ilinamorato

@ilinamorato@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  We’re already predisposed toward a bit of iconoclasm just being here instead of Reddit. The “normies” are still elsewhere, so we get it into our heads that the echo chamber around us is the norm, rather than a self-selected group of people for whom Greta Thunberg is a centrist. On those rare occasions that a normie gets here, we find ourselves shocked at how they live their lives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If AI was going to advance exponentially I'd of expected it to take off by now.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It has definitely plateaued.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Just because not everyone goes through each one doesn’t mean they aren’t stages. Not everyone goes to high school, or doesn’t sleep through the night, or catches a ball thrown from a meter away, or has trouble with adolescent relationships; that doesn’t mean those aren’t stages.

  “Stages” are entirely theoretical and hotly debated, and you shouldn’t think of them like video game levels where you have to go through all (or even any) of them. Think of them more like theatrical stages: it’s where the action happens for a time, the set upon which the action of your life occurs. You’re almost always going to be on multiple stages at a time, and the people around you are probably going to be on a different set of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Creepy? No, probably not, but it does present some potential problems: You probably don’t have a whole lot of things in common at this point. You might not be particularly compatible with regard to your friend groups or your desires for your future. You are in a situation where it’s going to be difficult to get on the same level. These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they are potential obstacles.

  That said, if you and she are both okay with it—and your daughter, who is clearly someone whose opinion you care about—then have a great time! Don’t have high expectations, but enjoy yourself and see what happens.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Life definitely can have stages once you’re an adult. Relationships (married/divorced/remarried), family (babies/kids/teenagers/adults), work (entry level/senior/management/retirement). Think about if you’re on the other side of a big party than the other person; then you’re probably on different life stages. Not all of them are weird to date between, but most of them are weird to date across big differences.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you actually audit open source projects you download?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Those are silly folks lmao

  Eh, I kind of get it. OpenAI’s malfeasance with regard to energy usage, data theft, and the aforementioned rampant shoe-horning (maybe “misapplication” is a better word) of the technology has sort of poisoned the entire AI well for them, and it doesn’t feel (and honestly isn’t) necessary enough that it’s worth considering ways that it might be done ethically.

  I don’t agree with them entirely, but I do get where they’re coming from. Personally, I think once the hype dies down enough and the corporate money (and VC money) gets out of it, it can finally settle into a more reasonable solid-state and the money can actually go into truly useful implementations of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you actually audit open source projects you download?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is one of the few things that AI could potentially actually be good at. Aside from the few people on Lemmy who are entirely anti-AI, most people just don’t want AI jammed willy-nilly into everything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duolingo CEO tries to walk back AI-first comments, fails⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So…tries and fails? 😛

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Mozilla! Stop doing stupid stuff!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, now you know otherwise. I use it daily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, their read-it-later and content discovery app, and Fakespot, their browser extension that analyzes the authenticity of online product reviews.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah, it’s completely different from bookmarks. But obviously there’s no sense trying to sell anyone on it anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “I never give advice, but there is one thing I wish you would do when you sit down to write news stories, and that is: Never use the word ‘very.’ It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn’t mean anything. If you feel the urge of ‘very’ coming on, just write the word ‘damn’ in the place of ‘very.’ The editor will strike out the word ‘damn,’ and you will have a good sentence.”

  —William Allen White

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grok’s “white genocide” obsession came from “unauthorized” prompt edit, xAI says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly a lot of the issues result from null results only existing in the gaps between information (unanswered questions, questions closed as unanswerable, searches that return no results, etc), and thus being nonexistent in training data. Models are therefore predisposed toward giving an answer of any kind, and if one doesn’t exist it’ll make one up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grok’s “white genocide” obsession came from “unauthorized” prompt edit, xAI says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “Unintentionally” is the wrong word, because it attributes the intent to the model rather than the people who designed it.

  You misunderstand me. I don’t mean that the model has any intent at all. Model designers have no intent to misinform: they designed a machine that produces answers.

  True answers or false answers, a neural network is designed to produce an output. Because a null result (“there is no answer to that question”) is very, very rare online, the training data doesn’t include it; meaning that a GPT will almost invariably produce any answer; if a true answer does not exist in its training data, it will simply make one up.

  But the designers didn’t intend for it to reproduce misinformation. They intended it to give answers. If a model is trained with the intent to misinform, it will be very, very good at it indeed; because the only training data it will need is literally everything except the correct answer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Grok’s “white genocide” obsession came from “unauthorized” prompt edit, xAI says⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but unintentionally. I heard about a guy whose small business (which is just him) recently had someone call in, furious because ChatGPT told them that he was having a sale that she couldn’t find. The customer didn’t believe him when he said that the promotion didn’t exist. Once someone decides to leverage that, and make a sufficiently-popular AI model start giving bad information on purpose, things will escalate.

  Even now, I think Elon could put a small company out of business if he wanted to, just by making Grok claim that its owner was a pedophile or something.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure there were some forum software packages that offered voting and ranking and such. All of the ones that I was a part of were quiet enough that you didn’t need such a thing, though; you could keep up with every post, even if only to decide that you weren’t interested in it, if you read it every third day or so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I think “forumverse” isn’t bad. Though I have always felt like a Reddit-like interface and a forum interface are fundamentally different, in some way I can’t really put my finger on. I’ve been involved in bulletin board forums (fora?) in one aspect or another since the late 90s, so maybe it’s just nostalgia vs. recency bias; though it could also be the feeling that a “forum” seems like it should be hyper-specific, with different subforums on an already-niche bulletin board scoping down to even more niche and specific areas.

  (Side note: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the forum -> topic -> thread connection is why people like the name “threadiverse.” The word “thread” definitely seems like it arose from there.)

  Anyway, I am fully ready to admit that I’m yelling at clouds here. Get off my lawn, dang kids and all that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Definitely agreed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think likes serve the same function as votes. The downvote, the ranking as a function of score and recency, and the surfacing and consensus-building that comes as a result are the main point of this sort of platform.

  By contrast, the microblog “like” (at least on a platform without an algorithm, like Mastodon) doesn’t do anything other than express appreciation.

  Threads are common in pretty much every form of social media now, from friend-aggregation sites like Facebook and Friendica to messaging services like Discord and Revolt. They’re hardly exclusive to a Reddit/Lemmy-type service. Mastodon even organizes posts into threads.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve been calling them “Redditlikes” or “Reddit replacements” in ordinary conversation. We won’t need terms like that forever, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What about “Fedivotes” or “Votiverse?” Upvotes and downvotes are pretty key distinctives to this form of social network.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Several phone brands rumored to be planning a major shift away from Android⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Samsung actually added Knox to their Android implementation a few months before iOS added Secure Enclave. I think Qualcomm had some sort of trusted execution environment around that time, too, if I recall correctly. And Google added Trusty to the AOSP two years ago. So it’s already running on Android, and has been for ages.

  But I’m not convinced a TEE would be necessary for a device that doesn’t run any third-party native code. Browser tab sandboxing is already pretty robust; I haven’t heard of an escalation exploit being found in ages on any major JavaScript engine, meaning that the risk of data exfiltration or bootloader compromise are extremely remote, and would be much quicker (and less risky!) to patch via browser updates than firmware/OS updates.

  The only other reason I know of that you’d need a TEE is for DRM, and I’d be willing to wager most people who would want a FirefoxOS phone would actively prefer not to have that on their device.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Several phone brands rumored to be planning a major shift away from Android⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, I think the old FirefoxOS could do well these days. Literally everything an app can do can be done by a browser with a decent caching/local storage scheme. Slap a decent camera on that and it would be amazing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming Website Polgyon Sold To Valnet And Hit With Layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s also a complete rehash of the Wikipedia article about the game, its release and reception, and maybe even a slideshow of memes before you get to the “No confirmation” part. And then a list of all the times the developers have said, “yeah, if they want to do another one, we’d take their money.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming Website Polgyon Sold To Valnet And Hit With Layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Looking through their portfolio, I honestly don’t know how XDA and Android Police maintain their quality levels. Everything else is Taboola-level click farming junk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming Website Polgyon Sold To Valnet And Hit With Layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mass layoffs, though. That doesn’t usually presage a great time in a news site’s life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Gaming Website Polgyon Sold To Valnet And Hit With Layoffs⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Aftermath is the only gaming site I really pay attention to anymore. I still have Kotaku and PCGamer in my RSS reader, but I don’t really read any of their articles.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The BBC deepfaked Agatha Christie to teach a writing course⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Deepfakes predate the current AI craze, if I recall the timelines correctly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The BBC deepfaked Agatha Christie to teach a writing course⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The editor of The Verge tends to be fairly neutral-to-negative about AI, at least on his podcast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘You Can’t Lick a Badger Twice’: Google Failures Highlight a Fundamental AI Flaw⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not thinking. It’s just spicy autocomplete; having ingested most of the web, it “knows” that what follows a question about the meaning of a phrase is usually the definition and etymology of that phrase; there aren’t many examples online of anyone asking for the definition of a phrase and being told “that doesn’t exist, it’s not a real thing.” So it does some frequency analysis (actually it’s probably more correct to say that it is frequency analysis) and decides what the most likely words to come after your question are, based on everything it’s been trained on.

  But it doesn’t actually know or think anything. It just keeps giving you the next expected word until it meets its parameters.