There are lots of people on the internet who have tried to get LLMs to play chess. The history seems to go something like this:
Before September 2023: Wow, recent LLMs can sort of play chess! They fall apart after the early game, but they can do something! Amazing!
September-October 2023: Wow! LLMs can now play chess at an advanced amateur level! Amazing!
(Year of silence.)
Recently: Wow, recent LLMs can sort of play chess! They fall apart after the early game, but they can do something! Amazing!
I can only assume that lots of other people are experimenting with recent models, getting terrible results, and then mostly not saying anything. I haven’t seen anyone say explicitly that only gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct is good at chess. No other LLM is remotely close.
My contribution to 3DTotal’s book on tarot! Each artist handled a different suit, I illustrated the suit of wands. I had a great time working on this series! If you’re interested, here’s the preorder link:
This observation featrues some awesome little barchan train climbing up a gully in Hebes Chasma. One of our science goals is to quantify annual changes, sand fluxes and monitor nearby recurring slope lineae. Hebes Chasma is an isolated chasma just north of the Valles Marineris canyon system of Mars.
biologists will be like this is a very simplified diagram of a mammalian cell
chemists will be like this is a molecule
okay but this is what the best render of a human cell looks like
They are not kidding
We are full of so many fuckign guys
This is actuallya full on interactive map! You can put your cursor over
anystructure to focus on it and see its name, you can focus on all the structures that are part of a specific pathway and, when you click on proteins, you open it up on PhosphoSitePlus, which is a curated database of proteins and their post-translational modifications. It has a helpful description and summary for each protein!
This is a HUGE complementary resource for learning molecular biology! It really helps to make sense of each individual pathway and it puts everything into perspective. It only focuses on human, rat and certain other animal cells, so it won’t have all the pathways one would wish to see… But for the pathways it does include, consider opening the image and accompanying it as you learn or revise them!
oh wow, thank you for the additional information, i had no idea, that’s so much cooler than just the flat picture.
we are in a universe made of universes made of universes made of…
Hu Guoqing
aka 胡国庆
aka Guoqing Hu (Chinese, b. Nantong, Jiangsu Province, based Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China) -Crows fly in the snow in Hokkaido. The crow, worshipped as an auspicious bird in Japan, stands out in the white snow, Photography
The Onion wins Alex Jones’ Infowars in bankruptcy auction
The Onion, the satirical news company that repeatedly spoofed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, has won the bankruptcy auction for control over his media empire — most notably InfoWars, the far-right, conspiracy-minded website that served as Jones’ primary online platform.
What’s next for
InfoWars remains a live issue. The excess funds initially allocated for the purchase will be reinvested into our philanthropic efforts that include business school scholarships for promising cult leaders, a charity that donates elections to at-risk third world dictators, and a new pro bono program pairing orphans with stable factory jobs at no cost to the factories.
“One of the supports of the authoritarian family is the ideology of the “blessings of large families.” This ideology is upheld not so much in the interests of imperialistic wars but in the interests of a more important function: that of depreciating woman’s sexual function compared with her function of procreation. The antithesis of “mother” and “whore,” as for example in the writings of the philosopher Weininger, correspond to the antithesis between sexual desire and procreation in the thinking of the reactionary individual. According to these concepts, the sexual act for pleasure degrades the woman and mother; she who affirms pleasure and lives accordingly is a “whore.” The concept that sexuality is moral only when in the service of procreation is the core of reactionary sex politics.”
I am becoming aware of the effect a lack of trust in the media has had on people, paired with a dearth of research skills.
I’m thinking about the argument I got caught in yesterday- the subject of it doesn’t matter.
Often, pseudoscience and misinformation comes packaged with a lot of very important sounding words, and the jargon gets to the point where it seems like a lot of work to fact check it. Which makes the ‘I encourage you to do your own research’ statements real obnoxious. If it’s phrased in a way that’s impossible to navigate, good luck.
It sucks, but you gotta.
If you don’t want to fact check individual words, that’s fine. That’s a lot to ask of someone that’s just trying to figure out whether something is true.
This is where we get into something called 'lateral research.’ Instead of trying to draw a map to a sentence, you check the credibility of their source material.
This is your Snopes, your Fact Check/Media Bias, your Follow The Money.
Knowing more context about what someone is saying will save you a lot of time and energy.
If you’re not sure about something, question it.
I feel like I’ve been throwing this around a LOT lately, but:
Practice SIFT! SIFT is based on lateral research and can be very helpful for these situations.
DON’T just share information without doing your due diligence.
whyyy the fuck does this not have more notes please rb this more often qwq
Well, I mean… probably because I posted it like an hour ago.
STOP
i have found this post and infographic and i want to share it
INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE
zetabrarian’s blog says they are a socially progressive librarian monsterfucker, which a quick scroll through their blog seems to support. This makes them pretty cool but not necessarily the perfect source – anyone can
say they are a librarian, and surely not every librarian is correct about processing information
FIND BETTER COVERAGE
if i go to a search engine (in this case google via firefox) i see that several universities, libraries from large municipalities (like Los Angeles) as well as the BBC all agree that this is a real method experts in information fields recommend. I wouldn’t necessarily take any single one of these sources as 100% credible, but they are individually reasonably reliable, and taken together indicate a high probability of factual information
TRACE TO ORIGINAL CONTEXT
A brief search reveals that the SIFT method was created by Mike Caulfield, who is a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation. This is an extremely good source of information for how to process information on the internet. As the creator of the SIFT method, he has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops.
It corroborates the above information, though there are a few notable differences. For example, under the “trace to original context” section in the Washington U. source (again, as close to the original as i could find) this step contains advice to
check the date. This seems very good to include, as in the fast moving world of internet information, things become outdated or get updated very quickly, and yet first takes and outdated articles hang around and get shared for a long time.
EXTRA CREDIT
I personally find that it is important to outright search for the opposite information. For example, I put in a few searches like “Mike Caulfield discredited” “Mike Caulfield wrong” “SIFT method bad” etc. I found nothing showing me any indications this method has any problems. Interestingly, somehow this did turn up an article about news literacy on Medium, which was actually written by Mike Caulfield in April of 2017
Kiyoshi Yamashita (1922 - 1971) was a famous vagabond artist in Japan. He was the subject of a motion picture in 1959 and a long running television series (1980-1997). When Yamashita was three years old he became very ill and as a result suffered some neurological damage. Bullied as a child because he was slow and spoke with a speech impediment he acted out and wounded a classmate with a knife. As a result of this incident his parents thought it would be better if Yamashita had a specialized environment for his education. They enrolled him in Yawata Gakuen (a school for the mentally disabled) and it was there that his artistic abilities flowered.
When Kiyoshi Yamishita turned eighteen in 1940 he ran away in order to avoid being examined for recruitment into the army. This begins the period of his wanderings which so captivated the Japanese popular imagination. When he was twenty-one he was forced to submit to the army exam but was found to be unacceptable for service. He resumed to his vagabond lifestyle returning now and again to his school or family home where he would create his famous pictures which were composed entirely of pasted bits of torn of colored paper.
Yamashita died from a cerebral hemorrhage aged 49.
“Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
“Everything is in flux: everything changes; the body changes, the soul changes. We are capable of extraordinary self-transmutation and internal self-transformation.”
Here is a (nearly) complete collection of Re/Search books mostly on PDF.
Enjoy the Ballard. Learn about early Industrial culture. Be baffled by their attempt to cash in on the Swing trend of the early 2,000’s. Be annoyed that they were partially responsible for extending Boyd Rice’s career by decades. Marvel at once was and might possibly still be transgressive.
We are offering a FREE 349-page downloadable pdf compendium of Raymond Scott artifacts and ephemera, including previously uncirculated historic material. The
Artifacts files are intended as informational supplements to the Scott albums
Three Willow Park: Electronic Music from Inner Space, 1961–1971;
Manhattan Research Inc.; and
Soothing Sounds for Baby (all available on Basta Music).
The chronologically sequenced and annotated documents and images illuminate Scott’s career in the field of electronic music, from his 1920s Brooklyn high school days to his 1980s post-Motown years in Los Angeles. Two-thirds of the content focuses in-depth on Scott’s most productive period, 1958 (when he began working on electronic music full-time), thru his mid-1960s collaborations with Bob Moog, to 1972 (his first year at Motown).
This extensive collection features Scott’s handwritten and typed technical notes, photographs, sketches, correspondence, art, schematics, patents, circuit diagrams, vintage news articles, and family ephemera. While the collection is not intended to be read as a book (the patent disclosures and diagrams are extremely complex), there are many artifacts which the curiosity-seeker will find readable, enjoyable and informative.
The pdf is offered for download in two formats: high resolution (181MB; Dropbox folder–click to redirect and download), for best quality viewing and printing, and reduced resolution (66MB, Dropbox folder–click to redirect and downloa), suitable for paging through on-screen. We invite you to read, re-post, and share these documents. The Artifacts compendium was compiled, edited and annotated by Irwin Chusid and Jeff Winner, and designed by Piet Schreuders.
The Artifacts compendium was compiled, edited and annotated by
Irwin Chusid and
Jeff Winner, and designed by
Piet Schreuders.
“China’s carbon emissions have flatlined over the past six months and there’s now an opportunity for substantial declines over the next decade, analysts say.
The rapid growth in clean energy generation has been sufficient to offset a recent surge in power demandcaused by higher air conditioning use amid late-summer heatwaves, and the government’s manufacturing push, according to an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
China’s carbon emissions fell by 1% in the second quarter of 2024 and were flat in the third quarter, providing another indication that emissions may have already peaked.
This is largely because
solar power output was up 44% in the three months to end-September, compared to a year before, while
wind power generation grew 24%. In the first nine months of 2024,
China installed 161GW of new solar capacity and 39GW of wind, per CREA data.
For emissions to post a decline in 2024 as a whole, there will need to be a 2% reduction in the fourth quarter, Myllyvirta’s calculations show.
That’s probableif power demand growth cools as expected and hydro plants perform in line with historical averages, he wrote in a post on X, adding that over the entire summer period, clean energy expansion covered all electricity demand growth.
“If the current downturn in China’s emissions is sustained — with emissions falling in the second quarter and stable in the third quarter — that
would open the door to the country beginning to reduce emissions much faster than its current commitments require.
“This would have enormous significance for the global effort to avoid catastrophic climate change, as China’s emissions growth has been the dominant factor pushing global emissions up for the past eight years since the signing of the Paris climate agreement.”
Based on current trends and targets, CREA expects China’s emissions will decline 30% by 2035. The International Energy Agency says emissions will fall 24% by then based only on stated policies, but that could be raised to 45% if the country follows a pathway that’s consistent with its long-term carbon neutrality target.
For the time being, Chinese policymakers are setting relatively unambitious targets, and “it’s vital that future targets reflect ongoing clean energy trends to avoid locking in lower ambitions,” Myllyvirta said.”
man did you know wind turbine power output is not linear with wind speed, it’s
cubic? Not really cubic, it maxes out when the turbine starts forming vortexes or some shit, but up til then its cubic.
it’s really extracting kinetic energy from the wind. So already that’s velocity squared.
But that’s not per unit time, that’s per unit air. And the amount of air going through per unit time is proportional to velocity. So now we’re at velocity cubed.
so you can see that the wind speed required for a wind turbine to produce any significant amount of power is higher than the average speed in most of the country.
But really the cubic dependence means that average wind speed doesn’t tell you much, it’s more about “how often is it above 8 m/s”. I can’t find a map of estimated average wind turbine power efficiency, but I think it would be more “binary” than this map. Like if you try to build a wind farm in a place with half the average wind speed, it’s less “we need twice as many turbines”, more like “I asked a physicist and they told me to give up”.
this is totally different than solar power which is actually pretty much linear as a function of light hitting the panel. Though you might get a nonlinear panels required to build due to seasonality
probably my most environmentalist view is that species are an enormously valuable public good. I think AlphaFold may be the first real sign that I was right about that. You probably don’t know what I mean because AlphaFold is widely misunderstood. People think it’s a solution to the “protein folding problem” as formulated decades ago, figuring out the protein fold based on the sequence. Actually, it figures out the protein fold based on the sequence
and hundreds or thousands of related sequences. It’s using the history of life on Earth like a natural experiment that determines which modifications of the protein maintain the functional fold. However I think almost of these sequences are from microbes so it actually seems orthogonal to environmentalist concerns about extinction. But maybe it’s a proof of principle.
You can never tell exactly where information in ML comes from, but the protein structures that AlphaFold2 was trained on come from the PDB which is mostly human proteins. AF2 generally uses 30-100 related proteins in the MSA, so some might be bacteria, but typically for a protein from a mammal I don’t expect that many to show up because (1) there’s more closely related organisms and (2) bacteria as prokaryotes don’t have analogues to Eukaryotic proteins.
Readers have told me they like to build small-scale photovoltaic installations like those that power Low-tech Magazine’s website and office. However, they don’t know where to start and what components to buy. This guide brings all the information together: what you need, how to wire everything, what your design choices are, where to put solar panels, how to fix them in place (or not), how to split power and install measuring instruments. It deals with solar energy systems that charge batteries and simpler configurations that provide direct solar power.
Conventional solar PV installations are installed on a rooftop or in a field. They convert the low voltage direct current (DC) power produced by solar panels into high voltage alternate (AC) power for use by main appliances and rely on the power grid during the night and in bad weather. None of this holds for the small-scale systems we build in this manual. They are completely independent of the power grid, run entirely on low voltage power, and are not powering a whole household or city but rather a room, a collection of devices, or a specific device. Small-scale solar is decentralized power production taken to its extremes.
Most of the work in building a small-scale solar system is deciding the size of the components and the building of the supporting structure for the solar panel. Wiring is pretty straightforward unless you want a sophisticated control panel. You only need a limited set of tools: a wire stripper, some screwdrivers (including small ones), and a wood saw are the only essentials. A soldering iron, pliers, and a multimeter are handy, but you can do without them.
Here’s one of my favorite keyboards, which I made in July of 2021. This is the
Clock Keyboard.
The way it works is that it is a clock (not the analog one on screen, that’s just for show for the video), and it has one button. The button types the key that it’s currently time for.
And what key it’s time for is determined by the minutes of the current time:
At 0 minutes past the hour, it types an “a”.
1 minute later, a “b”.
and so on.
Typing “Hello World!” into twitter took 5 hours and 24 minutes.
“The question,” MLK reminded us from a Birmingham jail cell, “is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”
“Once thought to be extinct, black-footed ferrets are the only ferret native to North America, and are making a comeback, thanks to the tireless efforts of conservationists.
Captive breeding, habitat restoration, and wildlife reintegration have all played a major role in bringing populations into the hundreds after near total extinction.
Cloning is a tactic to preserve the health of species, as
all living black-footed ferrets come from just seven wild-caught descendants. This means their genetic diversity is extremely limited and opens them up to greater risks of disease and genetic abnormalities.
ALT
Now, a new breakthrough has been made.
Antonia, a black-footed ferret cloned from the DNA of a ferret that lived in the 1980s has successfully birthed two healthy kits of her own: Sibert and Red Cloud.
These babies mark the first successful live births from a cloned endangered species — and is a milestone for the country’s ferret recovery program.
The kits are now three months old, and mother Antonia is helping to raise them — and expand their gene pool.
In fact, Antonia’s offspring have three times the genetic diversity of any other living ferrets that have come from the original seven ancestors.
ALT
Researchers believe that expanded genetic diversity could help grow the ferrets’ population and help prime them to recoverfrom ongoing diseases that have been massively detrimental to the species, including sylvatic plague and canine distemper.
“The successful breeding and subsequent birth of Antonia’s kits marks a major milestone in endangered species conservation,” said Paul Marinari, senior curator at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.
“The many partners in the Black-footed Ferret Recovery Program continue their innovative and inspirational efforts to save this species and be a model for other conservation programs across the globe.”
ALT
Antonia actually gave birth to three kits, after mating with Urchin, a 3-year-old male ferret. One of the three kits passed away shortly after birth, but one male and one female are in good health and meeting developmental milestones, according to the Smithsonian.
Mom and babies will remain at the facility for further research, with no plans to release them into the wild.
According to the Colorado Sun, another cloned ferret, Noreen, is also a potential mom in the cloning-breeding program. The original cloned ferret, Elizabeth Ann, is doing well at the recovery program in Colorado, but does not have the capabilities to breed.
Antonia, who was cloned using the DNA of a black-footed ferret named Willa, has now solidified Willa’s place as the eighth founding ancestor of all current living ferrets.
“By
doing this, we’ve actually added an eighth founder,” said Tina Jackson, black-footed ferret recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in an interview with the Colorado Sun.
“And in some ways that may not sound like a lot, but in this genetic world, that is huge.”
ALT
Along with the USFWS and Smithsonian, conservation organization Revive & Restore has also enabled the use of biotechnologies in conservation practice. Co-founder and executive director Ryan Phelan is thrilled to welcome these two new kits to the black-footed ferret family.
“For the first time, we can definitively say that cloning contributed meaningful genetic variation back into a breeding population,” he said in a statement.
“As these kits move forward in the breeding program, the impact of this work will multiply, building a more robust and resilient population over time.””
Not too long ago I made a post about the Sanded Church of Skagen that was abandoned due to being buried in sand, but the “sand problem” is much larger than the church.
If you look at Denmark on a map you might notice a white dot near the very top of the country.
That my friend is a huge sand dune that arose out of the sea 300 years ago and is slowly eating its way through the landscape at 18 meters a year.
And if you look closer you might notice that it’s heading straight for the towns Rannerød and Hulsig and when that happens no one will come to save them because the dune is protected. At least they’ll see it coming.
That means that in a few hundred years we won’t just have a sanded church, we’ll have sanded towns with more roofs and towers sticking out of the dune than any tourist bureau could wish for.
Because the dune is a very popular tourist spot. I myself have been to it a few times and it’s quite the experience for a child to suddenly be in a “desert” in Denmark.
If you feel sad for the people in the towns just remember that’s nature. The reason why the dune is protected is because the area used to have many more but people made an effort to destroy them and it fucked up the ecosystem in the area. The dunes leave moist wetland behind that loads of rare creatures thrive in.
So today the inevitable end of the towns are viewed as sort of romantic poetry about nature, the march of time and appreciating the now.
And isn’t it kinda beautiful? To know that something like this exists in the world that will destroy our towns, roads and railways that we could
easily eradicate with our modern technology but we choose not to simply because we know it would be wrong.
Bats are incredibly diverse animals: They can climb onto other animals to drink their blood, pluck insects from leaves or hover to drink nectar from tropical flowers, all of which require distinctive wing designs.
But why aren’t there any flightless bats that behave like ostriches—long-legged creatures that wade along riverbanks for fish like herons—or bats that spend their lives at sea, like the wandering albatross?
Researchers may have just found the answer: Unlike birds, the evolution of bats’ wings and legs is tightly coupled, which may have prevented them from filling as many ecological niches as birds.
“We initially expected to confirm that bat evolution is similar to that of birds, and that their wings and legs evolve independently of one another. The fact we found the opposite was greatly surprising,” said Andrew Orkney, postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Brandon Hedrick, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, in the College of Veterinary Medicine.
This interactive map shows the access points for major industry groups from agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and finance, as well as mining and fossil fuels, to the 2024 UN biodiversity summit. Credit: Rachel Sherrington.Corporations have turned out in large numbers at COP16, as they did at the last biodiversity summit in 2022. Compared to climate summits, where corporate logos and lobbyists are more visible, here they are flying under the radar. Yet they have found ways to tap into the negotiations.DeSmog’s map of business participation in COP16 reveals the presence of a range of powerful industry associations and multinationals from the agriculture, pharmaceuticals, finance, mining, and fossil fuels sectors.
Governments risk another decade of failure on biodiversity loss, due to the slow implementation of an international agreement to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems, experts have warned.
Less than two years ago, the world reached a historic agreement at the Cop15 summit in Montreal to stop the human-caused destruction of life on our planet. The deal included targets to protect 30% of the planet for nature by the end of the decade (30x30), reform $500bn (then £410bn) of environmentally damaging subsidies, and begin restoring 30% of the planet’s degraded ecosystems.
But as country representatives dig into their second week of negotiations at Cop16 in Cali, Colombia – their first meeting since Montreal – alarm is growing at the lack of concrete progress on any of the major targets they agreed upon. An increasing number of indicators show that governments are not on track. They still need to protect an area of land equivalent to the combined size of Brazil and Australia, and an expanse of sea larger than the Indian Ocean to meet the headline 30x30 target, according to a new UN report.
Weak progress on funding for nature and almost no progress on subsidy reform have also frustrated observers. At the time of publication, 158 countries are yet to submit formal plans on how they are going to meet the targets, according to Carbon Brief, missing their deadline this month ahead of the biodiversity summit in Cali, where governments are not likely to set a new deadline.
The world has never met a target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems. Amid growing scientific warnings about the state of life on Earth, there has been a major push to make sure this decade is different, and that governments comply with targets designed to prevent wildlife extinctions, such as cuts to pesticides use and pollution.
Leading figures in conservation and science have raised concerns about the progress governments are making towards the targets in Cali. Martin Harper, CEO of Birdlife International, said meaningful action on commitments was vital.
“We cannot accept inaction as the new normal. This means more action to bolster efforts to recover threatened species, to protect and restore more land, fresh water and sea, and to transform our food, energy and industrial systems. We have five years to raise hundreds of billions of dollars. If we don’t see it materialise, I dread to think where we will be in 2030,” he said
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