• 0 Posts
  • 445 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 20th, 2023

help-circle
  • Ground hornets pattern match too. I had a massive nest I had never noticed in an old stump. They hadn’t bothered me despite having walked by numerous times. Then one time I hit the nest with the riding mower. Man that sucked. I’m not outright allergic, but a dozen stings does make me feel sick. After that, anytime I got within 20ft of the nest with the mower they would come out in force.

    Then a few years later I had the same thing happen with a raised garden bed. They never bothered me and I didn’t even know they were there, until my weedwacker attacked the entrance of the nest. I had to steer clear of that section of the garden for a few weeks after.

    Ground hornets are horrible.









  • Fermion@feddit.nltoScience Memes@mander.xyzBlack Holes
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    76
    ·
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    Yeah, black holes in media where they are depicted as a giant space vacuum cleaner is a big pet peave of mine. Unless you get really close, nothing is remarkable about the orbital mechanics of a black hole. The equivalent mass star would have burned you up at a much further distance than the gravity starts to become noticeably wonky.

    It’s a shame that writers focus so much on the gravity and neglect accretion disks and astrophysical jets which do extend large distances and are visually stunning as well.






  • My biggest apprehension about using llms for shopping is that there is no reason to think the models won’t sell priority/positive attribution as an alternative to traditional marketing. It’s the only monetization scheme that I think makes the absurd valuations make any sense. Condition everyone to offload the tiresome tasks of comparison shopping by just telling the llms what they want. Once people form the impression that the top results are what they themselves would pick or at least close to it, then the llm’s will take over the actual purchasing task. Then the stage is fully set to sell consumers as a product to various companies. Imagine if HP could move away from scammy ink subscriptions and instead pay OpenAI to get millions of people to buy their printers and ink anytime they ask chatgpt to find them a printer.

    I recognize that this is borderline conspiratorial, but llm’s smell like the next evolution of enshittification and removing that pesky rational actor of pricing models.


  • Definitely, any changes natural or anthropogenic would be measured and to great accuracy. I just wanted to point out that the notion of the general public, especially if conditioned to distrust scientists and authorities, not noticing changes isn’t the outlandish part. See global warming denial despite years of record setting temperatures.


  • Fermion@feddit.nltoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    6 months ago

    Ignoring conspiracy theory stuff, people aren’t very good at perceiving changes in light levels if they happen gradually. During any solar eclipse there are wide bands where only a partial eclipse is observed. It’s pretty common for people in those bands to not notice that something has changed even with 50% occlusion.


  • Yeah that’s my attitude as well. I grow the things that are significantly better straight out of the garden. The best tomatoes are too fragile to go through the sorting machinery, so growing your own enables much higher quality produce. Berries are way better picked ripe. Green beans are also super easy to grow and are better fresh.

    Then there’s varieties that just aren’t popular enough for many stores to stock and specialty stores are far and expensive: patty pan squash, molokhia, ground cherries, shallots, celery leaves (I don’t like the stalk), a variety of herbs, peppers that aren’t bell or jalapeno, etc.