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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Plenty of self-driving trains around, generally metros where frequency and 24/7 operation is a great boon to overall service quality – you don’t want people to look at schedules, you want them to go to the station knowing there’s going to be a train in a couple of minutes, tops.

    It’s way different for long-haul service, freight, passenger, doesn’t matter. Longer and less frequent trains with way more passengers in them, and you probably need other staff too, like someone needs to run the bistro. The tracks they’re running on are also way less predictable, with a metro you can have station screen doors everywhere (which btw necessitate automatic driving, humans aren’t accurate enough) try that with an international train: Regions much less countries can’t even agree on uniform platform heights. Much less door locations: Automated long-haul would require dedicated platforms at every station and while those could be served by trains with drivers, trains nowadays are all smart enough that including a button “stop at exactly that location, to the half-centimetre” isn’t an issue, those trains would have to have doors at the right location. Now go ahead and convince Germany and France that they need to replace all TGVs and ICEs to have doors in the same location as your regional trains.

    Oh and none of that automation tech used with trains uses machine learning, btw. At least not at the basic level, when it comes to actually driving the train. I do remember watching a documentary about Singapore’s metro, where they have an ML algorithm scheduling track maintenance, minimising not service interruptions as such but impact on people’s commute. First the workers complained that none of the orders made any sense, then the developers made the computer spit out context and motivation alongside with the orders, workers changed their tune to “that’s fucking brilliant”.

    …which, actually, brings me to the conclusion: Also with automated systems we’re going to need maintenance which isn’t going to be automated any time soon. If you automate a metro that currently doesn’t run 24/7 you don’t have that many drivers in the first place, and probably have other jobs for them to do. Automating really is about making “a train max. every five minutes, 24/7” possible without breaking the bank.



  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzGet good.
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    8 days ago

    Coaches do have quite a large impact on teams, they’re the ones who study the opponent, formulate strategies, and then translate that into a training regimen.

    In so far as being a kid is playing sportsball the coach is primarily the genome, then with some distance culture (takes a village and everything), and then the parents. You can praise a parent for having the wherewithal to introduce their kid to spaced repetition software, you can’t praise them for the kid feeling inclined to learn six languages before the age of 14 that was all the genome spotting a niche, adapting a suitable individual to serve a role by making it excited.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzGet good.
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    8 days ago

    For one, you might not have much to chat about with your baby, so doing baby talk might actually get in more language training.

    In a good environment babies should be exposed to plenty of language. There’s tribal societies which don’t talk to their kids until they start to talk themselves and those kids turn out fine by all metrics researchers could throw at them. What they do do is take them with them everywhere.

    You do not need to capture a baby’s attention for them to sponge up information. They do pretty much nothing else no matter what you do.

    What has been shown to be beneficial is to give them the opportunity to talk to their caregivers earlier, figures that language capability develops faster than the capability to make complex sounds, it’s the whole point behind baby sign: So they can tell you that no they aren’t hungry they want their teddy. Doesn’t benefit language skills, it does reduce frustration (you might figure), bonds to their caregiver, and benefits both party’s emotional states.





  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzHoney
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    12 days ago

    People who don’t understand bees and think that the queen is ruling the hive – if the queen can’t swarm then they’re going to dispose of her and raise a new one. All you’re doing is weakening the hive without actually preventing it from swarming. You might even kill it off.

    You let them swarm, you let them get their rocks on, and you also have a nice property ready for them to settle back into.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldGoddammit Texas!
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    16 days ago

    I’m not too familiar with the specific legal status of the OSCE in American law, I bet there’s a treaty or the other, but generally speaking a) you’re a member and b) you regularly send out your own people as OSCE mission members into other countries to observe elections and c) Every member state gets observed (alongside non-member countries inviting the OSCE because it’s a stamp of approval and can help stabilise democracies, establish trust in the procedures). Cursory observations are done for basically all elections that aren’t strictly regional, more in-depth ones every couple of elections. It’s democracies holding each other accountable.

    If Bumfuck, TX, wants to make a statement against Canadians observing their elections that’s their god-damned right but it’s also the duty of Washington to shut them the fuck up. Not too filled-in on the details either but when you start arresting people with diplomatic passports accredited by the federal level I think you should maybe take a step back and make a phone call before deploying handcuffs.


  • You don’t need an ID in Germany to vote just, push comes to shove, a way to make your identity believable. Expired ID, student ID, personalised public transport ticket, perfectly sufficient. Generally you just vote with your election notification, a sheet of paper with your address, ballot location, and number in the voter registry on it. If you try to vote with an ID but without notification workers are going to roll their eyes because they’ll have to manually search for you in their lists, heck, you might’ve turned up at the wrong location.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldGoddammit Texas!
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    17 days ago

    I don’t need my ID to vote, also it’s valid for 10 years. Municipalities fill the voting registry from their citizens’ registry, then send out notifications to everyone. You literally cannot miss an election. You generally go voting with that notification, it’s sufficient, or use it to request a mail-in ballot.

    I’m sure administration is sufficiently different in the US than it is in Germany for the thing to not be able to work like that, but, big picture: The IRS can find everyone. Have them fill the registry, then.



  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzJust So
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    18 days ago

    Those kinds of things cover a lot, in particular the community aspect and basic coming of age stuff, but they can’t really get into the layers that mystics access. I think one approach to do it well without tripping up is to talk to the ancestors while being, on reflection, perfectly aware that you’re talking to your own genome. “Ancestors” as in think of your parents, no, earlier, your grandparents, you met them, your great-grandparents, you’ve heard stories, your great-great-grandparents, nope haven’t heard stories but you know where they’re from, go as far as you need to not have any idea about who those individuals were, but still have a sense of ancestry. That’s where it is. And once you’ve managed to get laid using your six times great-grandparent’s rizz, when you can freely access it, feel free to identify those aspects as, say, Freyr and Freya. But not before, that’s idolatry.


  • barsoap@lemm.eetoScience Memes@mander.xyzJust So
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    19 days ago

    I’ll just quote the man himself: “I’m glad I’m Jung, and not a Jungian”.

    He didn’t want the Red and Black Books to be released, not so much because he was embarrassed but because it was his personal myth, his own way to draw lines in the sand of his unconscious, complete with all his own flaws and hang-ups, and now we have people running around declaring it to be the metaphysical end-all-be-all truth. And he knew it would happen.

    He also said stuff like “To understand me, you first have to understand Freud and Adler”. Cue modern-day Jungians dismissing Freud and Adler out of hand.

    So when people get their Ph.D proposals about Jung rejected with the words “That’d be religion, not psychology” I’m not even mad. It’s just that it happens to be that religion, myth, is a universal psychological phenomenon and studying it as such is quite valuable. Time’s not ripe, it seems, to do it without inadvertently spawning a cult following confusing the map for the territory, and even worse their prophet’s map for their own map.




  • Useful becomes useless quite quickly. Yes, we have useful predictions for the weather tomorrow. A week from now? Not really. Two weeks? Could just as well get your prediction from tea leaves.

    And that’s just statistical reliability. Weather predictions are actually allowed to be wrong, when the prediction for tomorrow is off then people shrug their shoulders. Not really what Descartes meant when describing his daemon.