A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.
I’ll watch her anyway. I mean it’s hard to convey anything about theoretical physics in 5min videos. And being mean and a contrarian is kind of part of the scientific method. You’ll come up with a hypothesis and then spend the next year trying to disprove it 😆 So it’s kind of fitting… I get what you’re saying, though. She’s special. And not always in a good way… She is funny, though. And also understands precisely how the Youtube attention game works…
Sabine Hossenfelder, Numberphile, Computerphile, Vinheteiro, bigclivedotcom, Map Men, Robert Miles, fern, …
Currently not looking too good… We have a pretty constant 1 million active users. Despite all the previous enshittification of mainstream social media. But yeah, that’s the spirit 👍
What’s the security model and permission system like? Can I run this as my regular user, or can this nuke my projects directory or pull random code from the internet and execute it like most of the other agents?
There will be a trace. First of all, the way the Fediverse it set up, the instances all cooperate from distributing posts and comments, to deleting them. There’s no guarantee every instance does it (correctly). And as the Fediverse is made up of different software, it also depends on the specific implementation.
And then we also have AI scrapers, the Wayback Machine and other internet archives. It’ll end up there as well.
So better treat everything as easily traceable which you post in public. And it’s notoriously difficult to really remove stuff from the internet anyway.
Plus the US has some absurdly large datacenters for surveillance. Idk if it’s clever to lie to them about your social media history. They certainly have the capacity to scrape posts and store them forever.
Yeah, a few years ago, most of that was Google Translate. To be fair it has some limited on-device features. All of this used to be proprietary technology, though.
Not sure if I need tools for business meetings, at least on a regular basis. We kind of all agreed to use either the local language or English as the universal language in software development. And people are expected to be somewhat fluent. And if you clients are abroad, you better hire a real translator at some point. Or you’ll end up like Microsoft with all the messed up translations in Windows 11. It’ll be handy at times, though. Or if you work on a construction site. And some other jobs.
I recently learned about the Offline Translator app. That’s awesome. Allows to translate text, documents and what’s in front of the phone camera. Completely on device and no external services needed.
I’m also a regular user of Mozilla Firefox Translate. Allows me to read news articles from other European countries, occasionally visit some Japanese websites…
They’re all massively helpful. I like talking to people. Listen to perspectives beyond the standard American one (or German in my case). Or go shopping in an Asian supermarket. Sometimes I’ll read a datasheet of some obscure electronics and it’s in Chinese. And I live in one of the more multicultural regions, so it wouldn’t hurt to be able to give directions in other languages. People get lost here all the times because the Deutsche Bahn sucks. And all I can do is speak German, English and 50 words of French. Which sometimes isn’t enough. So I’m all for more translation helpers.
Story writing is a bit difficult in my experience. I had more fun with older models like Mistral Nemo. I feel newer AI models are often way more tuned to fulfill the role as a “helpful assistant” / chatbot, which I think tends to make their style of writing worse. You could also try to use some of those “base models”. They’re not tuned in that way. They also won’t follow instructions, they’re more autocomplete. You’d provide them with something like a word problem, give the first few paragraphs and see where they take it.
And honestly, I don’t think AI is super clever, on a book-author level. It’ll always get the pacing wrong. Push for story tropes like sudden plot twists. Introduce random characters to make something happen. And brush over / summarize other parts which would be interesting to tell in detail.
What could help is an elaborate (strict) process. Something like the computer programming / coding agents do. Make it first come up with a story idea. Make a plan, a todo list of the framework story, side stories and arcs, devise chapter names and a short summary of what needs to happen in those chapters. Write short character cards. And only then feed that plan back to the AI and make it begin writing the actual text.
How about you have a look at some public instances, scroll through some content, watch a few videos and see which one you like better from a user perspective? I mean technically, they both work. Setup of an instance is just done once, and I guess uploading videos has about the same complexity… So it’s down to what interface you like, and where you’d find your audience.
Uh. I kinda dislike all these closed-source additional moderating systems flange-mounted to the Fediverse. I think in the long-term, we should come up with a good system with good effectiveness, plus (/despite of) transparency, and share it amongst the entire Fediverse.
The thing is, a link to a Wikipedia article isn’t structured data either. It could very well link to the article about The Little Mermaid. Or the List of fictional pirates. So in that regard, both approaches are about on the same level. The hashtag just cuts off the unnecessary “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…”
I’m afraid if the idea is something like that, it won’t allow users to search for content nearby. That’d require some coordinates to calculate distance. If it’s just names, it’s closer to the concept of hashtags. You could as well add #Melbourne in the text (on Mastodon for example). And people would then be able to click on #Melbourne or maybe subscribe to the hashtag once/if that feature is ready on Lemmy.
Really hard to tell. I mean there are situations in which people think they’re doing someone a favour. But they’re really not. Upside of doing it individually is: affected people get to pick the model they like best. And they can prompt it however they like. Depends a bit on your expertise on the matter if your pre-generated stuff is on the same level or more a disservice. Upside of pre-generating it once is: maybe a bit less CO2 in the atmosphere and a few less trees killed. But that certainly depends on how many people read those descriptions. If there’s just 2 people with screenreaders out there, who don’t even click on all the images, you might very well be wasting compute. And have a negative balance on the environment.
I’d ask someone who needs these transcriptions first. I tend more towards “Nay”. I mean if they want AI transcriptions, I guess they could just run their own AI. And that way they get to choose between human and AI ones. I’m kind of against flooding the internet with AI content as long as the recipients can do it themselves.
Uh sorry, is there a good way to tell RAM usage on a different phone with more RAM? I didn’t find any usage number in the settings. It’s a ~50MB app. So at leat they didn’t include as much bloat as other apps do… You can try it. It allows you do watch videos right away, without signing up.
There’s good and bad tools out there? Most free internet services that pop up on the first page of Google are in fact rubbish. But that doesn’t mean there’s good ones. I once tried tools for detecting AI text for a different reason and there were one or two who didn’t have any false positives with the 20-30 example texts I tried. Schools and universities have come to use the same tools. Seems they also look at how people are typing, that’s pretty much 100% accurate, but people do both.
There’s also crazy different approaches out there. Like looking at the probability distribution of the vocabulary and see if that matches ChatGPT. And it’ll be a certain unique probability distribution since that’s what ChatGPT is. It has to leave a fingerprint, since it’s picking the words based on probability. And there’s more good strategies. We have one or two open-source tools which demonstrate how it can be done without AI. There’s of course also the option to train another AI model / classifier to figure out what constitutes AI text and what isn’t. That also works.
And @cinoreus@lemmy.world : Another democracy idea I recently wrote down somewhere, was the idea of German clubs / organizations I’m familiar with. That can be anything from a few people do sports once a week, maybe your boy scouts, or KDE e.V. or the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V.
That’s a legal status. Comes with minimum standards. But I think one clever thing about it is how it tends to push democracy down to the members / people involved. Like: you have to come up with your individual statute, you’re responsible to appoint your management board. And your highest body is the general assembly. The people in power are more in a role to execute what the organization wants. Specifics are down to what the members like to implement.
And the authorities don’t care too much(?!). There’s standards on how clubs have to operate. Like your group needs to follow a purpose and write it down. Simple majority rule for regular decisions in the general assembly, 75% majority votes to change the statute. But you do it as a community, you do your statute, assemblies, subgroups and elections and then you get to identify with it. Government doesn’t hold your hands too much from my perspective. They’ll read the statue and care if it meets the requirements. And later on they’ll simply need to (occasionally) check whether your organization is up to their own statute. Especially once there’s complaints. (And Germans love to complain, so you can be sure there will be feedback once something remotely goes wrong.)
And in practice, you’ll get things like a regular general assembly. You can come as a member, listen to the board explain what they did, what issues they faced, what they spent your membership fee on… Maybe you’re in a position to vote on something or elect the next board. Or give your opinion on whether you’re alright with what your old board did. Sometimes you can send in ideas as a member and make people decide on it. And someone is going to write a summary so there’s accountability for third parties in case they’re interested.
My idea was to push people towards something more like a grassroots democracy. Maybe as an admin I don’t care too much with making exact rules that fit for every community. Maybe democracy should be done and be alive / lived by the involved people themselves. That’ll strengthen their group cohesion. And they need to live it anyway. Make them come up with an idea for a community along with goals and rules, the first board of moderators, signed by 7 people and off they go. After that you (as an admin) just check on them. See if they do general assemblies at regular intervals, if those meet your minimum democratic requirements. But other than that they get to live democracy and the community put in the work to make it happen. And what they have to do is send back some accountability to retain their status as a democratic entity.
(And depending on the minimum requirements set, this might even include an Athens style democracy, if a communitiy likes to come up with a statute like that.)
Hmmh. Maybe you’re right and I shouldn’t recommend her videos to a general audience… I feel there’s also some kind of cultural(?) difference buried here?! I like science, I listen to a bunch of other podcasts, mostly long-form content though. I think at the end of the day science is not about identity or belief, or even manners. It’s a method to build a model of reality, and concerned with factual truth… And I’m able to laugh about string theory not really being part of it unless they come up with a way to test it. Though, Angela Collier’s critizism how physics hasn’t done anything in 50 years isn’t what I (personally) got from the videos at all… But if some other people do… That’s very unfortunate. And I see how people make things like that part of their identity. I think it’s way more pronounced in places like the US. Less so where I live… So maybe I am a bit oblivious to the fact.