hendrik ✅

Read a history book. So far communism is a theoretical concept. Never has been achieved. And all the attempts didn’t even get close.

Yeah, the world is super unfair in general. Some people get life handed on a silver platter. Some have to work hard. And some don’t even get a chance. That’s not unique to dating but also applies to jobs, health, education, … practically everything. Life’s not fair to any of us. Never has been.

And btw, the situation in Japan and some other countries isn’t because men couldn’t get any women. It’s more they choose not to. They pursue other things.

Is that alright with communism? Strive for a classless society except for when we like to do classes anyways? I mean starfleet is kind of military and I don’t know much about that in the context of communism. But there’s also the separation between the worker class in a starship and then the officers who manage them and who get depicted in most of the TV series. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t align well with communism. I’m not sure how many exceptions there are in a communist utopia. But I’d like to see some strong arguments when doing away with some of the core values of an ideology. And I’m not sure if there is a better way to organize a starship than 20 century military hierarchy style.

You can look up the definition and see if it applies. I’d argue it isn’t a classless society. Especially with all the military ranks and hierarchies. And socialism is kind of a broad term. I’m pretty sure you can apply it to this case without starting a debate.

What’s with the old saying “There’s a nut for every bolt”? I keep seeing posts like this one here on Lemmy. I’m always unsure if that’s a statement, or asking for dating advice or a cry for help or venting. I mean not every person is into money. And social skills is something that can be learned. And being nice to people is a decision. Sure, being alone isn’t a nice feeling if you wish for something different. But I’m not sure if I’d phrase it that fatalistic.

Embrace it. Most of us used to use Windows at some point. But I think it’s really nice here on the other side. Hope you find your nice and bullshit-free way to use your computer.

But it’s super annoying when doing storywriting or using it as an agent. And then you have to do detection and extra handling of refusals, circumvent them and write extra prompts. And I think I read some paper that jailbreaking and removing “censorship” tends to make the models a bit stupider. I think in general it’s way more clever to take a model without guardrails and fine-tune it, than to put them in place and then remove them again, degrade the model in the process and also make your life harder. A base model should be entirely without any censorship. (It’s a base model though. It obviously won’t follow instructions or answer questions… It’s the basis for the community to take and fine-tune, aligned with our vision of baked-in ethics or the lack thereof.)

Was wäre mit Wein-Präsidentin?

Thanks for the comprehensive comments. I didn’t even know the whole backstory behind ActivityPub. I always just took it for granted. I think we agree that there are quite some issues that are technical in nature. I think we’d need so solve a few of those before we can think about growing the Fediverse substantially. It’s certainly not easy. But adding drama also doesn’t help. I’m quite pisitive about the Fediverse. At least in the mid to long term. Maybe a bit competition and new projects will help add a few new ideas.

Proper scientists (plural) said that? Or the author made that up and happens to be a scientist too?

I’m not sure if 3-4 times a day is a lot. I had computers (especially laptops) which were way more aggressive with spinning up and down the disks. Maybe you can look it up. A decent (enterprise(?)) hdd should have some datasheet available including info about how often you can powercycle or spin them up/down.

And I wouldn’t wake up disks deliberately. If you don’t mind the 5-10s waiting, you can just spin them down at the end of the day and leave them that way. The next day they’ll either spin up on first access, or they won’t. And save that one cycle. I’m not sure though if you can change the spindown timeout during the day without also waking it up. I mean you could run a script that spins them down at 22:00 and sets the timeout to 1h, and at 07:30 you run a script to keep them awake for a 6h period. But you’d need to test if changing that setting wakes them up. Or I’d rather not run a script like that. Sometimes executing hdparm spins up a disk, even if unnecessary.

I don’t have any good links. There has been an AMA with the developers earlier this year (on lemmy.ml) and I asked some questions regarding the development process and the direction of the project (and finances). I don’t have the link available, since I switched instances in the meantime.

And I followed the Github issues for some time. Usually you get an idea about how developers handle things by looking at their interaction with the community. There are some requests from last summer which I think would be worth looking into, but the devs say they don’t have the manpower. Same applies to several UI bugs. They’re still pretty much untouched as development focuses on the backend. And I’ve heard from people that the maintainers aren’t always happy with contributions. Which I think isn’t great because if you have an open source project along with a community, and then people try to engage but get disappointed because their day worth of coding is wasted and the PR denied… That isn’t going to foster a healthy community. I’m not sure if they’re working towards a different vision of the project, or manpower is that scarce. I mean they have 2 or 3 people working fulltime on Lemmy and they get paid a salary. I think we discussed that in the AMA. They definitely don’t get rich and pay isn’t what a big company would pay.

And there was something with the instance admins that needs improvement. I’m not sure what that was. Either image moderation or resource usage. (Or both.) Because admins need to abide by the law and pay attention to what’s uploaded (ideally without messing with the database manually) and I think they did some database performance improvements in the last few releases. I’m not sure. Rust should be fairly efficient. With databases you need to pay attention to what you’re doing. But I don’t know all the used frameworks. I’m just speculating here.

So… I really don’t have a link. I just occasionally read what people post here and want. And I sometimes follow the development.

And the fediverse as a whole… I don’t think ActivityPub is very efficient. The polling and simple design is compelling, but it’s not very performant. And it has some issues with caching etc. Also people want extensions and functionality that is well-defined and interoperable. But AP is just a well-defined core. And I think not even voting is part of that standard and just something people kind of agreed on. Which is problematic. Lots of normal stuff in Mastodon, Lemmy, etc isn’t really part of the standard. And I’m not sure if they release a new revision at some point. I think the current revision is a bit older as of now. I think we need that because the whole Fediverse is about interoperability.

Thanks for the link. I’ll have a look at that. Currently I use PieFed. Which as some way to go, but some gread ideas.

Concerning the All-feed: Using that to find new communities would be something I also do. But I heard people just use that instead of subscribing. And one or two people said they then just block all the communities they’re not interested in. I guess that works, too. I haven’t tried myself.

I think you got enough recommendations for several tunneling solutions.

Apart from that (and free DynDNS) you could also use a regular paid DNS provider. Some of them also offer DynDNS or an API. I think I saw some regular providers in the list of my DynDNS client on my router, next to the super cheap or free ones.

I don’t get that either. The “All” feed ist just a random pile of uninteresting stuff (to me). Lots of news of the day, memes that aren’t even funny… I think I would have left Lemmy a long time ago if that had been my experience. I subscribe to the things I want to read. But I took from a few conversations that some people like to browse the “All” feed. I still don’t get it.

I kinda lost hope that Lemmy will provide us with a new and different approach to this. The developers are kind of doing their thing. There have been suggestions and new ideas. But usually they don’t get implemented. Maybe they’re just not that progressive. And a few attempt I read about were really radical in re-defining social media. And people also don’t seem to like anarchy and freedom of speech over everything else because that just ends up being a place for trolls. I’d like to have something in the middle. And I think we’ve already learned a few things in the time Lemmy has been around.

Isn’t that like 60% of what creativity is? Art sometimes is about combining things in a new way. I mean it’s rare anyways that one genius comes up with an entirely new concept like scifi stories or pop art and invents that genre out of thin air. Most of the times also humans take something that already exists and build upon that. It’s not that far off here. And I doubt a human can draw a “rkbvrpoi” on a “wuqrkah” and not take inspiration from …anything.

I mean obviously there is something missing. Some human told it to draw that astronaut. So the whole artwork contains that original creativity that didn’t come from the AI. But I think it’s debatable wheter it could do it. This is only one specific example

Agree to disagree. If the internet was an empty space with only a few posts, I’d understand. But it’s filled with lots of stuff. And every shitty interaction I have, actively takes away time from my day. Time I could spend reading something nice and positive, actually interacting with people, learning something or doing something productive like maintaining my server or coding. I think it’s a waste. And worse than that, it also affects my mood and drives us further apart. And it’s not healthy. Every interaction defines the atmosphere of this place. Good and bad ones. The whole atmosphere becomes toxic if a certain amount of interaction is bad and people always have to expect that happening. I’ll certainly stop giving (good) advice if there is a 40% chance that I get yelled at. And I think we have to guide and steer to the correct destination and do that early. And there is precedent. We have had several attempts at re-defining social media. Once trolls and negativity dominate, the places usually die over the course of a few months or years.

Sure. SearX is a meta-search engine. It does (only) queries to other search engines to get results. YaCy on the other hand is itself a search engine. It has the data available and doesn’t do queries to other engines. In theory you could combine the two concepts. Have a software that does both. But that requires some clever thinking. The returned (Google) ranking only applies to the exact search term. And it’s questionable if you can store it and do anything useful with it except for when some other user searches for the exact same thing. And also the returned teaser texts are very short and tailored to the search query. So maybe also useless. It’d be hard.

One thing you could do is crawl the results that users actually click on. And I think YaCy already does that. AFAIK they had an browser add-on or a proxy or something to intercept visited pages (and hence search results).

That is misinformation. It doesn’t need anywhere close to that amount of RAM. It’s pretty much like other webapps and I used to run it on an old computer. It’ll fill up your harddisk, though. If you allow it to do that.

I’ve heard people saying that before. But it’s not true. You can ask an AI to draw you an astronaut on a horse and it’ll do it despite never having seen such picture. (Now it has.) Same applies to LLMs. They come up with an answer to your exact question. Not a similar one it saw on Reddit before. That answer might be wrong (which is my point) but if you try it, you’ll regularly find it tries answering your questions and not different ones.

I’ve also tried some scifi storywriting with AI and there it becomes quite obvious that it’s able to apply things it knows from different contexts and apply that to my setting. Like ethics questions, basic physics and what character can and cannot do. Rough knowledge about how stories are written. You can tell it to do a plot twist an an arbitrary point and it’ll do. All of that is knowledge about (abstract) concepts and the ability to apply it to different contexts. Which is an important part of creativity.

And I’ve read papers where the scientists try to look inside of AI and they are able to spot abstract concepts like what a cat is in the weights. It’s fascinating how it works. And it turns out it’s not just regurgitating it’s training data. Which isn’t surprising because a lot of effort has been put into the computer science behind it to make AI more than that. And it’s also why they’re useful in the first place.