Different angles:

This thought has been weighing on me for the past few weeks. I am not religious, and my knowledge of the bible is embarrassingly lacking, even for an atheist. So I don't know if any of what I'm gonna say is new, or if it's been done to death a thousand years ago.

So, here goes. In the story of the garden of Eden and Adam and Eve, God created the humans, and told them clear limitations for what they're allowed to do. Namely: don't eat from the tree of knowledge. But of course, it didn't take too long until that one rule was broken.

Fast forward to the 2020s. Humans created AI, and in many cases configured it as an agent with certain instructions and certain limitations, often communicated with just words, e.g. don't make any changes to the live database, don't git push, or what have you. And of course, in so many reported cases, it did eventually do exactly the forbidden action, just like Adam and Eve.

I think the parallels are obvious: we can interpret the biblical story as a parable, where God stands for us, the users, and Adam and Eve stand for the AI agents. The lesson is clear, that even if you are a "superior being", the rules you set WILL be broken if you don't make actual robust safeguards against it.

My question is: has anyone thought of this before about the bible? Not just in the context of AI, but in general taking the stories of the bible and interpreting God as the stand-in for us? I mean, surely someone has, but is there an established school of thought based on it?

Would this kind of thing be considered blasphemy? (I'm sure some religious people would certainly think so)

The following links should all have the query string ?P=5%B02%27.

example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

link

www.example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

www.example.com/query?P=5%B02%27

link

http://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

http://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

link

https://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

https://www.example.com/query?P=5%EF%BF%BD2%27

link

... since she was born.

This is something between a question and a shower thought. People use air quotes to stimulate "quoting" a word or short phrase in the middle of a sentence. Are there any other punctuation marks that can be stimulated this way? And in particular, is there a gesture for parentheses (like this)?

If not, then why not? How did quotes get special treatment?

And if yes - how many people would actually understand what those other gestures mean? (I am reminded of that scene from Friends where Joey admits he doesn't know what air quotes mean)

Image taken from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_quotes / https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Airquotes.gif

I recently bought a Steam Deck and I have a lapdock on the way, intending to use the Deck as a dual-purpose gaming handheld and laptop replacement. So on that front, I was wondering what more experienced users could tell me about using it.

I did read through the official FAQ, and a few questions pop up. In no particular order:

1. Is there a way to boot the Steam Deck directly into desktop mode, without going through the Steam environment first? (Strictly as a time saver)
2. In practice, how well does sudo steamos-readonly disable and installing things from pacman work out for you? In particular, I want to use PWAs For Firefox and it requires this package in order to work. Do packages actually get wiped with SteamOS updates, as the FAQ warns?
3. Is it possible to re-enable the read-only filesystem after installing a package, to safeguard it from accidental changes?
4. Any other tips, tricks or warnings you'd like to share.

I have 64 GB of RAM, specifically this model (I think): https://www.gskill.com/specification/165/396/1731653269/F5-6000J2836G32GX2-FX5-Specification fortunately purchased just before RAM prices went insane.

Last night, I ran memtest86+ and noticed it showed I have "61.6GB" of RAM. This is 2.4 GB less than the stated 64 GB. I know that storage sizes are specified in GB (1000³B) instead of GiB (1024³B), so it wouldn't have shocked me if RAM is the same, but this actually doesn't explain it: 64 GB makes 59.6 GiB, so if that was it then I got 2 GiB extra, which makes no sense.

To be clear, I'm not complaining and there's no issue to fix, I just want to understand where the numbers are coming from.

My friend has 96 gigs of RAM, and for him Windows reports 93.6 GB, which is also 2.4 GB less than stated, same as me! So it seems more likely right now that RAM is actually measured and marketed in GiBs, and the same effect is causing both of us to "lose" 2.4 GB. But what effect is it?

It gets weirder.

In the FAQ of memtest, there's this:

Why is Memtest86+ testing more memory than I have?

It doesn't. The memory on a modern computer is not necessarily mapped in a linear way. E.g.: 16GB of RAM can be virtually mapped from 0-15GB and 16-17GB with a hole between 15GB and 16GB.

Which I thought might be related, so to get to the bottom of it I tracked which regions of memory it tests. This is what it showed:

• 4MB - 1GB (1020MB)
• 1GB - 2GB (1GB)
• 2GB - 2.4GB (416 MB)
• 4GB - 5GB (1GB)
• 5GB - 6GB (1GB)
• ... more 1GB regions with no gaps ...
• 62GB - 63GB (1GB)
• 63GB - 63.4GB (478MB)

Summing them all up gives a total of 60GiB + 1914MiB = 61GiB + 890MiB = 61.87GiB if my math is right, so it doesn't even match the 61.6 figure it reports!

... What's going on? WHERE ARE THE NUMBERS COMING FROM?!

If there's a better community for this, let me know and I'll cross-post it there.

I really like this guy's videos. William Spaniel is a political scientist, a professor in game theory. He covers conflicts from an academic point of view, and personally I can't get enough. Pretty much all of his videos are worth watching. He has been uploading regularly since the start of the Ukraine war, so a glance in his list of videos will probably find you something you'd like.

He is still a professor actively publishing new research.

There is a bit of subtle humor thrown into the mix too :)

SMBC comics have a comments section, run by Hyvor Talk. It used to work great, but after SMBC parted ways with the Hiveworks Comics, it seems the Hyvor Talk service tier was downgrade massively and now it shows the error "Embed temporarily disabled (limits exceeded)" almost all the time. Only on the first day or two of every month, the limits reset and we can both post and read comments again.

And yet, on those two days lots of people comment. There's an active community, but we can't talk!

Can be observed on any individual comic, e.g. the most recent one: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/language-6

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/42134968

My time has come!

The above stereographic image is for cross-eyed viewing (most stereograms are wall-eyed, so you may need to put your finger in front of your screen until this one comes into focus)

This is an image of Honolulu, Hawaii, published by NASA. Note Diamond Head (the volcanic crater) in the south.

Here are some other stereopairs published by JPL:

Wheeler Ridge, California

Mount Saint Helens

Salt Lake Valley, Utah

Wellington, New Zealand

The digitally colored manga was releasing at a relatively steady pace, with at least one release per year since it started in 2012, but after volume 99 in 2022 there's nothing. Does anyone know if they just stopped completely? Seems strange to stop just before volume 100.

A woman is out shopping, and suddenly spots her husband. As she's about to say hello to him, she notices the man is filthy: his clothes have stains from spilt food and drinks, his face and hands are dark with mud and grime.

"What happened to you?!" she asks, skipping the hello.

"Oh, it's nothing, don't worry about it..."

"What do you mean don't worry about it? You're dirty like a pig! At least go home and shower!!"

"No, I can't... There's something I have to do. Sorry, honey, I'll see you later tonight."

"Well at least tell me how you got so muddy!"

"I really can't tell you. It's nothing, I promise."

The woman starts getting angry. "Listen to me. Either you tell me what's going on, or go home with me right now to wash yourself!! If not, I'm packing your things and kicking you out!"

The husband thinks about it for a while, then makes a deep sigh and says: "Alright... I'll come clean."

This was a rare moment where I actually had to think to find it. Can you?

Screenshot is from a solver I found online because I didn't think to take a screenshot until I already opened the safe square.

Or a very very high zoom to get a similar effect.

No real reason for this question, just a random wonder I had. Basically the effect this would have on perspective might be interesting, and I wonder if any movie used this kind of shot for more than a couple of seconds.

I know that DNA encodes proteins. Truthfully, everything besides that (including 'what are proteins') mostly wooshes over my head, but that's not relevant because whenever I search this question I never even find it addressed anywhere.

The human body has, among other things, two hands each with five fingers, with a very particular bone structure. How are things like that encoded in DNA, and by what mechanisms does that DNA cause these features to be built the way they are? What makes two people have a different nose shape? Nearly everyone in my family has a mole on the left side of their face, how does that come about from DNA?

I'm sure there are many steps involved, but I don't see how we go from creating proteins to reproducibly building a full organism with all the organs in the right places and the right shapes. Whenever I try to look this up, all of these intermediate steps are missing, so it basically seems like magic.

As I said, any explanation will most likely go over my head and I won't be able to understand it fully, but I at least want to see an explanation. I'll do my best to understand it of course.

I'm in the middle east in case that helps narrow it down. Very hot few days probably have something to do with it.

Where are they coming from? Are they hiding somewhere in my apartment? They seem to be flightless. They are all the same size and very small, here's one on my finger for scale:

Kind of an update from my previous post. The Proton Drive app on Android utterly failed to back up my photos and videos. I've now got a glimpse to a possible reason why.

I realized that it was doing fine with photos and small videos but was struggling with large files, so as a temporary measure, I moved all the files bigger than 1GB to a different folder on my phone. I then had to wipe the app's data and log back in because it was just hanging or looping repeatedly otherwise. After logging back in, it successfully backed up all the remaining files over many hours. At least, I think it did - I'd have to go one by one to find out and I'm really not feeling too confident about it. But if it didn't get all of them, it got almost all of them.

Then I added back in the files that were between 1GB and 2GB. It managed this fine. The app's data usage grew to about 4GB at some points but that is fine as it needs to create encrypted copies of the file it's backing up and it might be doing a few files in parallel. At the end, the data usage went back down to <1GB.

Then I tried to add back the files between 2GB and 5GB. There were four of them: 2.25GB, 2.50GB, 3.86GB, and 4.12GB. Total size: approximately 12.73 GB. After setting the app running, its data usage grew to upwards of 60GB and I had to halt it. As before, there was no way to get the app to behave again after that besides wiping data and logging back in again. The "clear local cache" button in the app's settings did seemingly nothing. I moved the big files back to the temporary folder.

Next I tried to move the files one at a time, starting from the smallest one. So one 2.25 GB video file. Turns out my phone shows base-10-based file sizes, so it's actually 2.091 GiB. The app misbehaves a little bit in vague ways that I didn't quite comprehend and can't explain, e.g. it got stuck at "3 files remaining" even though I only added 1 file, so I needed to wipe its memory again, but eventually it uploaded the dang file. I don't remember exactly how much data it used in the process, but the important thing is it worked. And then I looked at the file through the Proton Drive web interface and checked its details, where I saw what's in the picture:

Size: 2.09 GB

Original size: -2049486257 bytes

The original file size is stored as a 32-bit signed integer! Is this only in the web frontend, or is it also like that behind the scenes? What happens when the file size exceeds 4GiB? Does this only affect photos/videos or does it happens for the general-purpose Drive as well? Is this why big files have been failing for me?

I'll keep you guys updated... And I hope these bugs are fixed. I still believe in Proton.

Edit: the four files, added one by one, uploaded successfully. Now moving on to a 6.10GB file. This is bigger in bytes than 32 bits can represent. Wish me luck.

Edit next day: the 6.10 GB file failed to upload. It's perpetually stuck at "1 item left" after giving it more than enough time overnight. The app is also taking up some 15GB of space - much more than it should. While uploading previous files, it gree to marginally larger than the file being uploaded. Now it's well over 2x that. So my conclusion is that Proton Drive for Android can't back up videos larger than 4GB, and fails catastrophically when attempting to do so.

I'm already in contact with Proton support. I'm not sure I've quit convinced them of the severity of this bug yet (or multiple bugs) but they acknowledged that there are issues and suggested that the current beta version 2.4.0 of the app has mitigations regarding storage usage, and they gave me instructions for trying to access it.

I upgraded to Proton Unlimited today and I've set Proton Drive to back up my whole camera gallery, a few hundreds of GBs, so it will take a while. But I noticed that it skips large videos, e.g. it skipped a 9.8GB video file. Is this intended behavior? I can't find documentation of it anywhere and it seems to happen silently. I easily could have missed it, assumed that it backed up everything down to a certain date, and deleted the only copy of the videos.

I joined Proton just a few days ago, and I'm paying for it so I can use my custom domain.

I watched this interview and it raises a huge question for me (link includes timestamp): https://tilvids.com/w/q1mZzv6eq3iULLmGdV6w6M?start=6m20s

In this interview, Andy Yen says about gmail et al "there's no such thing as a free lunch". Then, in nearly the same breath, he boasts that most Proton users don't pay, they use the basic service for free because that's all they need.

So my question is: if there's no such thing as a free lunch (which there isn't), how come Proton can offer it?

Screenshot from Antimine on Android. It's supposed to not require any guesses, but I'm totally stuck. I'm probably missing something simple, so more eyes on it should help... Anyone?