CodexArcanum @ codexarcanum @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts

5

Comments

295

Joined

7 mo. ago

I think you can tag the community like a person in a Mastodon post and it shows on the community? Like @asklemmy@lemmy.world but from Masto.

Nope! Doesn't seem to work. Could be that my mastodon instance doesn't federate to Lemmy.world though. If you search that "user" in masto you can follow them to see posts in this community, but seemingly not make them.

Words also just rotate around in popularity like any other fad. Remember synergy? Paradigm shifts? Thinking outside the box?

Academia isn't immune to memes, far from it. In the semi-contained world of higher education, trends in words and phrases are even more pronounced and likely to spread.

If this is evidence of LLM usage, it could easily be the machines reflecting back trends. These things pick up on subtle cues in your prompts to match tone with you as well so I wouldn't rule out human influence either in prompts or the RLHF process.

People say this, but I've been on Lemmy and Mastodon for about 1.5 years and Lemmy feels a lot more engaging than Masto. My posts there get one or two likes and boosts, while posts and comments here regularly get dozens if not hundreds of upvotes. I think Blue Sky is eating their lunch right now.

Why? So they can betray you at a critical junction to claim power for themselves, or so you can betray them without feeling too guilty about it?

Because you sure as hell can't work with them on any leftist projects. They have zero desire to unconcentrate the accumulated power in Washington, only to claim it for themselves.

It's an untenable situation because its so much bigger than the tech world and open source. FOSS fundamentally works on a communal model: everyone needs lots of software, no one can hope to write it all themselves, so what if we distributed the labor out among the community so that everyone can work on some things important to them and the whole community benefits.

Then, capitalist businesses entered the picture and began using more and more open software as backbone for their enterprises. Government entanglements further complicate the picture, but fundamentally the capitalist mindset is incapable of building or maintaining our current technological base. It isn't capable of maintaining or building our infrastructure either: almost all of that was built on government subsidies, socialism.

And now that vulture capitalism is the law of the land, everything is falling apart because there's no more "slack" in the system where people can engage in personal socialism on projects like FLOSS, every bit of our time is being stolen to pad the numbers of capitalists.

This bleeds over into attitude as well. Every entitled user who thinks their personal issue is more important than any other concern is a trump or musk in miniature, believing that the the blowhard bravado of our current government is a model for forcing work to get done rather than a death spiral there's no pulling out of.

You want FLOSS software that's good? You want less burden on maintainers? You want a safer, saner, more human-centric technology base? You want a better tech world?

Eat. The. Rich.

The United States will happily supply all the weapons our oldest ally, Canada, needs for this battle of survival against the tyrannical forces of the United States. Will you be paying with cash, credit, layaway, or mineral rights to all your natural resources?

There's a break-up song on Chvrch's debut album called Tether. One line, frequently repeated, goes "I'm feeling capable of... seeing the end." A fine lyric, very breakup, much hopeful.

Except, I can't tell when listening that she isn't saying "I feel incapable of..." I don't know if it's intentional but I think the ambiguity really elevates the song from semi-empowering breakup song to powerfully-relatable song about the chaos of seeing a relationship end; simultaneously believing you can get through it while also having no idea how you'll ever get through it.

It's just fun wordplay too: feeling capable/feel incapable. Makes me want to use that structure more in my own writing.

Imagine being a director at this company. One of your employees brings you a report showing that your most active users, who are the backbone of your business, have a huge overlap with rape reports. This will destroy the company, and you know they'll fire you for bringing it up and suppress it anyway. So you just.... forget... to bring it up at the next quarterly. You used to work at Uber, and before that covering up how gambling and gaming companies float on a raft made of addicts, so this is well practiced blindness.

There are aspects that could be better, sure. I think communities should be like sets of posts, subject to unions, conjuctions, and other set operations. Then you wouldnt have the issue of 5 versions of c/memes, they could be virtually joined into one memes community at the user level (and the user can filter out instances, communities, and users they don't like of course). Moderation could be decoupled from communities and made a broader service that users choose to interact with, agreeing to a level of moderation comfortable for their experience.

But also, put me in the group that thinks lemmy should stay small. Corpo social has convinced us that a single big room with every idiot and literally their mother screaming into it is how the internet should be and it isn't. We can go back to smaller, focused online communities that don't openly invite everyone to come in and fight.

Centralization tendencies are all rooted in power and control. We need to fragment more.

I'm being sarcastic but not by much. Nordic countries do have much better digital id systems and the EU overall looks to be following their model.

https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/

https://www.openbankingexcellence.org/blog/eid-and-the-eu-digital-identity-frameworka-scandinavian-perspective/

He's complaining that a number isn't unique and is being poorly used, but the number isn't supposed to be unique and he's complaining that it's not being used in a way that experts are specifically warned not to use it in.

But on a second, stupider layer, this is the system those numbers originate from. So however they use them is how they're supposed to be used.

But then, back above that first stupid layer, on an even more basic and surface level degree of stupid, the government definitely uses SQL databases. It uses just... so many of them.

It's wild too. I've been in the hospital a lot lately and in addition to a bar-code wristband, every healthcare worker, before doing anything with me (the patient) will ask my full name and either birthday or address and then double-check it against the wrist band. This is to make sure, at every step, that they didn't accidentally swap in some other patient with the same name. (Not so uncommon, lots of men have their father's name.)

Meanwhile in like Iceland, everyone gets assigned a personal GPG key at birth so you can just present you public cert as identification, not to mention send private messages and secure your state-assigned crypto-wallet. Not saying such a system is without flaw but it seems a lot better than what we're doing!

This is a good summary. I had to go pull up wikipedia on it since I roughly knew that social security was a national insurance/pension kind of system but am actually hazy on details.

The major issue with it as id (aside from DBA's gripes about it) is that credit agencies and banks started to rely on it for credit scores and loans. You see, the US has a social scoring system (what we always accuse China of) but the only thing it tracks is how reliable you are about paying off debts. So with your home address, name, and SSN, basically anyone can take out loans or credit cards in your name. This will then damage your credit score, making it harder to get loans, buy a home, rent property, or even get a job.

That's why Americans are always concerned about having our identity stolen: because you don't need a lot of info to financially ruin someone's life.

I'm hardly the king of databases, but always using a surrogate key (either an auto-incremented integet or a random uuid) has done me pretty well over the years. I had to engineer a combination of sequential timestamp with a hash extension as a key for one legacy system (keys had to be unique but mostly sequential), and an append-only log store would have been a better choice than an RDBMS, but sometimes you make it work with what you have.

Natural keys are almost always a bad idea though. SSNs aren't natural, which is one pitfall: implicitly relying on someone else's data practices by assuming their keys are natural. But also, nature is usually both more unique than you want (every snowflake is technically unique) and less than you'd hoped (all living things share quite a lot of DNA). Which means you end up relying on how good your taxonomy is for uniqueness. As opposed to surrogate keys, which you can assure the uniqueness of, by definition, for your needs.

I'm sure folks on here know this, but you know, there's also that 10K a day that don't so...

What makes this especially funny, to me, is that SSN is the literal text book example (when I was in school anyway) of a "natural" key that you absolutely should never use as a primary key. It is often the representative example of the kinds of data that seems like it'd make a good key but will absolutely fuck you over if you do.

SSN is not unique to a person. They get reused after death, and a person can have more than one in their lifetime (if your id is stolen and you arduously go about getting a new one). Edit: (See responses) It seems I'm misinformed about SSNs, apologies. I have heard from numerous sources that they are not unique to a person, but the specifics of how it happens are unknown to me.

And they're protected information due to all the financials that rely on them, so you don't really want to store them at all (unless you're the SSA, who would have guessed that'd ever come up though!?)

It's so stupid that it would be hilarious if people weren't dying.

I can't browse lemmy or play phone games while I read docs, but I can while I wait for the program to compile, load itself into a docker container, deploy to the test server, load my browser, and then fail to have fixed that bug I was looking at. Oh well, let me change one character and try again, it only takes about 15 minutes per attempt.

Ah sorry bud but You were Time's person of the year in 2006 so now we're all complicit!

The new Prince of Persia is the worst for this! There's no auto-cloud save, so you have to manually manage uploading and downloading to the one cloud save slot between your three on-device slots.

And no matter what, no matter how long it's been, it asks about it, like: "Your last save was 0 minutes ago, as you sure you want to exit?"

His exact tweet came up in another post of this story. He said we should eliminate Palestine and Isreal, which is that one step too far. Today's Nazi's actually can't be openly antisemetic because the genocidal apartheid state of Isreal is their closest international ally.