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blindsight

@blindsight@beehaw.org

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blindsight ,

It's missing filling the start bat with a massive Copilot box and weather/news widget. Or maybe missed an opportunity to make Clippy the AI assistant.

I love-hate it.

blindsight ,

This was my main concern. What's the monetization strategy?

blindsight ,

Another really sad part is that campus security just stood by and watched as the protesters were attacked by "counter protesters".

This is absolutely ridiculous. From what I can discuss, it sounds like they weren't blocking anyone's access to facilities, they were students peacefully protesting at their post secondary educational institution. This shit is happening in Canada, too!; thankfully a Quebec court just overruled one of our university's attempt to forcefully forcefully remove the protesters.

I hope the universities that called in militarized police responses get sued and administration staff is forced to resign. These chuckleclowns should never be in charge of educational institutions ever again.

blindsight ,

I disagree that CEOs are equivalent to landlords. CEOs do create value by providing direction for the efficient application of resources to solve business problems and leadership and direction to employees. It's not an easy job, by any stretch.

That said, taking skill doesn't mean that CEOs should be entitled to massive take-home pay. I think the "fix" comes in adjusting our taxation system, not CEO compensation. Well, at least so long as we're tied to the profit-seeking corporation structure we're in. A "good" CEO can lead a company to producing significantly more value than a bad CEO, so let them fight for big compensation packages all they want.

The highest marginal tax rate in the US for individuals peaked at 92% in the early 50s. If we had sane marginal income tax rates at higher income levels, then there would be no problem with executive income. (Granted, we also need to fix taxation on other forms of compensation and capital gains, too.)

blindsight ,

I think you nailed the confusion in this meme.

To simplify: it's confusing that ½ = 0.5, but 1/2 ≠ 1/0.5

blindsight , (edited )

LLMs aren't really capable of understanding spelling. They're token prediction machines.

LLMs have three major components: a massive database of "relatedness" (how closely related the meaning of tokens are), a transformer (figuring out which of the previous words have the most contextual meaning), and statistical modeling (the likelihood of the next word, like what your cell phone does.)

LLMs don't have any capability to understand spelling, unless it's something it's been specifically trained on, like "color" vs "colour" which is discussed in many training texts.

"Fruits ending in 'um' " or "Australian towns beginning with 'T' " aren't talked about in the training data enough to build a strong enough relatedness database for, so it's incapable of answering those sorts of questions.

blindsight ,

My level of research was to come to the comments hoping someone had explained the weird numbering jump already.

blindsight ,

I watched most of this video (in the background) the other day. I have a technical background, but I've never made a "real" game. It looks like a really good tutorial for newbies to making games.

I look forward to seeing the later videos!

Also, I found it an odd coincidence that he chose the exact knight sprite I used for a Scratch tile-based-game tutorial project for a lesson a few years ago. CC0 assets are awesome.

blindsight ,

To add to the other suggestion, you could set your default ringtone to silence, then set a custom ringtone for "priority contacts" so they can actually ring you.

blindsight ,

You had me until only 1 chance to fail; instead, you should temporarily get your license reduced back to the level 2 learners license. Then another chance to fail and retest before you get bumped down to a level 1 learners license.

Also, every year for 70+ is excessive. Passing a cog screen should be sufficient. Retesting every 5 years is already pretty good.

blindsight ,

LLMs can be great for explaining things that have concrete solutions, like physics and math problems, when they have a separate "computations" AI bolted onto it, like ChatGPT does. Usually, you can check the answer in the back of the book anyway, so it's very easy to catch fact hallucinations.

I wouldn't worry about source hallucinations with this either. I don't think it would even come up?

blindsight ,

I read it "THERE'S PLANET NOB". Like, a dick planet.

blindsight ,

Because interacting with streamers is a big part of Twitch?

I love popping into a nearly-empty Twitch stream and interacting with a streamer. It must be pretty discouraging to stream into the void with no viewers, and it's cool to hear about why they like a game I'm considering, or getting help with learning a game, or (rarely for me, lol) sharing some of my knowledge about a game.

It's also the only way I connect with two of my (married) friends from uni. I pop into their stream when I can and we chat a bit while they play.

Twitch with no chat might as well just be a YouTube video that I can speed up, pause, and seek.

blindsight ,

I really hope they make the right decision!

blindsight ,

This is fascinating to watch happening. As numbers-must-go-up businesses chase profits in a world where subscribership has peaked, they cannibalize their own value proposition to increase profits. This encourages more users to shift to piracy, accelerating profit losses.

Will we ever reach an equilibrium? My understanding is that total entertainment spending doesn't decline or grow much, so it's all just trying to compete with rivals for a bigger slice of the pie. I wonder if the major TV and film producers are just going to have less total money heading their way, and we'll have less high-budget content created.

I don't really care either way; lots of lower-budget content is amaze balls. I barely ever play AAA games or watch blockbuster movies, and I think it might be better for everyone to get more diversity in content creators (that lower budgets will likely enable.)

It will be very interesting seeing how this all plays out over the next few decades.

Now excuse my while I go pirate low-budget UK panel shows (that are region-locked internationally) while playing Final Fantasy 5 on an emulator modded with several fan-made romhacks.

blindsight ,

Ninite is pretty great, too.

blindsight ,

"She's asking to be objectified."

No, she's not. And this sexist argument needs to stop.

blindsight ,

Don't forget skimpflation. I can't even eat a lot of the food I used to as a kid because the quality is so terrible now.

Looking at you Tim Hortons.

blindsight ,

I expect piracy will be the big winner when it happens.

Exactly my thought. And backing up games and stripping Steam DRM from the games that use it (very easy to do, or so I hear.)

If Valve announces Steam is shutting down (or enshittifies), then everyone who can (and cares) will just backup their games, and everyone else will just download the DRM-stripped versions using their favourite piracy platform.

Right now, it's easier to buy a game on Steam than fuff about with piracy. Even at minimum wage, it's usually cheaper in the opportunity cost of time to just buy games (if you're a patient gamer, at any rate; higher income levels needed for full box price).

blindsight ,

Not parent poster, but I'm going to see if I can come up with some.

0: If you get banned from Steam, you lose hundreds or thousands of games.

0.1: You can't use credit card chargeback protection since you will get your account banned.

0.5: If you're blocked by VAC anti-cheat, you're locked out of all your games that use VAC.

1: Steam requiring other storefronts to sell at the same gross price instead of the same price net fees. This means nobody can compete with their 30% cut... On the other hand, they take 0% for activating games sold elsewhere, which kinda balances it. Still, this is probably the biggest barrier that's maintaining their 30% cut.

2: Discoverability since they stopped curating the games list. (Maybe? Not sure if this is a problem, tbh.)

3: Normalizing the concept of games requiring a launcher to run/DRM.

4: Offline play functionality is inconsistent, so sometimes it breaks when people are traveling with no Internet access.

5: Porn games can be seen easily my minors/people who find it offensive.

6: Region-locked censorship, like gore in Germany.

7: Some people would say region-adjusted pricing, but I disagree. Still, might be a valid reason for some.

(Numbering is wonky because I thought of actual real problems later.)

I think I did pretty well! It's hard to find things to fault. It's a pretty great platform.

blindsight ,

Yeah, Terraria is a great example of a game where the grind is integral to the game. Needing to get 20 drops from a particular creature encourages you to explore the specific zone deeply enough to really enjoy it. There's no story to progress through, it's just exploration and grinding to get different materials.

Similarly for Minecraft. Is it "grinding" to mine diamonds at z-level 11, or is that the game?

JRPGs and MMOs are the ones who generally don't respect your time with their XP grind systems.

What non-FOSS software have you been unable to quit?

For me, Google video search, Google books (Internet Archive is good, but doesn't always have the same stuff), Adobe InDesign (but in the process of learning LaTeX), and Typewise. As for the Google stuff, I liked Whoogle a lot, but almost all their instances seem to have been blocked or shut down. Also, apologies if this is...

blindsight ,

I'm really liking Logseq. I started on it instead of Obsidian since Logseq is FOSS. I understand it's not too hard to switch over since they both use markdown files, granted some scripts need to be run to convert markdown differences between the two.

Logseq's business model is to charge $5/mo for syncing on their (fully encrypted with a private key) server, but you can use a FOSS syncing solution (or a property one) if you prefer. I pay to support the project and to simplify sync on work devices I don't have administrator rights on (so most other sync solutions wouldn't work well.)

blindsight ,

My Skyrim mods download folder alone is over ½ a TB.

I also want to load a 1TB MicroSD on my Steam Deck for emulation, so I need at least another 1TB to download the image file to flash to the MicroSD card. (I don't want to fuff around downloading and curating a romset, so it's easier to just download a 1TB image from a private tracker and flash it. From there, I can just swap individual roms/romhacks in and out as needed.)

My Deck will have a 1TB SSD and a 1TB MicroSD. My desktop had 2TB, but I just added another 4TB.

On the other hand, on my phone I barely use half of my 128GB and will likely never run out of space.

blindsight , (edited )

Not sure if it's just my device, but I can't drag & drop files into the new Teams for organizations, so I'm still using classic for organizations.

It's ridiculous, and now I need to click through saying "no" to the new version every time I start it.

blindsight ,

I just checked and I got two emails from then asking if I want to buy in.

lol, hell no.

I would buy puts, if anything, but the valuation on puts will make them too expensive.

196 Stands with Palestine, but those of you in the US should still vote in the general election.

I've been seeing a lot of anti-voting sentiment going around. Can't believe I have to say this, but you need to vote. Not only is there more to the election than just the president. (State policy, Senate, house), but not voting is not an act of protest. C'mon guys

blindsight , (edited )

Cool; I didn't know Blahaj was a 2SLGBTQ+ instance. I just thought it was a kind and accepting space, like Beehaw.

Not to derail this thread too much, but I assume Allies are welcome to join? If Beehaw ends up leaving Lemmy, I'll need to make a new account somewhere.

blindsight ,

Blocking food aide at the borders and targeting hospitals with precise missile strikes isn't intentional? That's a stretch.

blindsight ,

I preferred the full video, but thanks for sharing. It's a shame stroads are the norm in North America. :(

blindsight ,

That's a shame. I really liked it for text-to-speech since the TTS apps for Android are a lot better (and cheap/free) compared to Windows offerings. I use it to grade student essays since I can speed read with TTS+eyes faster and more accurately than I can with just my eyes.

That said, I think there are other ways to get Android apps working in Windows, aren't there? I might need to look into the options, or see if the TTS options on Windows have improved.

WSA was the "killer feature" that made me upgrade from Windows 10. (Although Win+Shift+T for screen capture OCR is huge for me, too..)

blindsight ,

Beehaw defederating with the biggest open signups Lemmy instance has definitely kept it a lot nicer. There isn't as much content, but it's also a lot less toxic.

blindsight ,

I think it depends on the protest, a little bit, but that's generally the case in Canada, too.

I counter-protested anti-SOGI assholes (didn't want 2SLGBTQ+ taught in schools) and it was completely fine. I brought my 5 y.o.

blindsight ,

Takes ~2-3 seconds to set on my Sony Android phone; long-press power, top-right option is lockdown.

blindsight ,

That's not how LLMs work.

Super short version is that LLMs probabilistically determine the next word most likely to occur in a sequence. They do this using Statistical Models (like what your cell phone's auto complete uses); Transformers (rating the importance of preceding words, so the model can "focus" on the most important words); and Relatedness (a measure of how closely linked different words/phrases are to reach other in meaning).

With increasingly large models, LLMs can build a more accurate representation of Relatedness across a wider range of topics. With enough examples, LLMs can infinitely generate content that is closely Related to a query.

So a small LLM can make sentences that follow writing conventions but are nonsense. A larger LLM can write intelligibly about topics that are frequently included in the training materials. Huge LLMs can do increasingly nuanced things like "explain" jokes.

LLMs are not capable of evaluating truth or facts. It's not part of the algorithm. And it doesn't matter how big they get. At best, with enough examples to build a stronger Relatedness dataset, they are more likely to "stay on topic" and return results that are actually similar to what is being asked.

blindsight , (edited )

This can only work in contexts where the LLM already has a strong Relatedness database for the topic. LLMs are incapable of assessing the accuracy of any information they weren't trained on with sufficient examples to build that database.

This paper, if I'm understanding it correctly, is saying the same thing: LLMs will always hallucinate and are incapable of identifying hallucinations in certain contexts.

The problem we face is that it's hard to identify hallucinations in the exact context when LLMs are most likely to make them: in content that's not widely known and understood with many examples in the training data.

Or maybe I'm off base and I need to read the full study.

blindsight ,

I liked this article, and I think a lot of the commenters here are missing that the general public is treating LLMs as AGI. I have a whole 5-10 minutes I spend on why this is when I present about LLMs.

"The I in LLM stands for Intelligence" is a joke I read (and include in my presentation to hammer the point home). Laymen have no idea what AI or LLMs are, but they expect it to work similarly to human intelligence, since that's the only model they know, and are surprised to learn it doesn't work that way.

Edit: Forgot what I came to the comments to post, before I read everyone else's complaints about this, lol.

A small correction: the Air Canada example wasn't an LLM, it was just an old "dumb" chatbot that was likely sharing outdated policies.

Looking for a REALLY simple video editor for win10, nothing fancy please! [E: already solved. Amazing, thanks!] (kbin.social)

Windows Movie Maker used to be good enough, but for a while now it won't load mp4's anymore and I can't be bothered to try and fix it, and I'm really hating the online editors I've tried, so it's time to download some software!...

blindsight , (edited )

Nice. I should get that. I barely edit videos, but it's almost always just simple cutting. Not losing quality and increasing file size to reencoding would be great.

Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base' (www.404media.co)

Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early...

blindsight ,

The problem is that SEO has made it impossible to find accurate information easily, since even "old, trustworthy brands" can't be trusted online. [This is an excellent article that explains the problem thoroughly, and brings receipts] (https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/).

blindsight ,

Literally why I bookmarked it. I'm an online teacher, so I'm going to advocate for adding that article to a grade 10 course that's used by thousands of students each year.

blindsight ,

Somewhat related:

A recommendation about teaching controversial topics: you need to build connection first.

I mean, that's true of all teaching, but when you start to question the (prejudiced) things they're hearing from trusted adults at home, you really need to have a strong relationship with the students.

Being an anti-racist pro-SOGI educator in conservative communities is hard.

I wish you success in your career! Teachers have such an opportunity to make a huge impact on the world.

blindsight ,

Here's a link with more details on the story

blindsight ,

Yeah, agreed. I've learned a lot about gender minorities and issues affecting the 2SLGBTQ+ population in the last decade.

blindsight ,

Yes, starting with 2S is part of Canada's move toward Truth & Reconciliation with our local First Nations, to recognize how the intersectionality of racism further marginalizes Two Spirit First Nations people.

blindsight ,

I get that, but 2SLGBTQ+ is the most politically acceptable term in Canada. It's used by politicians and in education, and the 2S being at the start is a conscious act of reconciliation with our First Nations.

blindsight ,

As pointed out in the article, that's not necessarily perfect, either. Lots of companies hire people to post to Reddit about their products.

blindsight ,

School is a metaphor for the media and messaging that goes out to the public, too, not just literally brick & mortar K-12 education institutions.

Convincing the underclass that they benefit from the concentration of wealth amongst the elite. The"Circle of Life" is a metaphor for "Trickle-down Economics".

Or that's how I read it.

I am genuinely horrified to see how much data google collected from me

I created a google takeout and in that zip file I found some files containing a ton of data about me. It has logged every single page I visited while using the google search engine and chrome browser. It even logged every single time I opened an app on my old android phone. It even has VOICE RECORDINGS of me and a log of every...

blindsight ,

That only works if you can log in. Otherwise, it would be a massive privacy problem since anyone could takeout anyone's data.

blindsight ,

The point is that the scapegoat is usually female. Why is Taylor Swift being singled out for her private jet use? Is it because her use is assumed to be less legitimate because she's a woman?

A quick Internet search brought up this:

Among the most polluting jets covered by the list was a Boeing 767 wide-body aircraft used by the Rolling Stones. It emitted an estimated 5,046 tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of someone taking 1,763 return flights from London to New York City in economy class.

Aircraft owned by Lawrence Stroll, the billionaire owner of the Aston Martin Formula One team, recorded a combined 1,512 flights since the start of 2022. His private aircraft, including two helicopters, also made the most journeys of 15 minutes or less.

Thirty-nine jets linked to 30 Russian oligarchs – including Roman Abramovich, Leonid Mikhelson and the recently deceased leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin – were responsible for 30,701 tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to the total average carbon footprint of around 1,000 Russians).

Source

So, attacking billionaires who are abusing private jets is totally fair, in general, but always singing out the woman who does so is misogynistic.

Where are the Rolling Stones or Laurence Stroll memes?

ajsadauskas , to Fuck Cars
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

What can you get to within a 15-minute walk of your house?

A recent YouGov survey asked Americans what they think they should be able to get to within a 15-minute walk of their house.

Of these choices, I can currently walk to all of them from my apartment, aside from a university (no biggie, I'm not currently studying, although there is a Tafe within walking distance), a hospital, and a sports arena.

How many can you get to with a 15 minute walk from your house?

@fuck_cars

blindsight ,

Even then, 15 minutes is quite a radius. I wouldn't want to be a 3-minute walk away, but a 15 minute walk is like ~8 blocks.

Granted, that probably necessitates other homes being a lot closer than 8 blocks, so I suppose this just becomes a micro-scale NIMBY-ism. So I suppose you're probably right.

That said, there are lots of places where you have massive grocery stores at the ground level or underground in high-density urban environments, so you can get massive scale with high walkability, if you're willing to move past single-family homes (which we must... I say despite wanting a single-family home for my family.)

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