Skip Navigation
1274 - R-MastCam-Z - 110mm zoom
  • The stones in Machu Picchu are so perfectly fitted that you can't insert even a razor blade between them. Thousands of tiny monkey aliens swarming over the construction site with nuclear powered angle grinders polishing the rocks is the only reasonable explanation for this.

  • Spotted wood owl in Singapore

    Spotted an owl in the woods in Bishan Park in central Singapore early in the evening. Logically this makes it a spotted wood owl.

    Sorry for the low quality - it was at the limits of my Pixel 6 camera.

    2
    That is not vegan.
  • As an aside, oysters are not bivalves, they are brachiopods. Brachiopods do have a nervous system - some even have eyes.

    What's the difference and how do you tell a brachiopod from a bivalve? It's the plane of symmetry. In bivalves the plane of symmetry is where the shells (also known as valves) join. So bivalves have two identical shells. Whelks and razor shells are bivalves. Brachiopods also have two shells, but the shells are normally quite different. The oyster for example has one big concave shell and one small flat one on top. The big shell has a hole at the apex (just next to the hinge) and a root-like anchor grows from it to bind the brachiopod to the matrix on which it lives. Brachiopods have an axis of symmetry from this root/foot that vertically separates each shell into two mirrored parts.

  • Colorblindness check!
  • This is true for only red and green loght detecting proteins (opsins) - the blue opsin gene is on chromosome 7.

    The red and green detecting proteins have an interesting history in humans.

    Fish, amphibians, lizards and birds have 4 different opsins: for red, green, yellow and blue colours. And the blue opsin sees up into the ultra-violet. Most animals can see waaaay more colours in the world than we (or any mammal) can. So what happened that makes mammal vision so poor?

    It's thought that all mammals descend from one or a few species of nocturnal mammal that survived the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. The colour detecting cells (the cones) need a lot of light compared to ones that see in black-and-white (the rods) and therefore nocturnal animals frequently lose cones in favour of the more sensitive rods for better night vision. The mammals that survived the Cretaceous extinction had also lost the green and yellow opsins while keeping red and blue - basically the two different ends of the light spectrum.

    Consequently today most mammals still have only 2 opsins so your cat or dog is red-green colourblind.

    Why do humans see green? Probably because our monkey forebears, who lived in trees and ate leaves, needed to distinguish red leaves and red fruit (visible to birds) from the green background.

    But how did we bring back the green opsin? A whole section of the X chromosome (where the red opsin is coded) got duplicated in a dna copying mistake and then there were two genes for red opsins. As there are different alleles (versions), they could be selected for independently and so one red opsin drifted up the spectrum to be specific for green. So our green opsin is a completely different gene to the green opsin in fish, birds, etc. This kind of evolution happens a lot which is why, for example, there are many families of similar hormones like testosterone and estrogen. And steroids too.

  • Justice Thomas Failed to Reveal More Private Flights, Senator Says
  • Someone has to decide whether it is or is not perjury. In this case it's the Senate and they need 2/3rd majority. So that basically means Supreme court judges (and presidents) are impossible to get rid of, even for perjury.

  • I rode a dinosaur, you IDIOT!
  • He's hiring a ghost writer because they are very cheap.

    When a person dies, they stop needing earthly rewards. And, because a lot of great authors and writers have died, there are a lot of candidate ghost writers, like Martin Amis, Truman Capote and Barbara Cartland. A good spiritualist can summon the right auteur from beyond this mortal coil for any compositional need you have!

  • People who had severe covid-19 show cognitive decline years later
  • Did you reply before even reading the summary:

    “What we found is that the average cognitive deficit was equivalent to 10 IQ points, based on what would be expected for their age, et cetera,” says Maxime Taquet at the University of Oxford.

    We are discussing progress over just 4 years and adjusting for age.

  • HACS, microWakeWord, and Music Assistant projects have been added to the Open Home Foundation which manages open-source projects related to Home Assistant and Smart Home applications
  • MicroWakeWord is a project built on the ESPHome framework.

    ESPHome is a project for building, deploying and managing microcontroller firmware (such as ESP32 devices). So, because MicroWakeWord uses ESPHome, you can easily deploy it to your preferred device.

    ESPHome is deeply connected inside HomeAssistant and therefore the integration is essentially OOTB - but you have to flash ESPHome firmware on an ESP device which will probably involve soldering electronics. There are some dev kits available that contain everything you need pre-built though (like this one - no endorsement)

  • Asked about cognitive ability, Trump brings up Harris' bar-exam results
  • So a bunch of people who fail on their first attempt, and they pass the second (or third) time. So, of all people who eventually pass, 70-80% took the test twice or more.

    Corollary: in any given exam, 20-50% of all exam takers are there for the second (or more) time. So the total number of first-timers is considerably less than 100% and I'm guessing that their failure rate is greater than 50%.

  • average day in NPM land
  • All junior devs should read OCs comment and really think about this.

    The issue is whether is_number() is performing a semantic language matter or checking whether the text input can be converted by the program to a number type.

    The former case - the semantic language test - is useful for chat based interactions, analysis of text (and ancient text - I love the cuneiform btw) and similar. In this mode, some applications don't even have to be able to convert the text into eg binary (a 'gazillion' of something is quantifying it, but vaguely)

    The latter case (validating input) is useful where the input is controlled and users are supposed to enter numbers using a limited part of a standard keyboard. Clay tablets and triangular sticks are strictly excluded from this interface.

    Another example might be is_address(). Which of these are addresses? '10 Downing Street, London', '193.168.1.1', 'Gettysberg', 'Sir/Madam'.

    To me this highlights that code is a lot less reusable between different projects/apps than it at first appears.

  • Delta CEO says CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage cost the airline $500 million
  • Couldn't agree more.

    And now that this occurred, and cost $500m, perhaps finally some enterprise companies may actually resource IT departments better and allow them to do their work. But who am I kidding, that's never going to happen if it hits bonuses and dividends :(

  • jd vance
  • It is terribly sad - they must live in a world of hurt.

    However so many of these people actively try to hurt LGBTQ+ and trans people by inciting hate and changing laws to harm the non-straight. In particular they have been preaching that being gay/trans equates to being a child molester. This is horrific and needs to stop. Exposing the hypocrisy is essential to reducing the harm they are inflicting to real people right now

  • The first GPT-4-class AI model anyone can download has arrived: Llama 405B
  • Typically you need about 1GB graphics RAM for each billion parameters (i.e. one byte per parameter). This is a 405B parameter model. Ouch.

    Edit: you can try quantizing it. This reduces the amount of memory required per parameter to 4 bits, 2 bits or even 1 bit. As you reduce the size, the performance of the model can suffer. So in the extreme case you might be able to run this in under 64GB of graphics RAM.

  • An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience
  • I think that's a better plan than physically printing keys. I'd also want to save the keys in another format somewhere - perhaps using a small script to export them into a safe store in the cloud or a box I control somewhere

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MO
    modeler @lemmy.world
    Posts 1
    Comments 84