I was listening to the New Year’s Day concert by the Vienna philharmonic and wondered who one of the composers was so used a popular song recognition app. (I expected it would make some fuzzy match on the piece and give me the name + composer). To my amazement it did give the name and composer but as played by the Vienna philharmonic in 2005 in the same location. The orchestra does not have the same members as 19 years ago, nor was it the same conductor, so it seemed the piece was matched on the acoustics of the Musikverein where they were playing, which I found astonishing.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    Home automation technology and completely free development tools. Arduino and ESP controllers are amazing nowadays and unbelievably cheap. I just got a little $20 module that’s a 3" square 480x480 touch display with an ESP32 on the back of it. I haven’t even decided what to do with it yet, but it will probably end up as a wall-mounted indoor display/touch panel controller for the heater and vents in the greenhouse I just built in the backyard. I will add outdoor temperature as well, and maybe weather forecast icons. I was going to just use a phone app, but this thing was so cheap and will be readable from across the room at a glance without pulling out a phone. And totally DIY!

    • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.worldOP
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      14 days ago

      Yes! My ten year old brain would have melted at what’s available off the shelf now. A raspberry pi zero is, what, £20 or something? Picos I think are intended to compete directly with Arduino are even cheaper. That’s completely nuts

    • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
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      14 days ago

      Home Assistant. It’s just so good at what it does and makes things like what you are talking about more accessible to people like me.

      • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        I’ve been reluctant to embrace Home Assistant because the config files seem so arcane. I’m using NodeRED at the moment, which hides all that, You just create visual process flows on a drawing surface, and it generates a web UI. It reminds me of block programming languages like Lego Mindstorms lol.

        • McBB@lemmy.world
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          14 days ago

          I have a wife and kid and not a lot of free time. I used chatgpt to build like 90% of my home assistant dashboards and configs. Just a suggestion. I have IKEA lights, wiz connected lamps, govee strips, levoit air purifiers, switchbot humidity and temperature sensors, the dreamebot vacuum all integrated into home assistant. It’s great. Give it a go

  • Call me Lenny/Leni@lemm.eeM
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    15 days ago

    Any AI that can learn. Something always seems off when suddenly an AI that can’t even hear you claims it “learned” that “hors d’oeuvres” is pronounced “orderbs”. Sometimes it gives me mechanical turk vibes.

    • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      In spelling, V comes before R. But in pronounciation, it’s the other way round. Weird.

      I always said “ore-doovers” or even just “hors d"oeuvres” like in French. That’s always how it sounded to me.

  • Jimbabwe@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    I’m not sure this fits the bill, but I’m blown away by the depth and breadth of available hardware. Not computer hardware (tho that’s amazing, too), but latches, levers, nuts and bolts. I can go down a McMaster-Carr rabbit hole the way most people can go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. It’s just fascinating to me how many highly engineered, precisely machined, perfect, beautiful solutions exist to specific problems. If there’s ever an apocalypse, I’m seriously going to miss the ability to have brilliant mechanical solutions available at the click of a mouse.

  • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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    15 days ago

    Large Language Models.

    While it’s trendy to hate on them and nitpick every single flaw, I still have a vivid memory of how terrible chatbots were just a few years ago. The fact that I can now have an actual, insightful discussion with a computer still amazes me. I hope they continue to improve to the point where it’s impossible to tell them apart from a real person.

    • Shadow@lemmy.ca
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      15 days ago

      I’ve been working with cursor.ai lately and it’s pretty mind blowing in composer mode. I understand the hate and how the tech is limited, but it’s still pretty amazing at what it can do.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      15 days ago

      It’s funny, because what makes them more like a real person is their inability to be consistent.

      Like genuinely, LLMs are indeed cool, but in many ways all we’ve done is create a computer that is as bad at computer tasks as a human.

      It lies with the same confidence that it uses to tell the truth, mostly because it can’t actually make distinctions between the two.

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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        13 days ago

        in many ways all we’ve done is create a computer that is as bad at computer tasks as a human.

        What we have done is even worse because by and large the marketing around AI has worked and people categorically trust what a single AI will tell them after asking a question only once and if that doesn’t terrify you, you aren’t paying attention.

    • DankOfAmerica@reddthat.com
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      14 days ago

      I see a lot of hate for them on Lemmy, but I find hem quite helpful with earning how to work with computers and also summarizing general info I search for on the internet. Rather than spend 20 minutes reading thru various websites on a topic know nothing about, I can simply ask an LLM. Eve if they are known to make mistakes, I can accommodate that possibility if the stakes are high enough by looking into it further.

      • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        A programmer friend of mine uses AI constantly now in his work. Once during a D&D game he had ChatGPT write database code for a character generator or something, I forget the actual goal, just while sitting there between turns. It churned out the tedious routine crap you always have to write for tasks like that. He said he’s had it refactor his own code, and it has come up with interesting approaches he wouldn’t have thought of. Pretty amazing for software that essentially just reshuffles material it’s already seen to create something that looks like what a human would produce, without actually understanding what it’s doing.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    15 days ago

    Video generators are cool as fuck and I refuse to pretend otherwise. You can tell a robot “make this look more Pixar” and it works. Even if what you feed in is a block of solid noise. Yeah yeah yeah, sometimes you get six-legged dogs who are walking both ways at once, but even those amusing failure cases exist in photorealistic forests pulled from thin air.

    This is science fiction technology, and you’re mad at it because of… copyright?

    • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
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      15 days ago

      Knives are cool tech until you stab someone. People are less worried about the LLMs than they are about the stabby bits, like expropriation of others’ work.

    • Krudler@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      You know what’s wild about the protocol?

      Some super nerdy smart autistic dude literally woke up one morning and it’s like I’m going to make this.

      Programmed it, took a shit and was done for the day.

      A little bit of poetic license here but not far from the truth!

      • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.worldOP
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        15 days ago

        Magnets are magic. They’re concentrated magic. Almost absolutely everything we interact with is the electro-magnetic field (and gravity)… why we see things, why we touch things, how that touch signal reaches our brain, how our brain even processes it… all electro-magnetic! It is really hard to not see it as infused with something of the essence of reality. The strangeness of reality is everywhere and in feeling one magnet repel another we’re just toying with that magic concentrated in one place.

  • Mobile networks.
    It used to be absolutely amazing to get 1.5Mbps into your home with bulky equipment, on a dedicated copper line. Now you can get 100x times that bandwidth, while moving, on a device that fits in your pocket.
    Batshit.

  • Aphelion@lemm.ee
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    15 days ago

    I recently found a battery powered device for hot/cold therapy, and it has worked wonders the tendonitis in my arm.

      • Aphelion@lemm.ee
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        15 days ago

        It’s the Therabody RecoveryTherm Cube, and it get’s hot and cold enough on the highest setting it feels intense enough you can’t comfortably use it directly on skin. That said it’s not as cold as an ice pack, but I don’t think that’s the intended use.

        It has 3 modes, here are the temps from the manual:

        Heat: 24 minutes (95°F, 102°F, 109°F)

        Cold: 18 minutes (61°F, 54°F, 46°F)

        Contrast therapy: 20 minutes (Cold: 46°F, Heat: 109°F)

  • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    What better way to demonstrate international simultaneous television broadcasting than with an annual song competition? It’s quite literally the only reason why I turn on my telly anymore.

    The only thing I hate about it is the fact that it can get quite political, and it certainly results in often very depressing controversy. Last year was a prime example of this.

    But still, the tech behind it was and continues to be just so cool. Thanks, Switzerland.

    • Phoonzang@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      What better way to demonstrate international simultaneous television broadcasting than with an annual song competition? It’s quite literally the only reason why I turn on my telly anymore.

      Oh, they are talking about ESC!

      The only thing I hate about it is the fact that it can get quite political,

      Awww, not really.

      Seriously, ESC is the least political show on whole of television, they are trying to avoid anything controversial as much as they can, just look at how they handled that Dutch singer who fell from grace. There was zero discussion or mentioning, he was just cut from the show.

      • Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
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        15 days ago

        Good job. Also, the fact that they couldn’t just, idk, play one of his past performances and using that for the final instead of pretending he never even existed is a bit weird.

      • groet@infosec.pub
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        14 days ago

        The votes are always political even when the show doesn’t highlight it. Who wins and looses is mostly about which country the artist is from and the current events in that country. The music, performance, composition etc. barely matters

    • DankOfAmerica@reddthat.com
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      14 days ago

      Why are they called drones instead of remote-controlled whatever? What’s the difference between a drone plane and the remote-controlled planes flown by hobbyists at the park?

      • Higgs boson@dubvee.org
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        14 days ago

        The name being applied to aircraft supposedly comes from the engine noise from unpiloted target drones that used a jet engine. The term originally comes from the insect world, I bee-lieve.

      • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.worldOP
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        15 days ago

        I was unfortunate enough (or fortunate depending on your point of view) to see a video of Russian soldiers having a grenade go off right next to them. I used to thing some of the effects at the start of Saving Private Ryan were a bit janky and obviously prop based. But apparently, no, that’s exactly what a person being blown up by a grenade looks like.

  • VR. Both the good and the bad blow my mind. The good in that it’s actually useable now. I tried it in the 90’s as a kid and it was straight garbage, not to mention the way I experienced it wouldn’t be possible at home (fucker was huge and needed to be suspended by bungee cords). The bad in that it blows my mind that the adoption rate is super low and there’s not a helluva lot of good software for it, and it’s not even necessarily a price thing; people just don’t wanna deal with Meta (which is understandable).

  • mhague@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    Diffraction gratings because light is cool, and I like the pretty colors.

    Not super modern but you can 3d print in a mold, or even make chocolate, and it will look “holographic.” You don’t add anything, you just manipulate the surface of the object to have tiny grooves with thickness in the nanometer range. Then light hits it and waves do their thing and we perceive a rainbow effect.

    This is from a Reddit post, one of the top homemade “holographic chocolate” posts.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    15 days ago

    My cancer medication for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia.

    I don’t have to have chemotherapy. I take a single pill once daily. There are side effects, sure. My life isn’t as full of pep as it used to be, sure. I’m still in pain all the time, sure.

    But I’ve seen cancer, and I’ve seen how bad it can get and I’m floored at how much of a real life I’m capable of leading while being treated for this disease.

    The cost and risk of losing access to it hanging over my head is very stressful, but I can’t deny the actual results, which are life-changing and life-saving to say the least.

    • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      Honestly the lossy compression algorithms are some real magic. The way video can be streamed over wireless networks at all is pretty astonishing and requires many orders of magnitude of compression.

      If you ever have time, read up on how JPEG compression works.

    • fool@programming.dev
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      15 days ago

      Even more magical is the lossless Zstandard is this a name drop?. It does so much stuff, it’s awesome!

      • hella fast compared to similar-leveled compressors (zoom)
      • no matter the zstd compression level, decompression takes equal time! (ux!)
      • zstd can use a user-given dictionary, or train its own on a sample set (wowie)
      • zstd can be used for live compression (compress and decompress as you read and write, not before or after)
        • on ram (install more ram??)
        • in filesystems (2.5x your disk??)
        • saves CPU by not compressing if it’s not worth it (efficiency!!)
      • use ALL the cores!

      So kool. lol

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      15 days ago

      IMO lossy compression is crazier. You do some wizard math on a block of pixels and it shoves all the energy into one corner. Any half-ass job of storing those values will transform back into nearly the same image… so instead, we pursue just-barely-acceptable quality from dwindling fractions of an ass.