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.

  • 7 Posts
  • 370 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. “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.


  • Also: model trains. I was into model trains for a few years, but I realized that I didn’t really have the life experience to make a fulfilling model trainset. Like I did the thing, I made a (really childish) layout with some crappy blocks and streets, and I got the trains to move and stuff, but it didn’t…say much? It was “I’m a child and I like trains”, which is great! Probably wouldn’t have become interested in trains at all otherwise!

    But I want more…I always want more. I need to go more hardcore into the few things I can actually tolerate doing…

    And as a child, I saw some really cool trainsets built by adults that told stories, made me laugh, made my parents laugh, made me feel awe at the storytelling and creativity of the craft. Even my cousin, who built a trainset in his basement in his early twenties, had a much more inspired trainset than mine (when I was much younger, like 10 or 12). His trainset was cool. He studied how trains worked, how to make a realistic line with realistic scenery and infrastructure. His trainset reflected who he was, and ultimately forecasted what he became. He literally works for a rail company now designing the train tracks.

    So I’m kinda “saving” that hobby for when I’m in my 60’s after I integrate enough life experience (and hopefully some capital) to build a trainset that really reflects the person I ultimately became.

    My trainset is gonna have a sick, functioning roller coaster, some overly complicated automated control circuits, some heavy metal references, some intentionally goofy shit, serious shit, an anarcho-communist bent, a layout that at least is informed by modern infrastructure design, etc., because that’s at least partially the person I will have become.









  • 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.





  • Okay but you can always make your own shitposting community on your own instance with your own rules if you feel so strongly against the rules. That option simply was not available on R*ddit. The point of Lemmy isn’t that no one abuses their mod and admin powers ever, but that the system is set up so that you can just go to another Lemmy server, which simply was not available on R*ddit if you pissed off the site admins.

    Although I personally find Lemmy users nicer and moderation better on average, their character is not the point. It is merely the result of an imperfect but better system than R*ddit.