• 0 Posts
  • 146 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 11th, 2023
  • admiralteal@kbin.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•An Interview With Jack Dorsey
    37·
    2 months ago

    I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He’s a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.

    Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires – pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.

  • admiralteal@kbin.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs
    21·
    2 months ago

    Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.

    Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that’s a highly competitive title.

    They also don’t offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they’re intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.

    If you’ve ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service… you’d probably be the first.

  • admiralteal@kbin.socialtoMarvel Studios@lemmy.world•Chris Hemsworth Takes Blame for ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ Failure: ‘I Got Caught Up in the Improv and the Wackiness’ and ‘Became a Parody of Myself’
    1·
    2 months ago

    I don’t think the wacky was the probable, nor was the juxtaposition of the incredible darkness of the plot against that wackiness. Any of those elements could work and well – it’s honestly Waititi’s specialty (that’s exactly what made Jojo Rabbit and Hunt for the Wilderpeople so great – that they were attacking deeply, deeply dark themes under a safe and protective umbrella of silliness).

    What made Love and Thunder fail is just that it wasn’t made very well. The writing was kind of poor and it didn’t tie into much of a greater story. You can never save a movie from bad writing and it just had vaguely bad writing. Always feels like the writing is the first cost these projects try and trim when it should be the only one they never do.

    And worse, 2 of the great actors of my lifetime were totally squandered.

    In my opinion, the audience was never convinced that Portman’s character was actually suffering and addicted to the hammer, which made the sacrifice of what she was doing totally uncompelling. She’s capable of playing that role, but instead they turned who should’ve been the hero into a total sidekick.

    I was also entirely unconvinced that Bale’s character was… wrong. They literally had to make the plot about him gathering a bunch of children to murder in order to convince us to dislike him. His backstory was so convincing that his revenge felt like a quest to root for. He performed the character well enough to make you sympathize with him, yet they just had him kick a puppy to make his heel turn. Weak.

  • admiralteal@kbin.socialtoTabletop Gaming@beehaw.org•I recently tested all of my D20's for fairness, this was the worst offender after 100 rolls
    28·
    4 months ago

    Gotta account for a null hypothesis.

    The null would be that it is a fair die (average roll 10.5). Your test is whether the true result is significantly less than 10.5 based on a sample of 100 with a mu of 8.8. Let’s call it an alpha of 0.05

    So we have to run a left tail one-sample t-test.

    Unfortunately, this data set doesn’t tell me the standard deviation – but that could be determined in future trials. For now, we’ll have to just make an assumption that the D20 is fair. For a fair D20, the standard deviation should be be sqrt( ([20-1+1]^2 -1)/12) or roughly sqrt(33.25)

    We can run that t-test in a simply python script:

    import numpy as np
from scipy import stats as st

h0 = 10.5

sample = np.random.normal(loc=8.88, scale=(np.sqrt(33.25)), size=100)

t_stat, p_val = st.ttest_1samp(sample, h0)

print(f"T-statistic: {t_stat:.4f}")
print(f"P-value: {p_val:.4f}")

    Of course, I had to randomize this a bit since I don’t have access to the full data from the true sample. That would make for a better bit of analysis. But at least assuming I didn’t make a serious dumb here, 100 rolls averaging 8.88 would seem to suggest that the you can reject your null hypothesis of this being a fair die at a typical alpha of 0.05.

    Then again, the way I wrote this script is GUARANTEED to be an unfavorable result since the way I randomized it REQUIRES the average end up 8.88, which is, of course, less than 10.5. Your real world testing would not have this constraint.

  • admiralteal@kbin.socialtoProgramming@programming.dev•White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe
    3·
    4 months ago

    I have not encountered anything broken, aside from maybe binary app docstring stuff (e.g., automated example testing).

    On the contrary, everything seems precise, reliable, and trustworthy. That’s the thing to really like about Rust – you can be pretty much fearless in it. It’s just difficult. I die a bit in time any time I have a return type that looks like Box<dyn Fn(&str) -> Result<Vec<String>, CustomError>> or some shit . Honestly, the worst thing about Rust is probably that you have to manually specify heap vs stack when the compiler could easily make those determinations itself 99% of the time based on whether something is sized.

  • admiralteal@kbin.socialtoProgramming@programming.dev•White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe
    182·
    4 months ago

    I like Rust a lot, philosophically and functionally… but it is WAY harder. Undeniably very hard.

    Just try and do anything with, say, a linked list. It’s mind-boggling how hard it is to make basic things work without just cloning tons of values, using obnoxious patterns like .as_mut(), or having incredibly careful and deliberate patterns of take-ing values, Not to mention the endless use of shit like Boxes that just generates frustrating boilerplate.

    I still think it’s a good language and valuable to learn/use, and it’s incredibly easy to create performant applications in it once you mastered the basics, but christ.

  • admiralteal@kbin.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•We are closing in on zero-carbon cement
    6·
    5 months ago

    Highly recommend Volts to everyone interested.

    David Roberts is EXTREMELY practical, politically. He’s very no-nonsense, but gives clear and simple reasons for why he categorizes stuff as nonsense when he does. He’s not some techno-wizard optimist, but he’s also clear about how much tech we DO have and how much is achievable on realistic timelines if we just commit. He’s also clear about what the obstacles are, and even sometimes gives useful calls to action.

    His most recent episode on nuclear is an almost perfect example of this. A lot of people are VERY enthusiastic about nuclear. He had Jigar Shah from the DOE on to talk about the field extensively – the upsides and downsides, what technologies work and make sense, what technologies are just mis-advertised, what technologies are total vaporware, why it’s so hard to build nuclear in the US (hint: it’s not the anti-nuke environmental lobby), and all that. Fabulous interview.

    I definitely trend towards doomerism on all this stuff, but it’s good to be reminder the tech really is there decarbonize a LOT and VERY FAST, and probably even achieve planetary net zero or even net negative within my lifetime. Just have to convince people the juice is worth the squeeze – which it undeniably is when the entire ecosystem is at stake.