• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • For that side of reddit, you’re right.

    But for the uniquely useful side of reddit, federation won’t help. If I post a question like “how do I get this obscure game to run well on this obscure Linux distro?”, nobody is going to repost that for me, and if I don’t maximize the amount of eyeballs on it, it’s unlikely I’ll get an answer. My best choice is to post it on reddit, either in /r/linux_gaming or in the specific game’s subreddit.

    I assume that most users who post anything at all on reddit do it to ask questions like that.


  • The reddit concept of subreddits also doesn’t work well with federation IMO (at least no Lemmy’s implementation).

    Want to talk about video games? Well, there’s no /r/games, instead there are bunch of different /c/games on different servers with varying amounts of activity. You basically gotta make the “pick a server” decision again whenever you post something. If you make the wrong choice, your post might not get seen by anyone, and even if you post to the biggest sub, you’ll be missing out on eyeballs from people on other servers who aren’t subscribed to that instance for whatever reason.

    For example, lemmy.ml/c/linux_gaming and lemmy.world/c/linux_gaming have around the same number of subscribers. Should I post to both? Maybe the same people subscribe to both, so that’s pointless? Or maybe I’ll miss out on a lot of discussion if I post only to one? There’s no way for me to know.

    For me, it makes Lemmy less useful than reddit for asking really niche questions and getting useful answers. For posting comments on whatever pops up in my feed though, it works great.

    I don’t have any good solutions to this, and I’m sure it has been considered already. When I first joined, I remembered seeing people bring this same issue up, but it doesn’t seem like it went anywhere? (Or maybe it did?)


  • No one knows what the deal is with that relationship. Maybe this is all part of their plan, maybe Elon has dirt on Trump, maybe he’s brainwashed and neuralink is more advanced than is publicly known. Maybe they’re both being blackmailed, and Joe Biden is the one really pulling the strings, and he’s trying to destroy the country as revenge for Harris?

    There are a lot of equally likely possibilities here, so we shouldn’t try to jump to conclusions.


  • As a software engineer who started programming when he was 11, I get what you mean about “ladder climbers” feeling alien (my elitist term for them is “9-to-5ers” or “pedestrians”).

    However, I think this question is dumb at least so far as it won’t work to weed out the people you think it will. I don’t read fiction often, and the only scifi books I remember reading are Dune and Prey, but that’s very out of character for me. It’s pretty much luck that I read those, and more a factor of me just being an old fart (I’m almost 30, and that’s a lot of time to stumble upon at least one scifi book). Ask me this question a few years earlier and I’d draw a blank.

    Both were good books, but nothing that would consider a “favorite”. Dune is memorable to me just because it very clearly was based on Lawrence of Arabia, which I found neat. As for Prey, I only vaguely remember something about killer nanomachines, and that it was a fun read.

    But if you’re specifically looking to hire someone you can talk scifi novels with, then it’s a very good question (as long as you’re mature enough to hire someone who says their favorite book is one that you hate).


  • Literally nothing. A corporation, especially a publicly traded one like that, can’t do much but maximize (ideally long-term, but usually short-term) shareholder returns.

    The Activision-Microsoft merger is a good recent example of this. During the anti trust trial, the CEO of Activision literally came out and said that he believes it’s a bad idea that will be bad for the industry and bad for the company in the long term, using the impact of consolidation in Hollywood as an example, but he has to side with the board. He’s basically legally obligated to.

    I’m not saying it’s unjust or a bad system (and I’m definitely not trying to paint Bobby Kotick as a good guy), I just want to point out that corporations are very simple in their purpose, and nobody should be expecting anything more from them. If you’re disappointed that Google made this 180, that’s on you for falling in love with a corporation. They’re useful tools for producing goods and services, but terrible as a political tool for democracy.

    But for some reason, it became popular to fetishize tech companies, and that spawned megalomaniacs like Elon, Zuckerberg, Horowitz, Thiel, etc who feel like they should be the supreme rulers of our civilization.





  • Calculators made mental math obsolete. GPS apps made people forget how to navigate on their own.

    Maybe those are good innovations or not. Arguments can be made both ways, I guess.

    But if AI causes critical thinking skills to atrophy, I think it’s hard to argue that that’s a good thing for humanity. Maybe the end game is that AI achieves sentience and takes over the world, but is benevolent, and takes care of us like beloved pets (humans are AI’s best friend). Is that good? Idk

    Or maybe this isn’t a real issue and the study is flawed, or more realistically, my interpretation of the study is wrong because I only read the headline of this article and not the study itself?

    Who knows?


  • There’s so much misinfo spreading about this, and while I don’t blame you for buying it, I do blame you for spreading it. “It sounds legit” is not how you should decide to trust what you read. Many people think the earth is flat because the conspiracy theories sound legit to them.

    DeepSeek probably did lie about a lot of things, but their results are not disputed. R1 is competitive with leading models, it’s smaller, and it’s cheaper. The good results are definitely not from “sheer chip volume and energy used”, and American AI companies could have saved a lot of money if they had used those same techniques.


  • The model weights and research paper are

    I think you’re conflating “open source” with “free”

    What does it even mean for a research paper to be open source? That they release a docx instead of a pdf, so people can modify the formatting? Lol

    The model weights were released for free, but you don’t have access to their source, so you can’t recreate them yourself. Like Microsoft Paint isn’t open source just because they release the machine instructions for free. Model weights are the AI equivalent of an exe file. To extend that analogy, quants, LORAs, etc are like community-made mods.

    To be open source, they would have to release the training data and the code used to train it. They won’t do that because they don’t want competition. They just want to do the facebook llama thing, where they hope someone uses it to build the next big thing, so that facebook can copy them and destroy them with a much better model that they didn’t release, force them to sell, or kill them with the license.


  • I used to think like that, but now I’m on the fence since I’ve started working much more closely with packaging. Calling it “linux” is actually kind of harmful for adoption. Devs that claim their software works on Linux mislead people into thinking it works on any Linux distro, which is rarely true. Most of the time, those devs only test on Ubuntu and no other distro.

    Maybe when Snaps finally die out and Flatpak emerges as the one true standard for desktop apps, then that problem will go away once and for all. Until then, I think we should normalize distinguishing Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc as separate “operating systems” instead of “distros”, which is an unnecessary and misleading term anyways.




  • EA should split itself up or sell off some franchises. The current situation makes nobody happy: investors don’t like the profitability of single player games, players don’t like the live serviceification of single player games, and I’m sure devs don’t like that they can’t work on projects that likely inspired them to become game devs in the first place.

    The Sims franchise could support a medium sized studio on its own.

    I played the Sims 1&2 as a kid, and love the fuck out of them. As an adult with disposable income, I would have gladly dropped even $100 on a proper modernized rerelease of these games I love. Instead, I saved my money and downloaded them for free. Because why the hell wouldn’t I? The pirate versions are literally better. EA is squandering the potential of this and many other IPs



  • So the dems are dumb for not fighting fascism with fascism? You can’t save democracy by destroying it. That “ends justify the means” thinking is why the republican party ended up this way. Why would republicans in congress want to disenfranchise themselves by installing a dictator? They’re just morons grasping for conspiracy theories to win elections, without thinking about the long term consequences. Maybe I’m naive, but save for the few actual lunatics (like MTG), I’m sure many republicans would turn on Trump the instant they felt they could get away with it, especially now