Category: Tech / Science

Bad Habit of Overthinking

But looking at it from another angle, if we’re able to control our mind, maybe we’ll be able to stop the continuous thinking that goes on in our head, dictating how we behave. The problem here is that the mind has a habit of looking for stronger stimulation and can get out of control if we let it. Because negative thoughts have a much stronger impact on our brain than a mild, gentle sense of happiness, it’s hard to prevent that from happening.

The Practice of Not Thinking: A Guide to Mindful Living
Ryunosuke Koike

Does a humidifier make your house feel warmer? Asking Google AI

AI Overview

Learn more

Yes, a humidifier can make your house feel warmer, even though it doesn’t actually raise the air temperature, because increased humidity slows down the evaporation of sweat from your skin, making you perceive the temperature as higher; essentially, you feel warmer due to the moisture in the air, not because the room is physically warmer.

Key points about humidifiers and temperature perception:

Sweat evaporation:
When the air is humid, sweat evaporates more slowly from your skin, causing you to feel warmer.

Body temperature regulation:
Your body uses sweat evaporation to cool itself, so less evaporation in humid air means you feel warmer.

Comfort factor:

Proper humidity levels can significantly improve your comfort level, making a room feel warmer even if the actual temperature remains the same.

User Names – Programming Snags with

tonyHawkandthetaleofFeaturenotabug
byu/GoldenBaby2 inProgrammerHumor

Classy_Mouse
I know some people that only have a given name. No family name. So when they came over to Canada, they had a lot of issues with official forms. Some of them split their name into 2 names, some just repeated their given name twice

Toloran
True story, I went to middle school with a kid whose entire name was ‘Rainbow’. I initially assumed his parents were hippies or something, but it turned out they were hippies and indecisive: They both had different last names, but couldn’t decide which to give him. So they just didn’t give him one.

EODdoUbleU
My first name is a single letter. The amount of shit I can’t do without creating some bastardization to fulfill the mUSt cONTaIn a miNImUM Of tWO ChAraCTeRS bullshit is annoying as fuck.

Airport kiosks are absolutely the fucking worst because their system won’t let me put my legal name in, but I have to use my legal name to pass security.

FormerGameDev
aye, like Metallica’s longest lasting bass player, Roberto Agustín Miguel Santiago Samuel Trujillo Veracruz

thrye333
I like the point near the end about names being consistent across systems, because when I was getting ready to go apply to colleges, I found out that most of them had my last name misspelled. I have a common English first name as my last name. I have never seen it spelled how 75% of those colleges spelled it.

I have no idea how they got that spelling. I don’t even know how they had my info. But that’s college mailing lists, I guess.

Dalimyr
I used to work in a hospital, sharing an office with another team who told a story about how people testing in their system (in prod, because you’re lucky to have a proper test environment in the public sector) would use Simpsons characters for their tests. People who knew this got accustomed to filtering out “Bart Simpson”, “Lisa Simpson” and all that…until one day this instinctive behaviour impacted a patient (I can’t remember what happened – if it was an appointment being deleted or something like that) because their name was Margaret Simpson and someone had erroneously thought this was just test data.

I don’t think this incident actually stopped the person from continuing to create Simpsons test data, but yeah, that shit happens from time to time.

AaronTheElite007
I wonder if someone has the last name ‘null’?

IMightBeErnest
I heard a story about a guy who made his license plate “null” and ended up getting assigned all of the tickets where a license number wasn’t known (or bugged, or something). Point is, he got like a bajillion fines he had to contest.

Problem Solving Ants

Ants making a smart maneuver
byu/well-ok-I-am-in inDamnthatsinteresting

In the group challenge, however, the picture was completely different, especially for the larger groups. Not only did groups of ants perform better than individual ants, but in some cases they did better than humans. Groups of ants acted together in a calculated and strategic manner, exhibiting collective memory that helped them persist in a particular direction of motion and avoid repeated mistakes.

Humans, on the contrary, failed to significantly improve their performance when acting in groups. When communication between group members was restricted to resemble that of ants, their performance even dropped compared to that of individuals. They tended to opt for “greedy” solutions—which seemed attractive in the short term but were not beneficial in the long term, and—according to the researchers—opted for the lowest common denominator.

“An ant colony is actually a family,” Feinerman says. “All the ants in the nest are sisters, and they have common interests. It’s a tightly knit society in which cooperation greatly outweighs competition. That’s why an ant colony is sometimes referred to as a super-organism, sort of a living body composed of multiple ‘cells’ that cooperate with one another.

Health Care Reform Attempt – $7.50 Shot vs $75 Shot

Gruber: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think that, ultimately, it’s providers. First of all, if I was the health-care czar, I wouldn’t just pay what Europe pays. I would do a study of what’s the value of a hip replacement, and I’d pay according to that study. Answer one. Answer two is, who’s going to scream? It’s going to be providers, in particular the specialists and the hospitals. And let me tell you a story that illustrates that, Derek. If you get a shot, a drug injected at the doctor—not one you buy at the pharmacy, but an injectable drug, like for cancer, at the doctor—the way the government reimburses you under Medicare, that’s our universal coverage for the elderly, is the doctor gets paid 7.5 percent of the cost of the drug.

So if I give you a shot, Derek, that costs $100, I get $7.50. If I give you a shot that costs $1,000, same effort, same risk of carpal tunnel, I get $75. That’s stupid. That makes no sense. So 20 senators wrote a letter to President Obama saying, “Look, the system’s broken, we should fix it.” So President Obama and his advisers came up with a new system where doctors would largely be paid a flat amount per shot. Budget neutral. We paid the same amount of money to doctors in total, but you get a flat amount per shot. Shortly thereafter, 80 senators, including most of the original 20, wrote a letter to him saying, “How dare you propose this radical revitalization American health care? You must stop this at once. It’s socialism.”

What happened? Well, the oncologists, the cancer doctors, are the ones that give the $1,000 shots, and they got upset and they lobbied. That is the challenge, Derek.

Why American Health Care Is a “Broken System”
plain-english-with-derek-thompson

You’ve Come a Long Way Since the Primordial Soup

Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their own continuation in the world? There would be plenty of time for improvement. What weird engines of self-preservation would the millennia bring forth? Four thousand million years on, what was to be the fate of the ancient replicators? They did not die out, for they are past masters of the survival arts. But do not look for them floating loose in the sea; they gave up that cavalier freedom long ago. Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins

Earth and Moon, Photo of

The moon passed between Nasa’s Deep Space Climate Observatory and the Earth allowing this rare pic showing the dark side of the moon
byu/SmallAchiever ininterestingasfuck

KnightOfWords
It looks a bit weird because the Sun is almost directly behind the camera, so there are no shadows on the crater walls. This makes the Moon look very flat. Also, the far side of the Moon doesn’t have the large dark maria (“seas”) to break up its appearance.

Dynamic range is also a challenge in a picture like this as the Moon is far less reflective than the Earth. Presenting the Earth well results in a limited range of brightness for the Moon, so it has low contrast.

DSCOVR has a monochrome camera and takes a rapid succession of images through different coloured filters (red, green, blue, perhaps some other wavelengths such as UV and IR). These are combined into a colour balanced image. (Consumer cameras also have monochrome sensors but with colour filters directly grafted to them, called a Bayer filter. Neighbouring pixels see different colours.)

This is fine for DSCOVR’s day job, observing the Earth. But here the Moon is orbiting the Earth and moving across the field of view. As a result the green channel is slightly misaligned, if you look closely there is a green fringe around the Moon.

AI Transcription, Problems With

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.

Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

More concerning, they said, is a rush by medical centers to utilize Whisper-based tools to transcribe patients’ consultations with doctors, despite OpenAI’ s warnings that the tool should not be used in “high-risk domains.”

Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said

Peak Human Experience, Database of – ChillsDb

https://www.chillsdb.com/

Abstract
We introduce ChillsDB the first validated database of audiovisual stimuli eliciting aesthetic chills (goosebumps, psychogenic shivers) in a US population. To discover chills stimuli “in the wild”, we devised a bottom-up, ecologically-valid method consisting in searching for mentions of the emotion’ somatic markers in user comments throughout social media platforms (YouTube and Reddit). We successfully captured 204 chills-eliciting videos of three categories: music, film, and speech. We then tested the top 50 videos in the database on 600+ participants and validated a gold standard of 10 stimuli with a 0.9 probability of generating chills. All ChillsDB tools and data are fully available on GitHub for researchers to be able to contribute and perform further analysis.

Background & Summary
Aesthetic chills are a universal marker of human peak experiences across the arts, sciences and world religions. Best characterized as the feeling of cold down the spine or goosebumps while engaging with music or film, chills are the sensation associated to shivers: short thermogenic tremors of skeletal muscles. Though ordinarily involved in the regulation of temperature (or as an immune response during fever), chills can also be triggered by information-related processes (e.g., music, stories, speeches), independently of changes in temperature (i.e., psychogenic shivers, thereafter “chills”).

Nature

World’s Hottest Day on Record

The record for the world’s hottest day has tumbled twice in one week, according to the European climate change service.

On Monday the global average surface air temperature reached 17.15C, breaking the record of 17.09C set on Sunday.

It beats the record set in July 2023, and it could break again this week.

Parts of the world are experiencing powerful heatwaves including the Mediterranean, Russia and Canada.

World breaks hottest day record twice in a week
July 24, 2024

Renewable Energy in California

Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons, solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night, large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few years are often the single largest source of supply to the grid—sending the excess power stored up during the afternoon back out to consumers across the state. It’s taken years of construction—and solid political leadership in Sacramento—to slowly build this wave, but all of a sudden it’s cresting into view. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world and, in the course of a few months, the state has proved that it’s possible to run a thriving modern economy on clean energy.

California Is Showing How a Big State Can Power Itself Without Fossil Fuels
For part of almost every day this spring, the state produced more electricity than it needed from renewable sources.
By Bill McKibben

Google Search – Getting Lamer, Worse, Dumber, Shill…

In March, Gisele Navarro watched Google Search traffic to her Web site, HouseFresh, disappear. HouseFresh evaluates and reviews air purifiers. Her husband, Danny Ashton, launched the site in 2020, when the pandemic created a spike in demand for air purification, and at its peak the business had fifteen paid contributors. (Navarro and Ashton also work together at NeoMam, a content studio that Ashton founded.) Google traffic to HouseFresh had been slowly declining since last October, but the recent drop was far more dramatic—from around four thousand daily search referrals, or click-throughs from Google results, to around three hundred. The site makes money from affiliate fees, taking a small cut when a reader follows a link from HouseFresh to purchase an air purifier online; less traffic means less revenue, and the site can now only afford to pay one full-time employee. Navarro told me, “We are living our lives like Google is gone for us.”

The drop in traffic to HouseFresh has coincided with internal changes to Google’s search function. In late 2023, Google rolled out a series of algorithm modifications; with a “core update” in March, it made those changes permanent. HouseFresh reviews previously ranked highly on Google searches for air purifiers, but lately its articles have been buried below recommendations from brand-name publications—Better Homes and Gardens, People, Architectural Digest (which is owned by Condé Nast, the parent company of The New Yorker). Navarro even noticed Rolling Stone, the music magazine owned by Penske Media, recommending anti-mold humidifiers. To her, it seemed as if media companies were making a grab for affiliate revenue without the expertise that her own site had worked hard to cultivate—and it looked as if Google was rewarding them for doing so. HouseFresh followed Google’s guidelines for search-engine optimization, or S.E.O.s—the company suggests that Web sites “provide original information” and demonstrate “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness”—but this no longer seemed to have any effect. “There are people who feel that Google is obfuscating the truth,” Navarro said. “It’s lying to our faces, or gaslighting.” She began publishing articles on HouseFresh about the decline in search traffic, with headlines such as “How Google Is Killing Independent Sites Like Ours.” The articles got more search traffic than the reviews did.

Is Google S.E.O. Gaslighting the Internet?
Leaked documents provide a glimpse into the inner workings of Google Search—and contradict the company’s public
Kyle Chayka
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-google-seo-gaslighting-the-internet

Computer Keeps Making Me Sign In – Checked Power Settings and Screen Saver and That Didn’t Work – How to Fix

FIX – Go to Smart Assist > Zero Touch Lock – Set to off:

Solution to screen lock problem
Numerous threads in regards to the issue of screen lock and not being able to disable it.

I too had this issue and I change registry values and every conceivable setting and still Windows 11 would put me in screen lock and I had to re-enter my pin.

The problem is not in Windows 11 but rather something called “proximity sensor” which all hardware vendors now enable by default (HP, Lenovo, etc). In Lenovo you need to go into Lenovo Vantage and then into Smart Assist and disable “Zero Touch Lock”. Your screen will not get locked every 1-3 minutes when you step away.

answers.microsoft

AI Hallucination – Definition, Example of

In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a hallucination or artificial hallucination (also called confabulation or delusion) is a response generated by AI which contains false or misleading information presented as fact. This term draws a loose analogy with human psychology, where hallucination typically involves false percepts. However, there’s a key difference: AI hallucination is associated with unjustified responses or beliefs rather than perceptual experiences.

For example, a chatbot powered by large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, may embed plausible-sounding random falsehoods within its generated content. Researchers have recognized this issue, and by 2023, analysts estimated that chatbots hallucinate as much as 27% of the time, with factual errors present in 46% of their responses. Detecting and mitigating these hallucinations pose significant challenges for practical deployment and reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. Some researchers believe the specific term “AI hallucination” unreasonably anthropomorphizes computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence)

As an example, Googling to find a movie with three actors, Rainn Wilson, Kevin Hart, and Jason Statham, and Google says they were all in Crank, when only Statham was:

movie with rainn wilson kevin hart jason statham

Rainn Wilson, Kevin Hart, and Jason Statham star in Crank, a 2006 action movie that ends with Chelios breaking Verona’s neck in a helicopter. Some critics say the movie is better than expected and powered by a great performance from Statham.

VO2 Max – Health Indicator

Derek Thompson: Steve, I want to start with you: VO2 max. If you’re a listener who is anywhere proximate to the health and lifespan world, there is a 90 percent chance you have heard the term “VO2 max” in the last year, maybe the last month, possibly the last 15 minutes. This is a health and fitness metric that seems to have exploded into popular consciousness in large part thanks to the bestselling book Outlive by Peter Attia. The New York Times just recently, last week, called VO2 max “the best way to track fitness and longevity.” The best way to track fitness and longevity. Steve, ground-floor level please, what is VO2 max?

Steve Magness: I’ve got to say, as an exercise scientist, it humbles me that this has now come out as the thing when we’ve been able to measure VO2 max since about the 1930s. But anyways, what is VO2 max? Quite simply, it’s the maximum amount of oxygen that we can utilize. So it’s essentially how much oxygen you can breathe in, and then go through your circulatory system, and then utilized by the muscles, and that’s what it is. So the way we measure it is pretty simple. You get put on a treadmill or a bike in an exercise science or a doctor’s lab. They hook you up to a mask. That mask has a tube that runs into a machine or a bag that essentially measures how much oxygen you’re breathing in and out, and then they ramp up the exercise. You start really easy, and then the speed gets faster on the treadmill every one or two minutes, depending on the protocol.

And you keep that going until essentially you cry uncle, which is you are so exhausted that you either fall off the back of the treadmill, which happens with elite athletes, or, more so with regular people, you just scream, hit stop, and just are done. And generally, at the end of the fastest that you’re going on that treadmill, your oxygen consumption is at its highest level, and whatever that number is is your VO2 max. And it’s a surrogate indicator of cardiovascular or aerobic fitness. And the way I like to describe it is it’s the measure of the engine size of the car. So it’s that big number that we use holistically to look at aerobic fitness.
…
Magness: They use the speed that you reached at the end of the treadmill when you called uncle, when you quit. So I think this is really important because we confuse the thing. We say, “Oh. It’s VO2 max. It’s VO2 max. It’s VO2 max.” Vast majority of times in these mortality longevity studies, it’s not. We use that speed, or incline, or watts on the bike, and say, essentially, “How fast can you get until you’re exhausted on this test?” And that is what correlates to mortality, longevity, etc.

Health Fads and Fictions: VO2 Max, Supplement Mania, Sunlight, and Immortality