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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Most people have very little agency to change things, as even if they spend time and money they don’t have on getting their personal impact to zero, and nearly everyone else does the same, it won’t make much difference. There are a handful of people with so much money and influence that they could significantly change things, though, but who only care about further enriching themselves. It’s only really that handful of people who are behaving stupidly. The majority of people did not actively decide to create a system that gives the most power to the kind of person with that specific personality trait.






  • Depending on the context, it could just be who’s doing it. Star Wars was originally specifically an allegory for the Vietnam War, which was a war of Western imperialism because the two countries making it a war rather than a country gaining its independence were France (who’d conquered Vietnam as part of their empire and weren’t happy that the Vietnamese didn’t want to be in their empire) and the US (who wanted to stop communists gaining power anywhere), both of which are Western countries. It was about that war in particular rather than imperialism in general because that war in particular was the one that was a big deal for the target audience at the time - if Lucas had been Japanese and making the film decades earlier, maybe he’d have made it an allegory for something else, but he wasn’t, so he made the film he made.


  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldtoFediverse memes@feddit.ukExtremism
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    11 days ago

    Not ban-free, just easier to not care if you get banned by an idiot as you can make your own community with the same name on a different instance if you think a moderator is being dumb, and can move your account to a different instance if an admin is being dumb. If other people think you’re doing a better job, then your new community will outgrow the older one.

    With reddit, there’s only one community with each name, one set of admins, and one way to access things, so if something like this incident happened there, anyone affected would be totally fucked.





  • Because memory bugs are an absolute bastard to investigate compared to logic bugs, Rust makes the tradeoff of making it harder to express the logic of a program in return for making memory bugs impossible. That Should™ make it easier to write code with no bugs, but can make it harder to write code with no easily-encountered bugs. The kind of bugs it’s really good at preventing are ones that go unnoticed for years or take years to link to their root cause, and those aren’t the kinds of bug everyone encounters every time they run a program.



  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonerule
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    2 months ago

    That’s a controversial thought experiment rather than a proven fact. There’s no proof yet that consciousness isn’t ‘just’ a computation, albeit one done by brain tissue rather than a regular computer, and if that’s the case, then the Church Turing Thesis applies, and the same computation can be done on a different computer without changing its nature.




  • Whether or not that’s true at the moment (obviously, the status quo has changed because in 2020 UPlay changed to Ubisoft Connect, so the alleged incident happened years ago, and it’s alleged that Ubisoft were forced to stop selling something, so they wouldn’t still be selling it), the article specifically says:

    Uplay featured a $15 USD Rainbow Six Siege Starter Pack, but this version was not available on Steam, making the cheapest option on Valve’s platform much more expensive.

    The obvious way of parsing that is that it was the UPlay version of the game, but even if not, it’s generally not viable to sell Steam keys for things not available on Steam. The only time you can is when a game’s delisted but you’ve already generated keys for it, and then Valve can just wait for Ubisoft to run out rather than making the alleged threat.


  • If we’re going to pull up other people’s pithy phrases that aren’t intended to be taken entirely literally, then the relevant one here is machine learning is the second best solution to any problem. In the (approximately, depending on how you define it) century people have been thinking about computers, we’ve already found better solutions to lots of problems. If a transformer-based neural network can get 99% accuracy in sixty seconds on 92 billion transistors of GPU and billions more for its VRAM, that’s pretty useless if we can also do it with 100% accuracy in sixty microseconds on a $1 microcontroller, or even faster on a less constrained device.

    The attention is all you need phrase is specifically in the context of sequence transduction models, and specifically referring to the discovery that they don’t need a combination of attention, recurrence and convolution, but actually only need attention if it’s used in the novel way introduced by the paper. If you don’t need to transduce any sequences, then this isn’t necessarily relevant, and it’s critically not a claim that you can do everything by transducing sequences. It was a surprise that applying it to generating new text instead of just converting it worked as well as it did, and a surprise that it kept getting better with larger models instead of plateauing around the GPT-1 and GPT-2 era, and a surprise that the text generation could be used to do other things, even ones as basic as addition. These things weren’t predicted by the Attention Is All You Need paper.