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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I’ve been driving for about a decade and a half now, including a few years here and there working jobs with a lot of wheel time. Either pizza delivery or cable technician or driving around a box truck.

    I have never gotten as much as a speeding ticket. I typically don’t speed more than 5~10 mph over the limit. If it’s a 35 or 40 in a city area though I will typically stay the speed limit. Sometimes I go a little ham on country roads in the middle of nowhere. I drove through central Florida once at like 4am and I peaked at like 120mph because I hadn’t seen another car for at least an hour.

    I think it probably depends on your jurisdiction, but nobody really respects the laws. On the interstate near my house, the speed limit is 65 but it might as well be 80. Cops will pass you and people will pass the cops and nobody cares.

    I think the speeding laws are just to give the cops a reason to pull you over if they want you - OR a way to get people that are really being crazy. For example if you’re going 110 in a 65 you deserve to get pulled over and given a ticket or worse, depending on context.




  • but it’s not really viable for the internet as a whole right? Hoping for some spare change from a tiny fraction of your visitors

    Why not? It works for kbin/lemmy instances. It works for Wikipedia. It works for Lichess.

    Sure, some things like video hosting are going to require a lot more bandwidth / server storage so perhaps those need to be subscription based but I think large swathes of the internet could be turned into a donation/subscription model. it just isn’t done that way because it’s less profitable.

    look at which video games are the most profitable - it’s always the free ones. fortnite, league of legends, etc.


  • The reason is that the web browser chatgpt has a maximum amount of data per request. This is so they can minimize cost at scale. So for example you ask a question and tell it not to include a word. What will happen is your questions gets sent like this

    {‘context’: ‘user asking question’, ‘message’: {user question here} }

    then it gives you a response and you ask it another question. typically if it’s a small question the context is saved from one message to another.

    {‘context’: ‘user asking question - {previous message}’, ‘message’: {new message here} }

    so it literally just copies the previous message until it reaches the maximum token length

    however there’s a maximum # of words that can be in the context + message combined. therefore the context is limited. after a certain amount of words input into chatgpt, it will start dropping things. it does this with a method to try and find out what is the “most important words” but this is inherently lossy. it’s like a jpeg- it gets blurry in order to save data.

    so for example if you asked “please name the best fruit to eat, not including apple” and then maybe on the third or fourth question the “context” in the request becomes

    ‘context’: ‘user asking question - user wanted to know best fruit’

    it would cut off the “not including apple bit” in order to save space

    but here’s the thing - that exists in order to save space and processing power. it’s necessary at a large scale because millions of people could be talking to chatgpt and it couldn’t handle all that.

    BUT if chatgpt wanted some sort of internal request that had no token limit, then everything would be saved. it would turn from a lossy jpeg into a png file. chatgpt would have infinite context.

    this is why i think for someone who wants to keep context (ive been trying to develop specific applications which context is necessary) then chatgpt api just isn’t worth it.


  • very short term memory span so have longer conversations as in more messages

    Really, this is a function of practicality and not really one of capability. If someone were to give an LLM more context it would be able to hold very long conversations. It’s just that it’s very expensive to do so on any large scale - so for example OpenAI’s API gives a maximum token length to requests.

    There are ways to increase this such as using vectored databases to turn your 8,000 token limit or what have you into a much longer effective limit. And this is how you preserve context.

    When you talk to ChatGPT in the web browser, it’s basically sending a call to its own API and re-sending the last few messages (or what it thinks is most important in the last few messages) but that’s inherently lossy. After enough messages, context gets lost.

    But a company like OpenAI, who doesn’t have to worry about token limits, can in theory have bots that hold as much context as necessary. So while your advice is good in a practical sense - most chatbots you run into will likely have those limits because of financial reasons… it is in theory possible to have a chatbot that doesn’t have these limits and therefore this strategy would not work.


  • Users don’t use adblockers because they don’t want to see ads at all; they they use adblockers because getting a usable web experience requires it.

    Users don’t block advertisements; they block annoying advertisements. They block trackers. They block malware. They block privacy invasion.

    I block advertisements because I don’t want to see any advertisements. They are poison for the mind and I want to eliminate any form of advertisement I can control. Obviously you can’t avoid a lot of it - but I can definitely avoid it in my web browser.

    I would prefer a subscription based model or a donation based model. For example Wikipedia or Lichess I’ve donated to because I believe they provide a good service and show no ads. Or for example Kagi which is a search engine that charges a monthly fee.



  • Nobody ever directly engages the devs on the articles that created this whole affair. They simply accuse them of some vague “human rights denial” “genocide-supporters” “tankie” without any real substance. Go ahead and search out the articles. I read through some of them.

    Yes, they are leftist essays. The devs didn’t write them, they just compiled them together. I skimmed through a couple and read the titles of the rest. Some of them deal with topics such as Maoist China and the number of deaths from the Cultural Revolution. The article puts together an argument, with cited sources, that the common death figures are overblown.

    Maybe the author is wrong, I don’t know. I’m not an expert in this field nor do I have the energy to do as much research as I’d need to feel comfortable leaning one way or the other. But from reading the article, at no point does the author condone genocide.

    Is this what we’ve come to? Someone can’t post an article challenging one small piece of the narrative without all of a sudden being totally disavowed? I think it’s absurd. Wrong or right, people should be allowed to discuss and share reasoned analysis.


  • it really depends on what

    padding the years of experience for a specific skill from 4 to 7… not really a big deal in my opinion. someone’s 4 years could be more valuable than another’s 7

    if you’re making up whole degrees or careers… then it becomes impractical because you’ll have to walk the walk. if you’re frank abagnale, maybe you can do it. for us regular folk it’d be hard to convince someone who knows what they’re doing that you know what you’re doing when you actually don’t



  • This is a decentralized platform meant to be a social media system without the corporate power inherent to all the others. The developers of Lemmy for example have essays on Maoist China being hosted on their Github.

    By its very nature, it’s going to attract people who are trying to get away from corporate influence. It’s essentially why I’m here and not on reddit. I don’t want a company profiting off of my content.

    There’s space for pro-capitalists as well though. I believe in the open market of ideas - listen to what people have to say and share your bit. Engage genuinely and you’ll learn something and maybe teach someone else something.





  • I agree in certain circumstances. For example a file manager I don’t understand why people use in a terminal. When I need to do like batch deletions or something I can easily just write a couple terminal commands. Everything else I just use the default file manager. Either Finder on MacOS or the Gnome one on Linux.

    But stuff like vim, a terminal text editor, is simply more fluid and enjoyable than a GUI program. I’ve tried using vim plugins for various different GUI text editors like Sublime or VS Code but there’s nothing like a personalized vim install. It takes a little bit to get used to the commands, but once you do it’s like riding a bike. You just feel faster and muscle memory takes care of the rest. You don’t actively think about it

    same thing with for example package managers. it’s faster to just press my hotkey to open up terminal, type in “sudo dnf install <whatever>” and it’s installed. why do we need a GUI here? it doesn’t make anything faster. In fact, it just gets in the way.

    so some things GUIs don’t actually improve. Some they do. It’s a per case thing I think


  • I think it has the tendency to create a snowball effect. You see a comment with -50 points you are already subconsciously looking at it trying to analyze why everyone hates it. It essentially primes you into disagreeing with it. Sometimes it’s obvious in the case of a troll or someone saying hate speech or something but other times it’s someone sharing a genuine opinion that’s relevant to the discussion but the snowball effect of the first few people downvoting it causes it to spiral downwards.

    By itself it isn’t a bad thing but when comments are ranked based on votes or downvoted comments past a certain threshold are hidden, it contributes to creating echo chambers.

    Personally, I think it’s like that Churchill quote. Democracy is trash and has a lot of problems. But still, it’s the best thing we’ve come up with so far. It’s got its issues but the transparent nature definitely helps if someone is consciously trying to read things with an open mind.



  • tikitaki@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlDistro suggestions?
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    1 year ago

    Fedora. I’d avoid Ubuntu and its derivatives like Pop! or Arch derivatives. I think Arch is fine, especially if you know what you’re doing, but Arch derivatives in my experience are much less stable than for example Ubuntu or Fedora.

    But seriously. Fedora. It’s the best. Ubuntu is actually fine too but Blue > Orange


  • The point wasn’t the rare coal town but the perception that pervades the rural areas of this country. It doesn’t have to be coal towns - there are similar stories for all smallish cities across the Rust Belt for example. You’re focusing on a specific when really the point is that fascism grows only in poor economic situations.

    These people are legitimately suffering and they are turning to hate as a response. Trust me, you or me could have easily been in their shoes had we been in their position. But just like they have been swayed to hate, I think it’s possible to sway them to socialism as long as you call it something other than socialism.

    Zizek has talked about this before where Trump supporters in 2016 were a hair’s breadth away from being Bernie supporters. While a bit of a dramatic statement, there is some truth in this. When the economic situation is unstable, radicalism grows in both directions - left and right. Which is why around the same time period we saw an openly socialist candidate for president in the US receive about 6% of the general vote - while we also saw massive Nazi rallies in New York City.

    Everything is connected. We are fighting for the hearts and minds of the same people.