JustTesting

@JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are there regions of the world where local men and women have divergent accents?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Thai has some different words and accents used by male and female speakers. best source i could find with a quick search though i’d have liked a more detailed one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not talking about the quality of LLMs (they suck, in so many different ways…).

  I’m criticizing the experiment setup, it is not really statistically sound. Doing 10 tests each with 52 different models is almost bound to have one model be correct 100% of the time (even if the true probability is closer to 50%), by pure chance. Doing 100 tests each might yield very different results with none of them answering correct 100% of the time. Or put another way, the p-values of the tests performed are pretty high, not <0.05, so the results don’t really say what they purport to say.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  10 tests per model seems like way too little and they should give confidence intervals…

  the 10/10 vs. 8/10 is just as likely due chance than any real difference. But some people will definitely use this to justify model choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras. Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think >50% of my up votes are me swiping right to go back but missing the screen border by a tiny bit, causing the jerboa swipe to vote to kick in.

  so who knows, maybe they just accidentally hit the downvote arrow while scrolling?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d prefer 1.0 school, but hopefully they’ll work out most the kinks in the beta version already. Alpha should just be for internal testing, aka the CEOs kids…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Borrowing money against their stuff to get more stuff to borrow money...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh was that why they threw the tomato sauce on that one painting? Now it all makes sense

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do they turn Federation into a dystopia?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there’s still a lot of room to explore without abandoning the utopia setting. like we usually only see the spaceship stuff, but what about a more political drama taking place on member worlds, that kind of thing, i think it could be amazing.

  also, as you say, it’s been done for 60 years. Might as well do the same thing over again for a new generation that hasn’t seen tos/tng/ds9. They don’t know it yet, so it’s not overused, and the TOS audience wouldn’t be the target audience anyways. and could still explore new topics. the audience isn’t the same, our world isn’t the same, making the same show again would still not be boring as it be a completely different thing.

  Both approaches can work imo and have a place, without the need to go more dystopia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Plus firefox mostly exists because google pays them, probably so there’s no anti-trust action against them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A lot of the laid-off staff from the Washington Post should start a news cooperative. Seriously!⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t know about the second point, but on the first, there’s a online newspaper here that does it pretty well. It’s like 240$ a year, but with the option to pay however little/much you want. the articles can be shared freely (no paywall, though i think since a year ago you need to enter your email to read, used to be completely free to share), but can’t be discovered/found unless you’re subscibed. it’s split into two legal entities, the newspaper that employs the journalists and a second non-profit that actually collects the payments and that every subscriber is allowed to vote in, elect leadership for etc. that works out guidelines for the newspaper part to follow.

  has been working pretty well for several years now and it’s one of the last few places of quality, independent journalism in my country

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it's getting weird fast⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah but don’t worry, there’s also skills for scanning skills for security risks, so all good /s

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI agents now have their own Reddit-style social network, and it's getting weird fast⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They also have a ‘skill’ sharing page (a skill is just a text document with instructions) and depending on config, the bot can search for and ‘install’ new skills on its own. and agyone can upload a skill. So supply chain attacks are an option, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pope Leo XIV brings not peace but a sword to AI oligarchs and a slop-mad world in new address, says it's 'Turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I got mine from kultofathena.com 20 years ago for 40 bucks (though with fancier blade), but just checked and don’t think they sell it anymore.

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task – MIT Media Lab⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sorry, that came off very passive-aggressive, I really shouldn’t post at 3 am when I can sleep.

  The whole dark ages, and golden ages thing is just very annoying, made up during the renaissance, in part as a useful tool to go “look how shit everything is, I will make it great and amazing like it was before”, still a favorite to use by populists (in reference to whatever time is most suitable) and it’s been repeated so much, it actually works, everyone kinda just accepted it. But then when you dig into it, the middle ages weren’t really worse in terms of invention/art/etc. than the renaissance, nor was there this big stagnation after the decline of the roman empire, and people always made art, new inventions and great achievements, along with cruelty, bloodshed and other awful things. But then this has been a relatively recent shift in historical research, so not that well known

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task – MIT Media Lab⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In other news, dark ages are a myth disproven by science.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What steps can be taken to prevent AI training and scraping of my public facing website?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A big issue is that this works for bots that announce themselves as such, but there’s lots that pretend to be regular users, with fake user agents and ips selected from a random pool with each ip only sending like 1-3 request/day, but overall many thousands of requests. In my experience a lot of them are from huawei and tencent cloud/ASN

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why ActivityPub over Nostr? - function only⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t actually know how nostr deals with messages if you’re offline, if at all, not that familiar with the protocol. But your idea sounds workable.

  I tend to come at it from the other side, I like the federated model, but think the “supernodes” could behave more like dedicated relays. Like, a lemmy server right now does a lot of things, like serve a frontend, do expensive database queries to show a sorted feed, etc. and a lot of that does not scale very well. So having different kinds of nodes with more specialization, while still following a federated model makes sense to me. Right now if one of my users subscribes to some community, that community’s instance will start spamming my instance with updates nonstop, even though that user might not be active or might not even read that community anymore. It would be nicer if there was some kind of beefy instance I could request this data from if necessary, without getting each and every update even though 90% of it might never be viewed. But keeping individual instances that could have their own community and themes, or just be hosted for you and your friends to reduce the burden on non-techies having to self-host something.

  Or put another way, instead of making the relays more instance-y, embrace the super instances and make them more relay-y, but tailor made for that job and still hostable by anyone, if they want to spend on the hardware. But I’m still not clear on where you’d draw the line/how exactly you’d split the responsibility. For lemmy, instead of sending 100’s of requests in parallel for each thing that happens, a super-instance could just consolidate all the events and send them as single big requests/batches to sub-instances and maybe that’s a good place to draw the line?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Guarding My Git Forge Against AI Scrapers⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  it’s [iocaine)(docs.rs/crate/iocaine/latest) not Locaine, tripped me up at first as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why ActivityPub over Nostr? - function only⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  this article and the accompanying discussion from lobsters is very relevant. Though the article itself is a bit one sided in favor of nostr, it doesn’t do a great job arguing why a relay really is better

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  so the obvious solution is to just have humans execute our code manually. Grab a pen and some crayons, go through it step by step and write variable values on the paper and draw the interface with the crayons and show it on a webcam or something. And they can fill in the gaps with what they think the code in question is supposed to do. easy!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anubis is awesome and I want to talk aout it⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You mean for the referer part? Of course you don’t want it for all urls and there’s some legitimate cases. I have that on specific urls where it’s highly unlikely, not every url. E.g. a direct link to a single comment in lemmy, plus whitelisting logged-in users. Plus a limit, like >3 times an hour before a ban.

  It’s a pretty consistent bot pattern, they will go to some subsubpage with no referer with no prior traffic from that it, and then no other traffic from that ip after that for a bit (since they cycle though ip’s on each request) but you will get a ton of these requests across all ips they use. It was one of the most common patterns i saw when i followed the logs for a while.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anubis is awesome and I want to talk aout it⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the way. I also have rules for hits to url, without a referer, that should never be hit without a referer, with some threshold to account for a user hitting F5. Plus a whitelist of real users (ones that got a 200 on a login endpoint).

  then there’s ratelimiting and banning ip’s that hit the ratelimit regularly.

  Dowloading abuse ip lists nightly and banning those, that’s around 60k abusive ip’s gone. At that point you probably need to use nftables though, for the sets, as having 60k rules would be a bad idea.

  there’s lists of all datacenter ip ranges out there, so you could block as well, though that’s a pretty nuclear option, so better make sure traffic you want is whitelisted. E.g. for lemmy, you can get a list of the ips of all other instances nightly, so you don’t accidentally block them. Lemmy traffic is very spammy…

  there’s so much that can be done with f2b and a bit of scripting/writing filters

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  DS9 has lots of stuff against racism, either with aliens or black people in time travel episodes. And the one where Quark transitions for an episode and it’s not just milked for laughs or similar, for the 90s that was handled pretty tactfully

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone else notice an up tick in hostility on Lemmy lately?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d be really curios to see some sort of study done on this. I mean, it’s not just americans and most of the west is not insulated from america, either, at least not online. and you don’t know from talking to someone online where they’re from. At the same time, there’s rising fascism and neoliberalism bullshit in europe, too.

  I’d love to know how much of it is people getting antsier in general because they’re in a shit situation and how much it’s ‘infectious’ from talking with people in shit situations elsewhere, spreading bad vibes. Is this also happening in the chinese web? How about other countries that are more politically/economically aligned with the west but culturally less part of the english speaking web?

  There has to be some sociologist out there somewhere studying this, no? But i wouldn’t know where to look. if anyone knows of something along those lines, i’d love to hear it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Study: Global Fertility Rate Decline Now Linked Directly to the Commodification of Housing⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Where is the new study? They have sources at the bottom but which one is the actual study they talk about?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A.I. Video Generators Are Now So Good You Can No Longer Trust Your Eyes⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But what if your phone comes with nice AI filters? The fake videos get more and more real and the real videos get more and more fake

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’d be more accurately titled Star Trek: Burnham

  I always called it ‘The Burnham Show, starring Michael Burnham’

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t disagree. I meant for users it is incidental. Most users probably wouldn’t buy them with spying as the main purpose(they just also don’t really care that it can spy). making them much more widespread than something where spying was the main use-case, making the problem worse.

  And for Meta it’s like tracking cookies on crack

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  sure, but there the spying is the purpose, whereas with the glasses it’s incidental.

  you don’t buy such gadgets if you don’t intend to spy, but people would buy meta glasses for other reason, and meta being able to spy on you is just a side-effect. Plus it’ a matter of scale, this has the potential of being much more prominent than some spy camera.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Get ready to see ads on your… Samsung refrigerator⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I remember reading that hotel TVs are an option. They also have an ad platform, but one intended for the hotel owner to send ads from, not some 3rd party. Not exactly dumb but also not as bad as regular TVs.

  And of course a beamer or PC screen connected to some cheap small form factor PC is always an option, with Kodi or similar on it, i haven’t owned a TV in like 10 years, just using a small linux pc with beamer, and a tv tuner card in the past (nowadays my ISP offers all public channels on IPTV)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For the byte pair encoding (how those tokens get created) i think bpemb.h-its.org does a good job at giving an overview. after that i’d say self attention from 2017 is the seminal work that all of this is based on, and the most crucial to understand. jtlicardo.com/blog/self-attention-mechanism does a good job of explaining it. And jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/ is probably the best explanation of a transformer architecture (llms) out there. Transformers are made up of a lot of self attention.

  it does help if you know how matrix multiplications work, and how the backpropagation algorithm is used to train these things. i don’t know of a good easy explanation off the top of my head but xnought.github.io/backprop-explainer/ looks quite good.

  and that’s kinda it, you just make the transformers bigger, with more weight, pluck on a lot of engineering around them, like being able to run code and making it run more efficientls, exploit thousands of poor workers to fine tune it better with human feedback, and repeat that every 6-12 month for ever so it can stay up to date.