s awesome that you share your work instead of letting it sit hidden away. Your photos have the power to inspire someone out there! vernissage.photos/editors

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Understanding Engineer Speak

Event Descriptions⁠:

  • High Impedance Air Gap
    ⩵ It wasn't plugged in⁠🔌
  • Kinetic Disassembly
    ⩵ It blew up⁠💥
  • Organic Grounding
    ⩵ It electrocuted someone⁠⚡
  • Percussive Maintenance
    ⩵ It was hit with a hammer⁠🔨
  • Thermal Reconfiguring
    ⩵ It melted⁠🔥
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My 1000th Wordle today! Not a stellar performance, only in the fifth guess.
#Wordle


Spring can't come fast enough!

The trailer for the new film with Jenna Ortega is out! Death of a Unicorn, coming soon.
#JennaOrtega #DeathOfAUnicorn
instagram.com/reel/DDuPMQQo2wv…



Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with Jenna Ortega and The Pod Generation with Emilia Clarke arrived on blu-ray!

The German release of the latter has an alternative title Baby To Go, which isn't even in German. In my own country hardly any discs are released anymore, so we have to make do with these German releases.
#JennaOrtega #BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice #EmiliaClarke #ThePodGeneration #BabyToGo




I assume I won't see Spotify Wrapped posts from people berating others they use platforms that support right wing extremism. Right?

To me Spotify is still cancelled. I'm surprised how normalised it is again among others.



AI noise reduction in bird photography: I hope all these photographers spending hours in the wilderness to photograph a bird, know that when they apply AI noise reduction to remove the noise from the bird's feathers, it instead removes the noisy feathers and inserts completely made up feathers without noise. Is it even the same bird? Why not stay home and draw a bird instead?


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So here's yet another example of #Google Search AI Overviews completely missing the point of a question and giving misleading/wrong answers. I asked Google how much larger a 75 inch TV is than a 55 inch TV. Google replied with an AI Overview (as below) declaring the 75 was 36% larger than the 55, "meaning the viewing area is significantly bigger on the 75 inch screen", it confidently declared.

Only 36%? That doesn't seem right. We're talking about viewing area, as the AI reply itself stated.

So what went wrong? If you look at the calculation that the AI answer used, it simply calculated how much longer the diagonal of the 75 is vs. the 55. Yeah, it's about 36% longer. But that's NOT the viewing area.

If you calculate out the actual viewing area, a term mentioned by the AI answer itself, the actual result is that the 75 viewing area is about 86% (!) larger than the 55. Not a mere 36%.

So the AI Overview answer was utterly misleading at best, and just plain stupid wrong at worst. Not even close.

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in reply to Lauren Weinstein

this exhibits two different failures. First, if it was uncertain of your meaning, it should have asked a clarifying question or stated its interpretation. Second, its answers are internally inconsistent. Both are very common LLM failures
in reply to Lauren Weinstein

because it doesn't "know" anything. It has no idea what a TV is, or what dimensions are. It's just a huge bag of words.


This video of Corina Bradley singing a cover is very beautiful, as is her voice. As far as I know she didn't publish anything like this before.
youtu.be/LmhV3gVWbKY
#CorinaBradley
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in reply to Gidi Kroon

I also love how this video is shot, with the Corina on the right doing backing vocals for the Corina on the left.
#CorinaBradley
in reply to Gidi Kroon

I can't add it to my music playlist due to YouTube being weird, but it reminded me of this other video on that list of a slightly more famous actress also showing her gorgeous voice in a beautifully filmed studio setting in a video for her YouTube channel.
#MirandaCosgrove
youtu.be/dAfYBOsQQY8
This entry was edited (4 months ago)


It's around freezing outside, so it's a great time for the heating in my flat to not be working.
in reply to Gidi Kroon

It's fixed! It took a few days but it's so great to be able to be in a living room where I can raise the temperature above 15 degrees.


Glow is also in Best this year, as last year, side-Glow as it were.

Canon EOS R10, RF-S 10-18mm. cc-by.
#Photography #Glow2024

in reply to Gidi Kroon

More of Glow in Best, with the Windmill, the cemetery and eyes at the train station. The main Glow festival is of course in Eindhoven.
#Glow2024
in reply to Gidi Kroon

I had also taken photos in Best some days earlier with my RF 50mm 1.8 lens. Nothing wrong with those results, but I haven't processed these to jpeg yet. The 50mm, on an APS-C camera, didn't allow me to capture whole buildings, yet the aperture difference of 1.8 vs 4.5-6.3 makes itself felt in the dark...


Glow Eindhoven 2024.

I tried to take some photos with my Canon EOS R10, with the RF 50mm 1.8 lens, some with the RF 28mm 2.8.
#Photography #Glow #GlowEindhoven #Glow2024

in reply to Gidi Kroon

For the second one of these two I needed the other lens (building too big, etc).


Birds. Possibly a sparrowhawk and a pigeon.

Canon EOS R10 with Canon RF 100-400mm.
#Photography #Birds