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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • Using the best models as synthetic data is mostly pointless. You’re just going to recreate all of its biases and failures in a degraded copy. The whole point of open source software is being able to analyze the source code to learn how it works and understand and ideally remove its weaknesses.

    Open weights doesn’t let you do that, and what research it enables is mostly just tinkering around the edges. If someone trained a network, but it kept saying racist stuff, you can’t figure out why it’s racist or rebuild it without the racism from weights alone. Just the weights is like having a binary. Maybe nice to have a gratis app to use, but not really open.




  • I graduated in that rough time period and also felt like I was great, but realistically my institution didn’t really prepare me for most of the things you actually do on a software coding team. Sure, we had a course on software engineering and we’d had some demanding solo projects, but most of our coursework was computer science rather than software engineering.

    And my first job was actually in a researchy role with small teams and manageable process. Now I don’t think I was an actual drain on company resources, but I definitely recognized that a lot of what I did day to day wasn’t something that I was already well prepared for. Certainly it could have been done much faster by a senior employee though, so any task assigned to my was done so with the knowledge that it would take longer and benefit from some oversight, but that would be worthwhile to grow the company.










  • That just a function of it being a long-term and established community. And likely a bit of agreement with your broad cultural and political views. Right now Reddit is more likely to have information on a random video game than Lemmy, but that doesn’t mean their structure is inherently good for producing information.

    A federated system where you federate with everyone without limit is a good way to get a lot of bad shit, but that’s not how the Fediverse actually works. Instances defederate from other instances that are dragging down the quality of their social network. Most importantly, if your admins go bad and decide they want to not pursue truth but instead craft a narrative, you can move instances to one that has the standards you want while only losing the content that was actually on the now-bad instance.


  • Read on to literally the next paragraph, which says Diaspora is the only still developed platform that matches the original definition and does not use ActivityPub, or to the section that explicitly calls ATProto a Fediverse alternative.

    The first paragraph is descriptive of the Fediverse, not a test for whether something is part of it. The Internet is a collection of computers communicating via TCP/IP. That doesn’t mean any two computers communicating over TCP/IP are now part of the Internet.


  • That’s present in any user editable platform. Wikipedia’s consensus doesn’t mean it’s actually representing broad universal truth. That why everything gets cited and the talk and history pages are public to the readers, so they can judge the reliability themselves. If you stumble on a less visited page, that consensus group gets smaller and smaller and the likelihood of it being essentially a pretty fiefdom increases.

    Even printed encyclopedias had no such claim. If someone is putting out a instance that’s too highly biased to be useful, defederate.