AccountMaker

joined 2 years ago
[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 30 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Donated on Liberapay.

As others have said, this is financing software development, not a political campaign. I first learned of the fediverse when Reddit removed 3rd party apps, and I felt like my eyes were opened. This is what I want the internet to be, decentralized and running on open source software, and I'm sure I'm far from being alone in this, so thanks to the devs for that.

Also Jerboa is great!

[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 month ago

PPS: also, if you just study a lot of STEM in college, your views on humanities may still be atrocious, like elonstans.

This was very depressing to learn. I know a lot of software engineers, some of them PhD students, who are really smart and clever people, able to abstract concepts, form connections in thought, recall relevant information and make intelligent conclusions every day. And then they say things like masks don't do anything during COVID, the vaccines don't work, Russia is defending itself, the wokes are oppressing everyone and destroying everything etc. It's almost impressive to see someone seemingly intelligent act like the lowest Trump supporter with certain topics like someone just flipped a switch.

[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 25 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I still cannot come to terms with the fact that people find it completely normal that modern civilization rests on a handful of companies. If Google, Microsoft and Meta were to disappear tomorrow, half the planet would collapse given how many completely depend on their infrastructure. This by itself should be enough to induce a mania of local development and decentralized structures, but alas.

[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 month ago

This was partly explored in Erich Fromm's work "Escape from Freedom" and "The Anatomy of Human Destruction", but basically, if I understood correctly, sadistic personalities use it as a means of defence against loneliness and isolation. By exerting power over another, they temporarily lose the painful feeling of being alone. Abusive people tend to be miserable when their victims leave them and they have nobody to control.

Nobody gains anything from cruelty, it's a symptom that something's terribly wrong with the person in the first place. Even animals don't display acts of cruelty in the wild, they do so only when confined to cages and subjected to other inhumane treatment.

[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 months ago

Image recognition depends on the amount of resources you can offer for your system. There are traditional methods of feature extractions like edge detection, histogram of oriented gradients and viola-jones, but the best performers are all convolutional neural networks.

While the term can be up for debate, you cannot separate these cases and things like LLMs and image generators, they are the same field. Generative models try to capture the distribution of the data, whereas discriminitive models try to capture the distribution of labels given the data. Unlike traditional programming, you do not directly encode a sequence of steps that manipulate data into what you want as a result, but instead you try to recover the distributions based on the data you have, and then you use the model you have made in new situations.

And generative and discriminative/diagnostic paradigms are not mutually exclusive either, one is often used to improve the other.

I understand that people are angry with the aggressive marketing and find that LLMs and image generators do not remotely live up to the hype (I myself don't use them), but extending that feeling to the entire field to the point where people say that they "loathe machine learning" (which as a sentence makes as much sense as saying that you loathe the euclidean algorithm) is unjustified, just like limiting the term AI to a single digit use cases of an entire family of solutions.

[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 months ago

They're functionalities that were not made with traditional programming paradigms, but rather by modeling and training the model to fit it to the desired behaviour, making it able to adapt to new situations; the same basic techniques that were used to make LLMs. You can argue that it's not "artificial intelligence" because it's not sentient or whatever, but then AI doesn't exist and people are complaining that something that doesn't exist is useless.

Or you can just throw statements with no arguments under some personal secret definition, but that's not a very constructive contribution to anything.

[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

What?

If you ever used online translators like google translate or deepl, that was using AI. Most email providers use AI for spam detection. A lot of cameras use AI to set parameters or improve/denoise images. Cars with certain levels of automation often use AI.

That's for everyday uses, AI is used all the time in fields like astronomy and medicine, and even in mathematics for assistance in writing proofs.

[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I know that there is a number that's visible on kbin called "reputation", I think it works like karma, but I'm not sure. Yours is 2286: https://kbin.earth/u/@RidderSport@feddit.org/reputation/threads

[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 17 points 2 months ago

This is actually a tactic Antoine-Augustin Parmentier used to popularize potatoes in France. He couldn't get people to accept potatoes, so he placed armed guards to protect the plants, and withdrew them at a certain point in the day so that people could steal them.

[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Just finished watching it, and honestly that's the idea I got after those red flags that jumpscared me when I was watching that linux sucks video. I think I watched them up until 2018, and I remember finding them entertaining and they always ended on a postive note, but I knew absolutely nothing about Lunduke apart from those 4 or 5 videos, that's why I was so shocked to find out that he's a generic right wing parrot.

As a sidenote, Niccolò seems like a really cool guy. Thanks for sharing the video, I subbed

[–] AccountMaker@slrpnk.net 21 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I really liked his "Linux sucks" presentations when I watched them many years ago, but I didn't know anything about him beyond that. Then some time last year I saw that he made another one, and I decided to watch it mainly for nostalgia, and I was shocked to see so many points about how linux companies are woke, something about opensuse firing anyone who was right-wing and redhat doing some white shaming move or something. I paused, checked his actual channel and holy shit. More than 90% was anti-woke "journalism", and has been for years now. I was severely disappointed.

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