• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • …are you serious?

    There would be so much data in understanding people’s light usage. For example, you could figure out how late or early people get up, number of people living in a house, how crowded the house is, how many lights are used per room, etc etc. it would be a gold mine of information.

    Let’s say you’re a home automaton designer. You want to design devices to be used in the home, but in order to design such devices, you need enough of a stockpile of user data. This lightbulb data would be incredible valuable.

    You can probably even analyse the data and determine things like whether someone is watching tv late at night.

    From a nefarious view, how valuable would this data be to robbers and thieves?


  • These things are interesting for two reasons (to me).

    The first is that it seems utterly unsurprising that these inconsistencies exist. These are language models. People seem to fall easily into the trap in believing them to have any kind of “programming” on logic.

    The second is just how unscientific NN or ML is. This is why it’s hard to study ML as a science. The original paper referenced doesn’t really explain the issue or explain how to fix it because there’s not much you can do to explain ML(see their second paragraph in the discussion). It’s not like the derivation of a formula where you point to one component of the formula as say “this is where you go wrong”.


  • There was a prophetic podcast episode from the series Plain English a while back that I constantly think about.

    In that episode the author describes how the internet is going through a revolution.

    Basically 20 years ago, the internet was all about gaining numbers. Companies could operate at a loss if they got people signed up. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Uber, Deliveroo, etc. they were all about getting you in their mailing list or consumer list and who cares what happens then.

    Now there’s an issue because that model is not profitable. In order to continue, all the internet is moving towards subscription.

    In a sense, I don’t think of that as intrinsically bad. Patreon is a good example. The internet is now filled up with so much shit that people are willing to pay to filter it. So with Patreon, you pay a fee to support an artist to produce the content you want. That itself isn’t a bad idea.

    Now that being said, a lot of “bad things” do emerge. The fact that you can no longer buy software like Adobe and it’s all subscription based. That’s shit. But that also inspired software alternatives like Affinity Designer.


  • phario@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlHyprland is a toxic community
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    2 years ago

    Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?

    I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.

    It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.


  • Nope! Enjoyed it, though perhaps not as much as the second. ME1 reminded me a bit of Knights of the Old Republic (and Jade Empire around the same era), which had slightly stilted dialogue and choices. It was good but it still felt cartoonish.

    Apart from Jacob, who seems like a caricature, the characters and acting from ME2 seem so much more real.





  • Yes.

    I think with something like this you have to do a literature search. Even then it’s kind of tough because I’m sure it’s very hard to do objective tests of these traits.

    You might say that any activity has similar aspects. Learning a difficult passage in music, learning to speak languages, learning to throw a basketball through a hoop, etc.

    I’m not sure there is a huge amount of evidence that video games teach resilience any more than any other similar activity. Moreover, it’s easily the kind of thing that our biases set us up to believe things that aren’t there. For every person who learned resilience from video games, there might be three other people who learned poor lessons, like “I should be lazy and play video games and not study for my exams.”

    With academic or professional resilience, I can’t say I’ve seen any positive correlation with video games.

    I could easily argue that excessive video game play makes you less resilient to doing non-video-game challenges.



  • phario@lemmy.catoFoodPorn@lemmy.worldHomemade Pho Bo
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    2 years ago

    After having moved to the UK, where Vietnamese food is not so readily available in areas outside of London (and similar) I’ve gotten used to making my own pho.

    The main problem are the herbs as it can be hard to get all the necessary herbs outside of Asian supermarkets.

    It’s a really good dish for special events as well, since few people I’ve met dislike pho.







  • As a scientist I briefly read the Twitter chain by the company with some description of their methodology.

    Honestly I didn’t really follow it and it’s hard to critique based on buzzwords and Tweets. The person who was posting it sounds like a businessman, throwing jargon and words rather than something coherent.

    Ultimately I think that people are surprised by figures like “50% of gamers are female”. It might be 30%, or it might be something else. Maybe asking the questions a certain way biases the responses a certain way.

    It’s hard to glean anything based on what I’ve seen. I don’t have any skin in this game, and I don’t care either way, but all I’ll say is that it’s hard to figure out the truth based on the information available.



  • God. I don’t even know what to say.

    The article reads so strange…like describing a cult.

    His stellar career took on a sour note after he was bullied in a diversity, equity and inclusion training session for Toronto District School Board (TDSB) administrators in 2021, according to a lawsuit Bilkszto filed in court. His sin, in the eyes of facilitators at the KOJO Institute, was his questioning of their claim that Canada was a more racist place than the United States. Canada wasn’t perfect, he said, but it still offers a lot of good. For the rest of the training session, and throughout a follow-up training session the week after, facilitators repeatedly referred to Bilkszto’s comments as examples of white supremacy.




  • I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.

    Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.

    For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.

    Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.

    So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.

    I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw