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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • In the US, in most states, getting caught or recognized is enough to put you on the sex offender list. Even if you’re in private. (Again, in most states.) And that means you can no longer move into a new home without informing all your neighbors that you’re a sex offender for the rest of your life, among other penalties. There’s no difference to the US between this and people who actually do sexual crimes when it comes to this punishment.



  • Hm. I speak like a bot, do I? Maybe I am autistic after all.

    I am aware, my boyfriend and I have already had this conversation, but I guess he’s not on Lemmy, so you can’t ask him.

    Yes, DeepSeek caused a drop in the stock price, but you were saying that believing that LLM’s are over-hyped would lead to having insider knowledge and could give us an advantage in the stock market. Particularly with their already tanked stock. However, the stock market fluctuates based on hype, not value, and will do whatever the fuck it pleases, so the only way to have insider knowledge is by being on a board who controls the price or by managing to dump hype into the system. That is not something a lot of people have the power to do individually.

    But since you think I’m a bot and I have no way to disprove that thanks to what the world is now, I bid you adieu. I hope you’re having a good one. And stop antagonizing people for talking differently, please.

    Edit: I took a look at your recent comment history, and you do come off as trying to troll and be disingenuous. If you want to have a less inflammatory conversation, you can DM me, but I do recommend you tone it down. You’re not helping anyone with how you’re approaching this, buddy.


  • I’m glad we agree. I don’t know how much mental energy we should devote to these things, but I guess I’m happy to see discussion on this platform. I kind of miss the days when I had to respond to people who watched I, Robot and think I’m trying to destroy humanity, instead of… I don’t know what to call this except basically the same thing they did in the 60’s before the first AI winter, but with more drastic consequences.



  • Actually no. As someone who prefers academic work, I very heavily prefer Deepseek to OpenAI. But neither are open. They have open weights and open source interpreters, but datasets need to be documented. If it’s not reproducible, it’s not open source. At least in my eyes. And without training data, or details on how to collect it, it isn’t reproducible.

    You’re right. I don’t like big tech. I want to do research without being accused of trying to destroy the world again.

    And how is Deepseek over-hyped? It’s an LLM. LLM’s cannot reason, but they’re very good at producing statistically likely language generation which can sound like its training data enough to gaslight, but not actually develop. They’re great tools, but the application is wrong. Multi domain systems that use expert systems with LLM front ends to provide easy to interpret results is a much better way to do things, and Deepseek may help people creating expert systems (whether AI or not) make better front ends. This is in fact huge. But it’s not the silver bullet tech bros and popsci mags think it is.



  • That… Doesn’t align with years of research. Data is king. As someone who specifically studies long tail distributions and few-shot learning (before succumbing to long COVID, sorry if my response is a bit scattered), throwing more data at a problem always improves it more than the method. And the method can be simplified only with more data. Outside of some neat tricks that modern deep learning has decided is hogwash and “classical” at least, but most of those don’t scale enough for what is being looked at.

    Also, datasets inherently impose bias upon networks, and it’s easier to create adversarial examples that fool two networks trained on the same data than the same network twice freshly trained on different data.

    Sharing metadata and acquisition methods is important and should be the gold standard. Sharing network methods is also important, but that’s kind of the silver standard just because most modern state of the art models differ so minutely from each other in performance nowadays.

    Open source as a term should require both. This was the standard in the academic community before tech bros started running their mouths, and should be the standard once they leave us alone.





  • As someone who has professionally done legal reverse engineering. No. No it isn’t.

    The security you get through vetting your code is invaluable. Closing off things makes it more likely for things to not be caught by good actors, and thus not fixed and taken advantage of by bad actors.

    And obscurity does nothing to stop bad actors, if there’s money to be had. It will temporarily stop script kiddies though. Until the exploit finds it’s easy into their suite of exploits that no one’s fixed yet.



  • Using sex terms (as in “fucked up” or “that sucks”) to indicate violence (as in preventing normal action or imposing deprivation inducing results, philosophical violence, not colloquial) is a meme as old as time. It’s more of a dysphemistic treadmill thing than anything. People are okay with being oppressed when talked about in normal terms like “walled garden” but talking about sex at all is taboo in a lot of places (for no good reason). (I am asexual (mostly) and I find this paradoxical aspect of the largely sexual public (in the US) to be massively a detriment to society.)

    So no, using anal here isn’t being homophobic. Not including it in the dysphemistic treadmill would be. My boyfriend has used this term before and he’s hella gay.

    Edit: for reference, I’m exaggerating a bit. Buying into a walled garden is fine if that’s what you’re into. Just know that you don’t own the hardware or software you bought, instead you paid to get temporary access to services provided by it. For more information, see the war on right to repair.


  • It’s a very hard game. I really got into it playing with the Noita Together mod, and the Spell Labs mod when I was playing solo, to really figure out the game. Then once I felt I had a good grasp, I beat it, did the sun quest, eventually beat 33 orb Kolmi… Lost all my progress and had to do it again.

    If you can’t tell, I love Noita, but I fell in love with the wand building first. Spell Labs has excellent tutorials on improving your wand builds too. But I now have modded the game, so I’m not a casual player of it either.


  • I’ve seen a few, but it’s still kind of controversial. That being said, there is a time and a place for agile where it works, but also there is a team composition and a style of agile which works and that style tends to piss off micromanaging middle managers, so it rarely is allowed.

    I had an article saved in my work slack before I left that company (for health reasons), but a currently popular one seems to be this one: https://johnfarrier.com/agile-failure-what-drives-268-higher-failure-rates/

    My take is based on years of interaction with companies and friends in other companies. The biggest problem isn’t necessarily Agile, but instead that agile is not intended for long term projects. Agile is fantastic in short turnaround interactions such as web dev, and because these short turnaround places have such easily visible results, managers take them to be gospel. Thus comes Corporate Agile: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524230754/https://bits.danielrothmann.com/corporate-agile Link is from the Internet archive because I can’t find his new site if he moved.

    Long story short, corporate agile is the agile the bosses want, as it allows them to be constantly involved with more and more “agile” meetings. You know. Meetings. The antithesis of Agile. The place productivity goes to die. I had to remind our bosses that Agile dictated that stand ups included the developers and the scrum master ONLY multiple times and pointed them to the agile training they gave me. Didn’t matter. They’re the boss. This is a pretty common breakdown in Agile. So, that turned daily standup into daily meeting, since the quick status updates now had to be broken down for the boss. Every. Single. Day.

    Agile at its most basic is intended to reduce meetings to once a week so the rest of the time can be spent developing. Every company I know starts including devs in at least 300% more meetings (even junior devs) after switching to Agile for at least 6 months. And on average, it takes half an hour for a programmer to return to the level of productivity they hit before any interruption. This is generally due to the limitations of working memory. (Many research papers on this if you want.)

    But to get back to the original point. Because agile concentrates on short immediately tangible and verifiable benefits, any progress that takes longer than a sprint isn’t allowed. (It actually is, with proper implementation, as Agile is supposed to be edited on a team by team basis to make things work, but companies want everyone on exactly the same page.) Guess what doesn’t have immediately tangible and verifiable benefits? That’s right, research. Guess what it’s still in a research phase? Aside from basically anything that isn’t in market yet, self driving technology is very much research driven. Lots of trial, error, and long development cycles. Longer than a sprint for sure. And anyone who says self driving is in market should try an exercise if finding one level 5 self driving car that hasn’t been recalled due to false marketing or safety concerns. The technology isn’t there yet. It could be getting there, but profits are getting in the way of progress.


  • Realistically. Trains will revolutionize road transport of goods and people if the train industry properly maintained their rails, operated above board (unlike the one that had the chemical spill in Ohio and other issues), and expands a bit. The largest expense in good transport is long haul and no one wants to drive long haul. Last mile will probably need trucks and drivers for at least 3 to 5 more decades. And taxi services have similar challenges to last mile delivery. Personal self driving systems need even more consideration than taxi services, and will likely take five to ten years after taxi services become recognized as safe.


  • In my (in the industry) experience: Agile killed safe development by pushing superficial internal deadlines that look good instead of are good. Safety requirements therefore are never met, but people keep looking like they’re approaching at least one, but end up sacrificing other things that no one is concentrating on, causing more set backs than improvements. Self driving will not be legally commercialized until either someone lobbies bad development onto the roads, or capitalism realizes that quarter profit isn’t as important as ten year profit and Agile finally burns in a god damn fire.