Newtra

@Newtra@pawb.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google Is Killing Retro Dodo & Other Independent Sites⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re right. Everything is suspiciously wordy, substance is sparse, and every headline is clickbaity. It’s like they tuned the content specifically for google, not human readers…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Retro Dodo]Google is killing Retro Dodo and Other Independent Sites⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Google also is responsible for the SEO industry. They made ads hugely profitable, then started directing traffic to sites that serve more of their ads, regardless of quality.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you accept the things you cannot change?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To accept it, you just move on with your life. Find the next thing you should do and do it. The more you dwell, the harder it will be to stop dwelling, so just break the cycle and go do anything else.

  You will encounter plenty more people who are insistently wrong. Each one will affect you less than the last.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would magically turning all trans people into the gender they want to be be unethical?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a weird divide between self-determined identity and external classifications. Often, a culture forms around the label and the external label stops being relevant because the term has more social/cultural implications than practical implications. Some people internalize the label as that’s how they wish to steer their future interactions, and others ignore the label and move on with their lives.

  You can watch all of Star Trek, and some parts of society will label you a Trekkie if they find out, but it’s up to you whether you choose to identify as a Trekkie, or just go about your life not making a big deal about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would magically turning all trans people into the gender they want to be be unethical?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Assuming enthusiastic consent, good faith, and that you meant “sex/body they want” instead of “gender they want”:

  On another hand, it would erase their identity as trans people.

  I don’t think it would. Identities are built from life experiences, and having lived through transition they’d still be trans even if there were no traces of it on their body. A war veteran doesn’t stop being a veteran just because the war ended.

  consider it a genocide

  The definition of genocide depends on intent! Even in wars, etc. It’s only genocide if you’re specifically trying to erase/displace people/culture.

  • Trying to cure gender dysphoria: it’s not genocide, it’s medical treatment.

  • Trying to “fix” people to make them fit into society: it’s genocide.

  turning them into what they want would mean there is no more trans people

  There are identities that don’t stop being trans even if you give them the body they want:

  • A non-binary person’s desired sex/body and social gender might not match. Even with the perfect body (if one exists), they might still identify as trans because that body doesn’t match their social gender.

  • For genderfluid people, there might not be one singular perfect body. Even if their body constantly updated to suit them, they’d probably still identify as trans because they’d be constantly transitioning…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨MemoryCache, a Mozilla Innovation Project⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The website does a bad job explaining what its current state actually is. Here’s the GitHub repo’s explanation:

  Memory Cache is a project that allows you to save a webpage while you’re browsing in Firefox as a PDF, and save it to a synchronized folder that can be used in conjunction with privateGPT to augment a local language model.

  So it’s just a way to get data from browser into privateGPT, which is:

  PrivateGPT is a production-ready AI project that allows you to ask questions about your documents using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), even in scenarios without an Internet connection. The project provides an API offering all the primitives required to build private, context-aware AI applications.

  So basically something you can ask questions like “how much butter is needed for that recipe I saw last week?” and “what are the big trends across the news sites I’ve looked at recently?”

  Neat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The first EV with a lithium-free sodium battery hits the road in January⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree that older commercialized battery types aren’t so interesting, but my point was about all the battery types that haven’t had enough R&D yet to be commercially mass-produced.

  Power grids don’t care much about density - they can build batteries where land is cheap, and for fire control they need to artificially space out higher-density batteries anyway. There are heaps of known chemistries that might be cheaper per unit stored (molten salt batteries, flow batteries, and solid state batteries based on cheaper metals), but many only make sense for energy grid applications because they’re too big/heavy for anything portable.

  I’m saying it’s nuts that lithium ion is being used for cases where energy density isn’t important. It’s a bit like using bottled water on a farm because you don’t want to pay to get the nearby river water tested. It’s great that sodium ion could bring new economics to grid energy storage, but weird that the reason it was developed is for consumer applications.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The first EV with a lithium-free sodium battery hits the road in January⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is awesome news. Not because of the car, but because it builds the supply lines for an alternative battery chemistry.

  People have been using lithium-ion batteries for home and grid storage, which is nuts if you compare it to other battery types. Lithium is expensive and polluting and only makes sense if you’re limited by weight & space. Cheaper batteries, even if they’re bigger/heavier, will do wonders to the economics of sustainable electricity production.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dropbox removed ability to opt your files out of AI training⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But the comments below say they’re not able to access the new page, even with the direct URL… It seems certain tiers of customers can’t opt out. Possibly they can’t be included in the first place (e.g. EU users), but it’s a pretty big screw up to hide one’s status on such an important privacy setting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do I need to read to understand basic pytorch?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, I don’t think that there’s room for a competitor until a whole new paradigm is found. PyTorch’s community is the biggest and still growing. With their recent focus on compilation, not only are TF and Jax losing any chance at having an advantage, but the barrier to entry for new competitors is becoming much higher. Compilation takes a LOT of development time to implement, and it’s hard to ignore 50-200% performance boosts.

  Community size tends to ultimately drive open source software adoption. You can see the same with the web frameworks - in the end, most people didn’t learn React because it was the best available library, they learned it because the massive community had published so many tutorials and driven so many job adverts that it was a no-brainer to choose it over Angular, Vue, etc. Only the paradigm-shift libraries like Svelte and Htmx have had a chance at chipping away at React’s dominance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do I need to read to understand basic pytorch?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The easiest way to get the basics is to search for articles, online courses, and youtube videos about the specific modules you’re interested in. Papers are written for people who are already deep in the field. You’ll get there, but they’re not the most efficient way to get up to speed. I have no experience with textbooks.

  It helps to think of PyTorch as just a fancy math library. It has some well-documented frameworky structure (nn.Module) and a few differentiation engines, but all the deep learning-specific classes/functions (Conv2d, BatchNorm1d, ReLU, etc.) are just optimized math under the hood.

  You can see the math by looking for projects that reimplement everything in numpy, e.g. picoGPT or ConvNet in NumPy.

  If you can’t get your head around the tensor operations, I suggest searching for “explainers”. Basically for every impactful module there will be a bunch of " Explained" articles or videos out there. There are also ones for entire models, e.g. The Illustrated Transformer. Once you start googling specific modules’ explainers, you’ll find people who have made mountains of them.

  If you’re not getting an explanation of something, just google and find another one. People have done an incredible job of making this information freely accessible in many different formats. I basically learned my way from webdev to an AI career with a couple years of casually watching YouTube videos.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨we need better hobbies⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I could just be further down the path due to lucky opportunities. 20 years ago I had no ambitions beyond game programming. It was only when I got a biology-related job that learning in my free time started displacing mindless entertainment. The whole field is one big nerd snipe - there are endless opportunities where you can advance the frontier of knowledge by combining a few existing ideas and working out the kinks. The more you read, the more opportunities you see. It’s thrilling. I don’t think I can go back to non-science work.

  I think the dopamine from constant learning also helps to keep my ADHD in check. If I start the weekend with some study, I’ll usually also get the housework done. If I start with a video game or TV show, I’ll probably spend the rest of the weekend stressing about my todo list and not getting anything done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨we need better hobbies⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I honestly don’t know what that silence would be like. I’ve spent my programming career jumping between domains, becoming an expert then moving on to find a new challenge. Now I’m building AI stuff for medicine.

  In my down time I learn languages, watch videos about physics and math, and play puzzle games.

  My brain actually won’t let me stop. Boredom = pain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Early impressions of Google's Gemini aren't great | TechCrunch⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m glad to hear I’m not missing out on anything. (It’s still not out in Europe.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I Can't Drink Now Like I Used to a Few Years Ago (26M), is that Normal?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Some minor/hard-to-notice health-related things can dramatically reduce alcohol tolerance and/or give “hangovers” shortly after starting a session.

  For me, inflammation is a big cause. I have (barely noticeable) cat allergies, and (obvious but hard to avoid) food intolerances & gut issues. If I don’t stay on top of avoiding triggers, my alcohol tolerance goes from multiple G&Ts giving a nice buzz, to 1-2 sips of G&T giving dizziness and headaches. Electrolyte imbalance can also cause it. I’ve found I have to add magnesium and potassium salt to my diet, or else I generally feel tired more, and my alcohol tolerance plummets. Once you start controlling these factors, you’ll start getting clear feedback from your body when you have too much or too little salt, in the form of water and food tasting different and general feelings of tension or tiredness.

  My advice: try antihistamines, easily-digestible meals, and/or sports drinks for a few days before you drink. If those help your tolerance, you probably have some health stuff going on - figure it out and you’ll probably find a way to generally feel better.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unity apologises.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  They’ve had days to prepare this response. They didn’t rescind or explain the one thing that people universally hated, which means they’re just stalling and trying to save their reputation without actually changing trajectory.

  We’ve seen this corporate bullshit so much in recent years. No more “benefit of the doubt”.