PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

Anarchist, autistic, engineer, and Certified Professional Life-Regretter. If you got a brick of text, don’t be alarmed; that’s normal.

No, I’m not interested in voting for your candidate.

  • 3 Posts
  • 215 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlAI bros
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    2 months ago

    “Gradient descent” ≈ on a “hilly” (mathematical) surface, try to find the lowest point by finding the lowest point near an initial guess. Hopefully, the lowest point near your initial guess is low enough to pass as a solution to your problem.

    “Gradient” is basically the steepness, or rate that the thing you’re trying to optimize changes as you move through “space”. The gradient tells you mathematically which direction you need to go to reach the bottom. “Descent” means “try to find the minimum”.

    I’m glossing over a lot of details, particularly what a “surface” actually means in the high dimensional spaces that AI uses, but a lot of problems in mathematical optimization are solved like this. And one of the steps in training an AI agent is to do an optimization, which often does use a gradient descent algorithm. That being said, not every process that uses gradient descent is necessarily AI or even machine learning. I’m actually taking a course this semester where a bunch of my professor’s research is in optimization algorithms that don’t use a gradient descent!


  • They created a good product so people used it and there were no alternatives when it got shit.

    They created an inherently centralizing implementation of a video sharing platform. Even if it was done with good intentions (which it wasn’t, it was some capitalist’s hustle, and its social importance is a side effect), we should basically always condemn centralizing implementations of a given technology because they reinforce existing power structures regardless of the intentions of their creators.

    It’s their fault because they’re a corporation that does what corporations do. Even when corporations try to do right by the world (which is an extremely generous appraisal of YouTube’s existence), they still manage to create centralizing technologies that ultimately serve to reinforce their existing power, because that’s all they can do. Otherwise, they would have set themselves up as a non-profit or some other type of organization. I refuse to accept the notion of a good corporation.

    There’s no lock in. They don’t force you off the platform if you post elsewhere (like twitch did).

    That’s a good point, but while there isn’t a de jure lock-in for creators, there is a de facto lock-in that prevents them from migrating elsewhere. Namely, that YouTube is a centralized, proprietary service, which can’t be accessed from other services.








  • Is like saying oh you don’t like your local librarians? you’re free to make your own library!

    I’m probably being pedantic here but you kinda can, e.g. Little Free Libraries, although the reason isn’t “my local librarians suck”, it’s closer to “more libraries please”.

    Okay well being free to do something doesn’t magically make it a real option.

    Agreed, but I fail to see how, with enough consent from the user base, how moving to another existing server is not an option.

    Are there even any exceptions to that that aren’t entire communities agreeing to move together off instances?

    I’m not aware of any off the top of my head, but it absolutely does not seem implausible that we could move this community if the need arises. Entire communities moved off of Reddit during the boycott; I don’t see why we can’t do that again within the platform if the need arises. For the most part people are okay with the moderation here, as am I, but the minute that changes people will flee somewhere else.

    For literally the entire time I have been on lemmy I have heard laments about the centralization of comms on lemmy.world and seen attempts to mitigate it but every pie chart just shows lemmy.world with more of the pie because growing a comm on small servers isn’t simple!

    Hard agree there. I’m not sure how to fix it.




  • Not really? Although I’m probably way more tolerant to (wideband!) noise than others because I sleep literally inches from two box fans.

    But you don’t need to run it while you’re sleeping. It goes from room temperature to ice in under 10 minutes (20 minutes for the “good” ice after the insides have had a bit of time to cool down).


    To be clear, what I have is a Frigidaire portable ice maker. Here’s its Walmart product page, although I can’t vouch for Walmart’s website respecting your privacy.

    I actually bought a knockoff of this a couple years ago off Amazon, and it worked for about a year, but:

    1. The infrared sensor was crap from day 1, so I always had to manually override the machine’s decision that the ice was full, even when it was completely empty.
    2. The water where I was living (dorm room in city) was much…harder I think? It was safe to drink, I even tested it myself, but whatever minerals were in it very quickly fucked up my machine’s internals. I’m living at my parents house with better water.

    So far, the Frigidaire is a much better unit, and I use it tremendously more often because I don’t have to babysit the thing and constantly override the infrared sensor.

    The water supply is just an ordinary tank. Basically just open the lid, dump a Super Big Gulp of water into the tank every few hours and you’re set. Everything is self contained.

    It doesn’t keep the ice cool for you, i.e. it’s not a freezer. Once the ice gets dumped in the bucket, you’re on your own.

    So if you go down this route, I recommend getting a decent version of it. Mine cost about $87 in store from Walmart but I really bought this unit as an impulse buy, so I imagine you can get it cheaper if you do some shopping.


  • That happened on reddit all the time, minus the instance part. Remember /r/freefolk?

    The “instance part” is absolutely huge. If I wanted to, I could go start a /c/lemmyshitpost on SDF Lemmy [1] with a completely new set of rules [2], particularly a set of rules that possibly would violate Lemmy.world’s TOS or possibly even the law in Lemmy.world’s jurisdiction, but not SDF’s or their jurisdiction’s laws.

    It’s not a big deal for the average user until the day you run afoul of the server admins.

    [1] As of writing this, SDF does not have a /c/lemmyshitpost.

    [2] I’m not interested in doing that lol, this is just a hypothetical. I’m annoyed at this most recent decision but nowhere near ready to leave over it.




  • I think moderating comments needs to be banished.

    Nah because then someone could just post (for example) medical gore in a “safe space” and it’ll just get downvoted but not removed.

    It wasn’t gore, but do you remember the ThuleanPerspective (I think?) trolls from a little while back, spamming that racist photoshopped Simpsons comic by commenting it on literally everything? That effort was neutralized in the short term by deleting those comments on the spot, and then the users who posted them.

    It is absolutely a useful tool, but like most useful tools it can be abused.