Recent content by tomBitonti

Maybe a semantic problem here? The CONDITION of radiation poisoning is not contagious. However -- *) Chromosomal damage may be inherited, depending on what types of cells are damaged. *) The cause of radiation poisoning may remain on a person who was poisoned. Other persons can be poisoned...

From what I saw in the page source, the ads should be very very easy to block. XML has transformation tools which could quickly and simply remove the ads as they are currently implemented. The problems, really, are figuring out how to run the transformation on each page, and the possibility...

I was thinking more that water that is minimally radioactive and not immediately harmful may be quite harmful over a longer term due to ingestion. The immediate harm might be quite negligible. Being immersed in water but immediately rinsing it off is one category of exposure. Drinking water...

My understanding was that (1) cleaning up all contaminants is very hard, and (2) much smaller amounts are harmful. I’m going from memory on what he said, so I’m probably missing some details. The source was a scientist who studied environmental contamination, whom I thought was very...

I was told by a chemist friend that what was most dangerous was sources of ionizing radiation, which, if taken in, for example, through ingestion or inhalation, would often be sequestered in the body close to sensitive areas. That suggests that the situation for a diver might be much worse —...

For what it's worth: The sequences where she explores the dragon's caverns are great! Minor nit re: catching one's self while falling (and surviving the initial fall), but that's Hollywood physics for you; I don't hold it too much against the film. From a dramatic perspective, more subtle...

The dragon design is ok, but the motions are very very stiff. For example, while flying, one expects the dragon body to flex. The body model seems incomplete. TomB

Is there a term for jargon which is being used by an industry and which is recent, specific to the industry, and on the edge of being technical and being buzz words? For example: https://www.activestate.com/blog/white-box-vs-black-box-algorithms-in-machine-learning/ This shows that "white...

Also worth noting: The discussion re: "random" vs "deterministic", while entertaining and philosophically interesting (I guess, to some), is probably a diversionary rabbit hole that is not relevant to the question. In some terminologies, "random" can be "deterministic". See for example...

Returning to the original question: I presume that generative AI includes some "randomization", with complex steps between the initial request and the generated output to constrain the output to "match" input data. Then generative AI really is a "big fancy (semi-random) generator", with the...

(Looking in dismay at a recently dismantled tractor.) Wait, what? TomB

Back in the desert, if I remember correctly, when Elan was dealing with his father. Vaarsuvius cast baleful polymorph in one of the fights. It’s not even a mini-t-Rex while polymorphed, just a small harmless lizard with a lot of hit points. TomB

This is an interesting listen: Problems of what happens when AI consumes its own output as training data. TomB

1E gave Psionics a science fiction feel. "Probability Travel" vs "Plane Shift", "Force Screen" instead of "Shield". Psionics also leaned heavily into the Astral Plane, and had many unique aberrant creatures, like the Illithid, and Intellect Devourers. 1E psionic combat used a lot of terms...

I don’t know enough about generative AI to say whether it continues to process information after new data is presented. AlphaGo certainly was able to learn by playing itself. Whether AI, or generative AI can do more that it was designed to do seems an open question. There are (if I remember...