Is there a Lemmy community for posts like this showcasing the “dead-internet” ?

Mostly that’s due to how much restructuring would need done to fix it. Not really because we’re wired in the optimal way.

The left recurrent laryngeal nerve loops down around your aorta and then right back up parallel to itself because as the heart moved away from the head in evolution, the nerve was pulled down with it.

Could you reroute this nerve and still function? Yep, it would even reduce latency and just the amount of nerve tissue needed.

So why doesn’t evolution do this? Because it can’t…probably…

In order to reroute this nerve, you’d likely have to change how your nerves and heart develop in the first place. That would take significant changes to the genome and said changes would have cascading effects on the development of other systems. You’d need to deal with those effects to keep the rest of the organism organized like it was. (Just realized is kind of reminiscent of the transfer learning problem in machine learning, huh)

Point is, your body is wired the way it is because the “tech debt” that lead to bad routing is too much for evolution to fix easily. Much easier to just deal with it duct-tape style than refactor the whole body.

There are probably many more things like this, like our retinas being “reversed” where it likely would be better the other way, but evolution can’t fix such a primary structure so easily (our retinas develop from our brains), so instead it tries its best to make do, and we get specialized glial cells to be as transparent as possible and a neocortex capable of pattern filling in blind spots.

Hey mate you can always create your own community or full on instance if you want to. That’s kinda the point of the fediverse

Limbo and sex

(I will lose to Barbados Slim)

And if you directed most of that beam away from the sun and a smaller portion toward the sun (to keep your beam splitter in place) you could move the whole solar system

Sexual Mishap Warning: Do not try to retract male connectors by twisting nuts on yourself or your partner unless your genitals are an APC-7 connector. Organic connectors will not retract and testicular torsion can be deadly.

Note: Above warning does not necessarily apply to custom organic, semi-organic, or inorganic genitals of cyborgs or transhumanists. Please refer to the appropriate manual for guidance on safely operating the specific model in question.

I’m not a physicist, but even if Astatine is being produced in minute quantities by decay, a half life of 8hrs should probably put it lower on the numbers than Americium.

Americium is produced anywhere you have lots of free neutrons. This may be rare on earth outside of nuclear power plants and bomb test sites, but not necessarily rare in the universe. Especially since it has a half life of 432years, so unlike astatine it can actually accumulate a bit and not just decay immediately.

Astatine basically doesn’t exist. The total amount in the entirety of earth’s crust at any given time is estimated to be less than a gram.

So I feel like the amounts should be flipped or at the very least closer in orders of magnitude.

If we are trying to avoid losing any information due to abstraction, I’d say at least somewhere in the low hundreds.

All actions are done out of desire and human desires are numerous and often contradictory even in the same person. Many people who think they are utilitarian likely still wouldn’t be okay with the Omelas structure of torturing a single kid even if that act allowed thousands of others to live painless lives.

Is it more right to avoid violence altogether, or is violence to prevent the slaughter of others better than doing nothing?

Morality is complicated and since morality dictates much of how we interact with others, it is likely the most significant factor in politics.

The second most would be personal desires. People with weak or localized empathy don’t tend to care about any politics that doesn’t affect them or their desires directly. Since desires are also diverse, this is multidimensional too.

Now, that being said, if our goal is to reduce the dimensionality as much as possible… the answer is basically any number you want.

Data analysis techniques will let you reduce the dimensionality of n-dimensional data to whatever number you want. In fact using similar techniques to word embedding would likely be very effective even if you simply group people by how similar their views seem to be (no need for you to actually define dimensions)

If we assume that there are around as many important dimensions to politics as there are typical English words, then we can assume the number of dimensions needed for encoding a person’s politics without losing relationships would be about the same as a word embedding vector.

In typical LLMs this is anywhere from around 50-300 dimensions.

Honestly, now I’m really fucking curious. If you created a quiz with thousands of political/philosophical questions and then had a large enough number of people take the quiz, you could legitimately do this with an autoencoder and see how many hidden neurons (dimensions) you would need for a precise encoding.

You might not be able to tell what those dimensions represent, but it would be incredibly fascinating to be able to subtract political ideologies from one another like you can with word embeddings.

Like with good embeddings you can subtract “France” from “Paris” then add that to “Poland” and it will give you a vector very close to “Warsaw”

Imagine being able to map out political or philosophical ideologies like this! You could ask it how far away two ideologies are too, or ask it what the average between two ideologies is, etc.

I feel like that would be incredibly fascinating to mess around with AND like the average example it could give you an idea of gaps in our political spectrum, ideologies that don’t exist yet or haven’t been named. It could show you attractor points or clusters and give insight into inherent human nature.

Damn I want to make this.

My English teacher back in highschool was very picky about using “they” like most people do. I can hear him say “you have to use FORMAL LANGUAGE” in my head still lol

If it’s an unknown person we were told to use “he or she” instead of “they” and “his or her” instead of “their” despite the fact that no one fucking talks that way when referring to an unknown individual.

Like even saying “everyone should bring their laptop to class” would be marked wrong because “everyone” is singular so the “correct” version is “everyone should bring his or her laptop to class” which imo is way more confusing

However, he was also fine with us using masculine singular pronouns when the gender of a person wasn’t known, which I guess is kind of the case in like Spanish and some other Latin languages but still, just really weird rules

Where were the Egyptian cats supposed to go when Egypt fell / was conquered? The Ottoman and Roman Empires were prosperous, ergo they were the perfect societies for cats to enslave next lol

Kind of funny to think of cats thriving in so many countries that got repeatedly raided, conquered, and reestablished by multiple different empires and cultures. Everyone dies eventually but the cats stay haha