• 3 Posts
  • 606 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 25th, 2023
  • voracitude@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's the worst you ever hurt yourself as a kid?
    2·
    4 days ago

    I was skating at the local ice rink, and tripped. I think it was an Olympic-sized rink, but that might have been the pool… it was pretty big, anyway. I bounced my head off the ice so hard I saw blue and red fireworks (only time that’s ever happened to me), and slid half the length of the rink on my face wherein I crashed into the barrier. That shit hurt, I still remember it vividly 30 years later, but luckily nothing broken. My mum was simultaneously aghast, and relieved and amazed I wasn’t more injured. She was convinced I’d have fractured something in my face when she saw me fall.

  • voracitude@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Reminder: Proton Mail addresses have vendor lock-in
    2·
    17 days ago

    That’s the “special application” I mentioned, but it seems to have been updated since I last looked at it so it now offers the same level of encryption as the webmail app.

    I would prefer to see it freely available, but it doesn’t seem foundational to using the service in any scenario - free accounts have the webmail and mobile clients, which are arguably both more flexible (and maintainable) than the Bridge.

  • voracitude@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Reminder: Proton Mail addresses have vendor lock-in
    51·
    17 days ago

    Thunderbird doesn’t have your private key to decrypt your Proton emails. The key lives in your browser and in theory there’s no way to securely provide that key to Thunderbird so it can do the decrypting. There’s a special application they built for business owners who want this functionality, but by nature it breaks Proton’s security because the email content is then stored in plaintext (or close enough) so it’s not “secure” in the same sense Proton webmail is. (edit: maybe it got updates since I last looked, because the Bridge is now as secure as the webmail)

  • voracitude@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.ml•A Musician’s Brain Matter Is Still Making Music—Three Years After His Death
    13·
    26 days ago

    This wasn’t “his brain matter”, these were “neuronal organoids” (clumps of neurons) grown from harvesting white blood cells and turning those into stem cells. Then the clumps were networked together with a literal wire to conduct signals between them, for timing.

    Usually in organoids networks the wire delivers either regular, repeating inputs (“clean” pulses) as a reward for succeeding a task, or a random signal (“noise”) for failure; this is how they’re “trained” to play Pong for example:

    In more advanced closed-loop setups, organoid cultures are embedded within simulated environments that allow them to “interact” in a game-like world. By using high-density multielectrode arrays (MEAs) to deliver patterns of electrical signals, researchers can create closed-loop feedback systems that enable organoids to process and respond to certain inputs (Kagan et al. [2022]). For instance, in one experiment, monolayer neuronal cultures were given sparse sensory feedback about the consequences of their actions within a simulated game. The organoids displayed short-term memory by organizing themselves in goal-directed ways, effectively learning to complete simple behavioural tasks. This capability, made possible by reinforcement learning, allows organoids to adapt based on feedback, akin to how a human brain might learn from trial and error.

    (https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6)

    These same methods are being used to train organoids as Machine Learning compute substrates, because they’re much more efficient than silicon: https://aapsopen.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41120-025-00109-3