datalowe

@datalowe@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Duckstation(one of the most popular PS1 Emulators) dev plans on eventually dropping Linux support due to Linux users, especially Arch Linux users.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You say you don’t care who they are but you’re the one who first claimed to know that, when you called them “an anonymous user who has never contributed to foss outside of a whiney bug report or two.”. You seemed to think it very important. Moreover, it’s not impossible for the user to have been impersonating a FOSS developer for a couple of years, but what do you think the probability of that is? What would they gain? It seems far more probable that they simply are the same person.

  Noone called the developer a “petty bitch asshole” from what I saw, putting words in others’ mouths doesn’t seem to help the discussion.

  I agree with your overall sentiment that we can sympathize with the dev, even if they’re obviously not perfect themselves. FOSS is hard for everyone engaging with it.

  It is a games console emulator project. Noone’s livelihood or business hinges on this AFAIU, and there are alternative emulators for the PS. If anything I’d hope people - maintainers, contributors, users - would be more cool and relaxed about it. It’s the kind of project I wish would give everyone involved more energy and experience for other endeavors in their lives. What’s even the point if it’s not fun?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, thank you. It seemed bizarre to me as I was reading the article that this point is not brought up at all. Of course, it’s impossible to perform controlled realistic experiments to disentangle the effects. But to not even acknowledge this crucial limitation in the research makes the reporting and research deeply flawed. The research would really need to take into account each conflict’s preconditions, which is a very daunting task, to become more reliable. I understand it’s hard to do this research, but it’s only fair to demand that researchers temper their conclusions based on to the limitations. That kind of rigorous approach doesn’t sell as many books or lead to as many media appearances though, sadly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anthropic has developed an AI 'brain scanner' to understand how LLMs work and it turns out the reason why chatbots are terrible at simple math and hallucinate is weirder than you thought⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It also doesn’t help that the AI companies deliberately use language to make their models seem more human-like and cogent. Saying that the model e.g. “thinks” in “conceptual spaces” is misleading imo. It abuses our innate tendency to anthropomorphize, which I guess is very fitting for a company with that name.

  On this point I can highly recommend this open access and even language-wise accessible article: link.springer.com/article/…/s10676-024-09775-5 (the authors also appear on an episode of the Better Offline podcast)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The “about” page indicates that the author is a freelance frontend UI/UX dev, that’s recently switched to “helping developers get better with AI” (paraphrased). Nothing about credentials/education related to AI development, only some hobby projects using preexisting AI solutions from what I saw. The post itself doesn’t have any sources/links to research about junior devs either, it’s all anecdotes and personal opinion. Sure looks like an AI grifter trying to grab attention by ranting about AI, with some pretty lukewarm criticism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course, there are different opinions, but here’s my take (as a Swede, but not an expert in politics/history):

  The issues didn’t start during the last decade. In the 90’s, it was politically decided that schools wouldn’t be nearly as centrally managed by the state as they had been, instead municipalities would handle most school-related politics and administration locally. It was also decided that parents are allowed to choose more freely where to send their kids. This weakened public schools. Moreover, legislation was introduced (in the 00’s I think but I’m not sure) that allows for-profit private schools, which historically AFAIK had been prohibited.

  Parents usually don’t have to pay anything extra to send their kids to private schools, and for each private school pupil more tax money flows into the private instead of public schools. The private schools are of course incentivized to attract children from families that are well off, since they tend to perform better (boosting the school’s score and thus reputation), have parents that can e.g. drive them from a longer distance, and just generally have less issues and so cost and complain less. For instance, it’s been reported that some private schools refuse (openly or through loopholes) e.g. special needs pupils since the tax money paid to the school for them isn’t worth the cost (and “bad PR”, no doubt) of actually giving them a proper education.

  Sweden has also had a high rate of immigration the last decades. Immigrant parents understandably tend to not be as savvy about the school system and have less time/resources for getting their kids to “nicer” schools further away. Immigrant kids also tend to require more attention, both due to needing to learn Swedish and because psychological problems, e.g PTSD, are more common among many immigrant groups. Also I haven’t seen any studies on this, but IMO the private schools’ advertisements (on billboards etc) tend to be very geared towards “white” kids/parents with no immigrant background.

  In 2007 a tax benefit for “homework help” among other things was introduced, halving the price parents have to pay for private tutors at home. This again benefits families that are well off and lets private companies in education siphon tax money.

  All this means a cycle of segregation seen in so many countries. Public schools are burdened with students that require more resources, while private schools do everything they can to snatch up low-maintenance pupils. This makes private schools seem to perform better and gives public schools bad reputations. Racism and class discrimination also plays into all this of course.

  It also doesn’t help that teachers’ salaries and social standing have decreased, partly due to the same general pattern.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you mean you rigorously went through a hundred articles, asking DeepSeek to summarise them and then got relevant experts in the subject of the articles to rate the quality of answers? Could you tell us what percentage of the summaries that were found to introduce errors then? Literally 0?

  Or do you mean that you tried having DeepSeek summarise a couple of articles, didn’t see anything obviously problematic, and figured it is doing fine? Replacing rigorous research and journalism by humans with a couple of quick AI prompts, which is the core of the issue that the article is getting at. Because if so, please reconsider how you evaluate (or trust others’ evaluations of) information tools which might help or help destroy democracy.