captain_aggravated

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Same question rephrased: Can seat belts be a threat to humanity long-term by greatly reducing the effects of natural selection? After all, stronger individuals are more likely to survive car crashes.

What about wood stoves? Surely the fittest individuals are able to handle the cold?

We removed ourselves from “natural selection” a long time ago.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Turns out the reason Tom Paris ended up with B’ellana is because the show couldn’t afford to take Sarah Silverman on as a cast member.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

The Poseidon adventure IN SPACE!

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer are led into a long room. At the other end stands a beautiful naked woman. “When I ring this bell,” she says" you may cross half the space between us. When I ring the bell again, you may again cross half the space between us." Both the mathematician and physicist groan and wander off. “Ah, it’s Zeno’s paradox, we can never actually reach her.” The engineer, waiting for the bell, says “I think I can get close enough.”

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Reminds me of Extreme-G 2. “Reah Fiyah Rockets”

Multi-pull miss aisle!

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

It ran on the N64 with that frame rate. It felt great, it felt FAST, and that drum and bass soundtrack from the absolute peak of the genre. If we’re honest with ourselves it’s Mario Kart wearing Axe body spray but holy damn does it work.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

“The door is there, for anyone with a sincere, passionate desire to learn. Which sounds really nice, ‘anyone with a sincere and passionate desire to learn.’ I just eliminated 90% of the world. 90% of the world wants to sit at home and watch Honey Boo Boo.” --Chris Boden.

Sophisticated, powerful technology able to revolutionize the world becomes not only available but cheap, half the world’s population carries around a supercomputer in their pocket with an always-on connection to the sumtotal of all human knowledge, and that device’s user interface is designed to express little more than “Dat wun daddy watch me dat video dat wun now!” Because that’s the level at which nearly everyone is willing to approach computers.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

The one that says

This Year’s Ballot:

___ Fascism

___ Snooze (4 years)

sums it up.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

There is a post that’s circulating around the Lemmyhood where someone asks an LLM to solve the “there’s a goat, a wolf and a cabbage that need to cross a river” problem, and it returns grammatically correct logically impossible nonsense. I think this is instructive as to how LLMs work and how useless they really are.

Presented with a logic problem, it doesn’t attempt to solve any problems or apply logic. That it does is search through the sumtotal of all human communication, finds dozens if not hundreds of cases where this or a similar problem has been asked, and then averages the answers. Because answers might be phrased in different orders or different sentence structures, or some people published wrong or joke answers sometimes but it has no means to detect that, they get averaged in with equal weight and so the answer it puts out begins with “Take the wolf and the goat, leave the boat behind. Take the boat back.” It has a fascinating ability to output seemingly relevant and grammatically impeccable worthless noise. Just like everything I say.

The only compelling use case I’ve seen for these things is writing frameworks for fictional stories. There was an episode of the WAN Show back when LMG still existed where Linus gave ChatGPT a prompt to create a modern take on the premise of the movie Liar Liar. And it came up with an actually compelling outline, I’d go see the movie made out of that outline. Because it’s fictional, it doesn’t have to conform to reality.

I doubt it could write an entire acceptable movie script though, it would have gaping plot holes, would have no theme or cohesive narrative structure, but every individual line of dialog would make grammatical sense and some conversations might even seem coherent.

As a research or information gathering tool, they’re worse than useless because it has no way of detecting if information is up to date or obsolete, serious or farcical, correct or incorrect, it just averages them all together, basically on the same theory as the Poll The Audience lifeline on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire: Most of the crowd is almost always right. Except with this approach what happens is it will cite a completely fake made up paper and attribute it to a genuinely real scientist who works in the relevant field and allegedly published in a real reputable scientific journal. It looks right, it passes the sniff test. It’s also completely useless.

And that’s when they’re not throwing weird emotional tantrums.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

sigh would you look at all that stuff…

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

I think you can get there in TF2 when considering subclasses via weapons loadouts. Demoknight for instance is a completely different play style than normal pipe/sticky demoman.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

there’s no sex in your violence.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

Welcome to the world according to Republicans.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

pumped water or flywheels maybe? you lose a lot of energy compressing gas to heat dissipation.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

What does “a good heat exchanger” look like in this case? You compress air, the pump heats up, so you ventilate it to keep it cool. The air in the tank is hot, and starts to cool as it sits in the tank, and this causes a decrease in pressure, which is why even with no leaks a shop air compressor will run for awhile, stop, then after awhile cut back on again.

I get that I’m applying a shop tech’s “machines that I can move with a hand truck” understanding to factory-size operations here but…

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

I’m a CFI. on the subjects of aerodynamics, navigation, instrumentation, aircraft systems, aviation law, my word is usually accepted. I’m apparently the least knowledgeable person in the world on the subjects of aviation physiology and aeromedical factors. What could a pilot possibly know about hypoxia?

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

your truck is bad and you should feel bad.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

better idea: shut down the phone network entirely.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

There are very practical reasons for heritage rail to convert to oil burning rather than coal, including less abrasive grit flung all over the exposed running gear to not throwing burning embers all over the nation.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

I’m largely pulling from a video that Hyce published recently on the topic, that that there are several pros, cons and factors involved. Keeping a historically coal burning engine as original is definitely something a museum would like to do, but apparently as the world’s coal power plants are shutting down, so are the mines. Modern coal plants burn coal that is ground fairly finely, steam locomotives prefer large chunks, so that’s still a bit of a special order. Meanwhile it’s fairly easy to find bunker C or used motor oil or even used cooking oil.

Firing a coal-powered engine is a back breaking exercise because the fireman IS the fuel pump, shoveling literal tons of coal from the tender into the firebox, but given the mass of the fire it is fairly automatic when responding to changes in throttle from the engine. Oil fired engines are a matter of turning valves, but without the mass of the coal bed a change in demand from the engine requires fairly swift action from the fireman.

Shutdown of an oil steamer is a lot easier, when you’re done you close a valve, the fire goes out and she’ll spend the next week cooling down to room temperature. With a coal burner you’ve got to extinguish or dump the fire, fuck around with ash, etc.

And, fires are a thing. Early in her heritage career, UP’s Challenger just about burned down all of Utah. The state wasn’t going to let them run it again without converting to oil. They had to do the same with the Big Boy for the same reason. Other heritage railways are making the move to oil firing because it’s making more and more sense for 21st century steam traction.

captain_aggravated, 10 days ago

I did want to kneecap the idiot that decided to use a leaf blower to blow the sand off the parking lot of the apartment I used to rent in. Was kind of tempted to send the manager a bill for a new clear coat on my car.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

If someone were to call me a “short king,” I would have their name legally changed to “Cellulite Queen” or “The Right High Honorable Sir Shriveldick Pissinbed III” or some other such.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Your name is now Baron von Halitosis Drinksfromcarton Esq.

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Something that I often say to myself to end contemplation paralysis is “What’s the worst that can happen?” or “What’s the worst case scenario?” If I’m debating trying something in the kitchen. “What’s the worst that can happen? I waste a few cups of flour and some yeast.”

captain_aggravated, 9 days ago

Congratulations! now get out of here and you go be an awesome new dad. That table saw will wait.