Thorny_Insight

@Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee

I prioritize ethics over optics even if it means facing criticism.

Sharing my honest beliefs, welcoming constructive debates, and embracing the potential for evolving viewpoints. Independent thinker navigating through conversations without allegiance to any particular side.

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Thorny_Insight OP ,

Oh don't worry. They're fine.

Thorny_Insight OP ,

It's the winter that makes summer so enjoyable. Can't appreciate nice weather if it's like that every day.

Thorny_Insight ,

With that much money I could buy 8 houses like the one I live in right now.

Thorny_Insight ,

I didn't get a pickup so that I could transport groceries but I can't imagine having to do all my grocery shopping by bike. It's a +20km round trip and I usually come back with 2 - 3 bags of food which would be impossible to transport by either of my bikes so I would need a third one or a trailer just for grocery shopping and even in that case the issue that remains is that my SO couldn't come with me unless she also rides a bike.

I mean I could do it if I absolutely had to but having a car makes it so much easier. I tried bike commuting for a while too but quickly realized that it's turning an enjoyable hobby into a chore that I approach with apprehension, so I stopped doing that and instead only ride bikes as a hobby and for fun.

Thorny_Insight ,

I need a car for work so getting rid of it is not an option either way so I don't feel any guilt about using it to haul groceries. There's a lot to improve infrastructure-wise to encourage other means of transportation but I don't see cars as inherently bad. It's only bad when you force everyone to get one (or two) to even be able to live their lives.

Thorny_Insight ,

Oh yeah there's definitely a lot to improve. A ton of people would be more than willing to ditch their cars if there was viable alternatives that don't massively inconvenience our daily lives.

There is a grocery store only about 500 meters from my house but small ones like that are so much more expensive than the one I go to now. I'm easily saving my monthly fuel costs just by shopping there.

Thorny_Insight ,

Grocery trips are just a tiny portion of from where my fuel costs come from. I use the truck for work. I'd save practically no money at all by walking to the store.

Thorny_Insight ,

It's not inherently toxic but I'd argue the experience is a net-negative. Social media rewards all the bad and inflammatory behaviour that makes it so. The incentives are not aligned with being nice to each other.

One of the culprits in my mind are visible like counts. The ability to up- and downvote messages is a good one but the scores shouldn't be visible to anyone. Comments like "ACAB" or "eat the rich" bring zero value into the discussion but rather are just meant to fish likes from your own team and annoy the opposition. I doubt that removing that feature now would no longer solve the issue but it's one of the main things that trained us to act that way.

Personally I'm hoping for more powerful tools for curating our feeds. It's probably going to have to be AI based as I can't imagine how else you'd do that but on top of just simple word and domain filters (which even lemmy doesn't have) we need smart filters aswell that you could enable which filters out topics you don't like seeing. Kind of like with enough people using adblockers it would discourage ads-based bussines models and incentivices companies to come up with alternatives. With enough people using similar blockers for toxic content the people creating would quickly realize they're shouting into the void.

Thorny_Insight ,

Negativity get's more engagement on Lemmy aswell. The vast majority of content on the front page is about the world being on fire.

Thorny_Insight ,

This is the only way. Ruthlessly blocking everything you're not interested about seeing.

By blocklist on Lemmy is 1200+ users and communities long and even though I still see plenty of toxicity the difference is still noticeable. The only issue with it is that it's quite blunt tool. An user might be making inflammatory comments only on threads about a certain topic and then get blocked for it but then I'm not seeing any of their other content either which rarely is all toxic.

Thorny_Insight ,

The only reason I don’t do the same thing is that I want to be aware of how prevalent the toxicity is.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with the logic here. I did a similar thing years ago by pretty much stopping paying attention to the news. You'd think that would lead to me not being aware of what's going on in the world but turns out one does not simply just turn off the news. When something actually newsworthy happens I'll hear about it just the same way as everyone else. It's effectively impossible to avoid even if you try to. The only kind of news I more or less totally insulated myself from is celebrity gossip and other similar entirely meaningless trash.

Also I don't block people to create an echo chamber for myself. More often than not it's not what people say that get them blocked, it's how they say it. I'm more than willing to engage an actual nazi on a debate as long as they're approaching it in a good faith even to some extent. It's people that are just throwing shit that I'm trying to get rid of. I'm basically just trying to improve the signal-to-noise ratio but the noise will only get quieter but never dissapear completely.

Thorny_Insight OP , (edited )

I'm glad you like it!

The twigs stand out due to the lighting conditions. I didn't do anything to intentionally make them pop. Them beight light colored and me bumping up the "whites" probably plays a factor though.

I generally try to underexpose my pictures to avoid blowing out the highlights and I then bring back the shadows in post-processing. My editing usually consists of playing with shadows/highlights and blacks/whites so that I get maximum detail from the shadows without any too bright spots around the edges distracting from the subject of the photo. Generally this also includes adding vignette and often also a gradient filter on the top/bottom of the photo to lead your eyes to the centre. I also try to keep the darkest parts of the photo dark gray instead of black. For moody photos like this I usually also bring down the vibrance for more realism. In daylight shots I do the opposite. I do this all by eye.

Almost all my photos also contain some amount of "dodge and burn" meaning locally brushing in darker and brighter spots all around the picture to make the lighting more interesting. I never use any color filters but I tend to adjust the white balance more towards the warm side.

One good tip for editing is to not save it when you think you're done. Put it away for a little while and then come back to it. Our eyes get used to the look of it pretty quick and we tend to go a overboard with the editing. More often than not I end up toning it down a bit.

Here's the settings for this picture:

https://i.imgur.com/RNoLdj1.jpeg

I'll PM you a link to my Pixelfed incase you want to see my other pictures. You'll probably be able to pick out the common theme between them.

Thorny_Insight OP ,

Thanks!

Unfortunelatley I noticed logging markings on the trees which is what prompted me to take this as a "before" photo. I expect this forest no longer to be here next year as is the case with huge number of nice spots like this around where I live.

I agree that forests like this are quite nice looking but they're not natural. These are all planted trees intented to be cut down once they mature. That's why it's all the same specie trees with zero undergrowth.

Thorny_Insight OP ,

Thanks! I shot it wide open at f/2.8 at 50mm and focused on the foreground but I must admit I was slightly conflicted about the background being out of focus.

Thorny_Insight ,

Salty liquorice ice cream, probably.

It's not a weird taste to me but I'd imagine the vast majority of non-Finnish people would absolutely hate it.

Thorny_Insight ,

I remember seeing on a food show years ago a burger with a doughnut as a bun. I've never tasted one but I thought to myself that might actually work.

Thorny_Insight ,

I don't know what the difference is. Liquorice and salty liquorice are similar but separate products.

Thorny_Insight ,

Did it get stuck to your teeth when you tried biting it? May have been a Merkkari

Thorny_Insight ,

Probably similar to why you can make the turn indicator make fart noises or have the car "dance" by flashing lights and opening doors and such. The hardware is there so why not. Utterly pointless features but atleast it's something the competition isn't doing I guess.

Tho I must admit that it was quite funny when I once heard a guy lock the doors on his Tesla and instead of the generick "click click" it said "quack" instead.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Thorny_Insight ,

    Would be quite surprising if there was an ads-based platform that doesn't do that. Age and gender are among the most relevant things when targeting ads.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    Fair enough. I don't use Discord so I'm not sure but my understanding is that it's free to use. So how do they fund it? I presume by collecting user data to target advertising or to be sold to 3rd parties.

    My point here being that collecting data to figure out the user's age and gender isn't particularly uncommon.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    Well, I mean.. Besides the first two those are not the worst rules to live by. As an agnostic I'm obviously against pushing your religion onto others but I think I'll reserve my outrage for something more important.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    Agreed. It's also a great way to get extra calories with plenty of protein and fats and minimal carbonhydrates.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    We may very well be doomed if AI reaches consciousness but I'm not quite convinced LLM's is the way to get there but even if it was and it was solely trained on social media content I still wouldn't expect it to adopt the behaviour of your typical social media commentor. The toxic behaviour on social media is, in my view, almost solely driven by our human ego and pettiness. It's not obvious to me that AI would care about things like winning arguments or coming up with snide remarks and such. What I see as the most likely outcome would be endlessly patient and quite autistic-like being that's balanced in it's views and would most likely be pretty difficult to argue against. I doubt humans are anywhere even near the far-end of the intelligence spectrum and something with the information processing capability that's orders of magnitude greater than ours would more than likely not get caught up in stuff like confirmation bias, partisan thinking, motivated reasoning, being tossed around by emotions, cognitive dissonance etc. Those are by definitions human features.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    I feel like this type of guides are only understood by people who already know how different camera settings affect the picture quality. As a such person it's really difficult to imagine myself in the place of a total novice but I can imagine this not being helpful at all.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    Another thing about TikTok that I don't get is all the useless crap laid over the video. Seems extremely distracting to me.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    I'm a bit surprised about how quickly I got tired of seeing AI content (mostly porn and non-nudes) Somehow it all just looks the same. You'd think that being AI generated would give you infinite variety but apparently not.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    Ironically this comes at a time when FSD is getting so good that the car does indeed practically drive itself. It's still level 2 but the amount of driver interventions reguired to reach your destination has dropped to near zero. I don't think we're very far at all from an actual robotaxi and the ability to use your personal vehicle as such.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    That taxi might just aswell belong to a a private individual who instead of leaving their car at the company parking lot for the whole day sent it doing ridesharing.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    The link you didn't open has a video comparing Tesla and Mercedes driving the exact same route on autopilot.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    I don't know what this has to do with what I said. It's long overdue, yes. It was false advertising, yes. It's incredibly good nowdays, yes. Several things can be true at the same time.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    It can do that now. Probably not with zero driver interventions especially when talking about a trip across the country but Tesla is the only vehicle manufacturer today that offers this capability. There's a dude on YouTube doing ridesharing with Tesla using FSD and with the latest software version it completes 90% of the trips from the pickup to the destination without intervention from the driver.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    I think FSD is further along than you think it is.

    This is the issue with all these debates currently. The people arguing against FSD are totally unaware of how far it has come since just a few months ago. They have already made up their minds based on how much it sucked a year ago and they're under the illusion that it's at best just marginally better today. I love watching the YouTube channel CYBRLFT and seeing people's minds getting blown in real time when they realize that what they've heard on the news and on social media is so far from the reality.

    Is it perfect? No. Is it unbelieveably good? Yes.

    Thorny_Insight , (edited )

    I don't see anyone claiming they have "working full self driving". That's a strawman argument. Their system is really good and years ahead of competition but there's still a shit ton to improve. That's why it's classified as level 2 and not level 3. It's a vehicle capable of driving itself under supervision but it's not a self driving vehicle.

    I’ve seen videos with FSD creating numerous dangerous situations on a single trip

    In the past few months? Because the current software version is completely different than what it used to be. They've moved entirely from human code to neural nets and it made a giant improvement in its performance.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    The whole thread is about Musk claiming in 2019 that Tesla has FSD working NOW

    From the article:

    (1) representations that Tesla vehicles have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability and, (2) representations that a Tesla car would be able to drive itself cross-country in the coming year.

    So not only are you clearly emotionally invested here but you're also being dishonest about the claims that have been made. I don't think there's any reason to go further with this.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    ..and I don't see anyone claiming it to be "working" as in it being safe enough to not need supervision.

    Thorny_Insight , (edited )

    I thought the consensus was that Tesla is far behind, hence why Mercedes is the first brand to actually have some basic level 3 automomus driving actually to customers

    Yeah that seems to be the consensus but I have no idea what it's based on. When the Mercedes system is put against FSD it looks like this. The level 3 driving is available only on a handful of highways between LA, SF and LV and even then only in ideal weather and traffic conditions.

    If the competition really is ahead then where are all the videos of their vehicles doing what FSD does? There are countless accounts on YouTube demonstrating the capabilities of FSD driving both on highways and in cities but nothing about these other brands.

    https://i.imgur.com/ow3SUkR.jpeg

    Thorny_Insight , (edited )

    Are you misleading on purpose?

    The level 3 driving is available only on a handful of highways between LA, SF and LV and even then only in ideal weather and traffic conditions.

    Stated clearly in the very next sentence.

    This comparison shows that Tesla FSD in reality is merely a drive assist.

    Always has been. That video compares drive assist to another. Apples to apples comparison. What exactly is the issue here?

    Thorny_Insight ,

    Yeah I have no idea what you're trying to tell me. You're not going to buy a Tesla because they lied about FSD a decade earlier? Ok. Good for you?

    Thorny_Insight ,

    That's not how FSD works. It's a neural net trained on millions of hours of video content of good human driving. Nowhere in the code is even specified what a bicycle is.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    if Musk sabotaged Ukraine access again

    Misinformation

    Thorny_Insight ,

    Jesus christ dude. There's quote from the author himself, Walter Isaacson who is the person from whose book the whole claim originated from.

    To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.

    You believe him when the narrative suits you but you don't when it doesn't. Talk about cognitive dissonance lol

    Enabling Starlink in Crimea would have been against the sanctions to Russia by the US. Literally illegal.

    Anyway I'm done with you. Don't bother replying.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    No, the other user is claiming that they don't have a "working" full self driving but is being vague about what they mean by "working".

    Full Self Driving is just the name of the software. There's also autopilot but that's different. The end goal of it is to eventually be capable of level 5 self driving so that's why it's named like that even though it has been a work in progress all of it's existence. Wouldn't make much sense to call it "partial self driving under supervision" because Full Self Driving is a better marketing term. Misleading? Well yeah perhaps but that's what marketing teams do. Nothing new there. Not a single Tesla owner is under the illusion that you can just enable the system and take a nap. Doesn't mean people don't do that but they know that they shouldn't. The system tells you that every single time you enable it.

    Personally I don't see a huge issue with that name. It's level 2 meaning that it needs driver supervision and it's by no means flawless but it does what the name implies: drives itself. It's not just an advanced cruise control like for example the Mercedes Drive Pilot but it is actually capable of independently driving itself and especially with the V12 it's actually getting quite good at it.

    Thorny_Insight ,

    I'll grant you that the name is misleading. They should change it. It's also plausible that there's some number of customers for which the false marketing claims may have been the deciding factor in their purchase decision.

    Is there something else you feel I'm confused about?

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