[-] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Texas charges prisoners for water? What the fuck, how is this even remotely legal?

[-] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Get ready for subscription-based browsers requiring verified accounts, that share your personally identifiable public key with each website you visit.

I really hope EU or FTC step in. That looks like a dangerous development.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

As was mentioned in another comment, it’s a statistical term that measures the standard deviation. It basically tells you how “far” from the center of the bell curve you are with your data points. The higher the sigma, the less likely it is that an observed event was a fluke.

For example, 1-sigma event has a ~37% chance of being a “coincidence”, and 2-sigma has a chance of about 4.5%.

In science, 3-sigma (0.135%) is the first publishable certainty, it’s when something becomes significant enough to start a discussion.

And 5-sigma is the most common threshold for claiming discovery. 5-sigma events have a 0.0000287% chance of being a coincidence or some random happenstance. Or one in 3.5 million.

Higgs boson discovery was announced after 5-sigma certainty was reached. It means that if that particle didn’t actually exist, the chance of the experiments producing observed results would be 1 in 3.5 mln.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago

I’m glad we’re currently on a good news streak. Those climate change articles were weighing on me.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Let me put it this way. The difference in average global temperature between the last ice age 100,000 years ago and pre-industrial earth around 100 years ago is just ~3.5C. The expected temperature rise due to recent climate change is about +3C.

A lot is going to happen, and much sooner than in 50 years.

With current trends, it looks like we’re heading towards severe climate destabilization, much more common extreme weather events, some parts of the world becoming uninhabitable for humans, lots of mass extinction events for many species, including those that humanity currently relies upon, and probable global famine.

The fact that it’s not a complete extinction doesn’t make it fine. Sure, Earth as a planet will be fine. But the civilisation has some really hard challenges coming up, and it’s currently not prepared for them.

[-] [email protected] 24 points 2 years ago

That's a good write up, thanks. I don't claim it's coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.

Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven't heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can't not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it's not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it's a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I'm kinda curious now

[-] [email protected] 23 points 2 years ago

There’s a huuuge gap between evil robot overlords and chatGPT-like stuff tho. LLMs are not taking over the world anytime soon.

[-] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago

It’s a bit different depending on your health and all that. But 35 WBT is a definite point for everyone (since our bodies run at 36–37C). Kinda like the difference between “some will die” and “most will die”.

[-] [email protected] 27 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

That’s a weird mix between 15 million merits and 1984. Holy shit. Makes me feel kinda uneasy

[-] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago

Isn’t this, like, on purpose? Controversy and hate drive engagement, and since Elon “you’re a pedo cuck” Musk doesn’t give a shit about discussion quality or morality issues, it’s pretty obvious why he’s gone for that.

I wonder what advertisers think though, and whether they’re ok with sharing their advertising budget this way. Just from a public image point of view alone it might be a problem for some, if not most large companies.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 2 years ago

"Let's stop all progress until we deal with insert_your_problem_of_choice" has never been a good take, it stifles development without actually helping. In an ideal world that might work, but as is it just doesn't.

To add to that, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt that starving children in India is actually a mere money problem. It looks more like a wealth distribution problem, and that one doesn't get fixed by stopping space programs.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago

I’m not even a scientist and it’s scaring me too.

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