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astronaut_sloth

@ astronaut_sloth @mander.xyz

Posts
4
Comments
171
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Happy Monday

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  • Oh God I feel this in my bones.

  • How would you design online communities so they don't degenerate over time?

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  • Honestly, this feels like trying to program ourselves out of a fundamentally social/human issue. I think that the best way to design a strong-lasting platform is to not over-complicate it. I would look to successful forums, those that are still running or ran for many years. How did they maintain their community?

    Ultimately, I suspect that the answer ultimately comes down to the growth curve. Slow and steady growth where new users get assimilated into the platform's culture is likely how this works.

    I think your logarithmic curve is an interesting idea, and if you do implement it, I'd be interested to see the results. However, I don't know if it will be enough to "maintain" a community. In fact, you may end up with the opposite problem if the algorithm is successful. You'll have a community that doesn't change where the oldest accounts rule.

  • Trump to claim declassified intel reveals 2020 election interference: MS NOW

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  • President Donald Trump plans to claim in a Thursday night speech that newly declassified intelligence reports reveal a foreign nation’s plans to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, two White House officials told MS NOW on Monday.

    No shit there were plans. Russia and China plan to interfere with every election the US has. The real question is if there is proof that they were successful.

    Just saying there are plans is meaningless, but Trump and his toadies will trumpet this like his election denialism is actually justified. Utter and complete clown show.

  • Anybody Who Thinks Orbital Data Centers are a Good Idea Is Suffering from AI Psychosis, Experts Argue

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  • My new supervisor, the day I met him, was talking about how space data centers are a great idea ("because it's so cold up there!") and will be amazing when they're online. That's the moment I realized he was breathtakingly stupid. He may not believe in thermodynamics, but thermodynamics believes in him.

    I guess I shouldn't have expected much given that he has a degree in finance and has worked in consulting for 10 years.

  • Pokémon Go data trained AI that could assist military drones in war zones

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  • EULAs are part of the reason I almost exclusively use FOSS or just spin my own software (if time permitting).

    The first time I encountered one was as a small child (like 5 or 6) when I was trying to install some game. The EULA came up, and I started reading it. Of course, I only understood a fraction of the legalese, but seeing some clauses that seemed to a child supremely unfair, caused me to hit "Do Not Agree." Who would agree to such non-sense without having a full understanding or seeing crazy stipulations? The window closed, and I couldn't understand why, so I asked my parents. They said that although you should read and understand any agreement, EULAs were different because if you don't agree, then you can't use the software.

    It's crazy to me that even as a kid, I could see how one-sided EULAs were. These companies aren't even hiding their malicious intent, and we as a society have just decided to go along with it. I'm part of the problem, too (much as I try not to be). There have certainly been times that I hit accept even knowing that the EULA was taking advantage of me in some way, but I needed to use the software.

    Anyway, there's not much of a point of writing all this. Companies' EULAs screw us over, and there is little we can really do about it, especially if the software is necessary in some way.

  • Pete Hegseth’s D-day speech on immigration condemned as ‘grotesque stupidity’

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  • The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been accused by historians and rights campaigners of “grotesque stupidity”

    I see they were being kind to him.

    I literally don't know a single veteran or service member who either respects him or even just likes him. Literally 100% across the board disdain. There's got to be at least a couple who have positive views of him in the DoD, but no one I've met or worked with...

  • the solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

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  • Please read the citations. I've found Claude (and a slightly lesser extend GPT) to be right more often than not, but the leading LLMs do get things wrong with enough frequency that it's worth checking.

    Also, to be clear, I'm not fervently anti-LLM, but I do know how it works (as much as anyone who has read the academic literature). "Thinking" is at best a misnomer and at worst a marketing term. It's just an ouroboros; the LLM more-or-less feeds its output back into itself to "check" it and "think." It works surprisingly well, but it's not actual thinking.

  • "I fall asleep each night with an old book in my hands."

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  • Something along these lines is why I've always loved Star Trek and didn't get into other shows/movies as much (like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, etc.), especially as a kid. The crew of the Enterprise were just regular people, albeit hyper-competent, but still just people at the end of the day. They would combine their diversity of skills and overcome crazy situations. There was no savior or chosen-one, just people with skills and their own interests. It feels achievable for anyone to be an officer on the Enterprise if they put in the effort to be there. Not everyone can be a Jedi or a super hero. That's not to say those other stories are bad, but I always felt that's what made Star Trek special, and Picard's humility, I think, really showcases it. It feels like he would say, "I'm just a guy doing a job."

  • A sauce NOT for warriors

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  • I'm glad I'm not the only one who has this thought when I use that sauce

  • Spending Just 10 Minutes With AI Can Fry Your Brain, Researchers Find

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  • THANK YOU! I studied AI in school, and it always bothers me when people think that LLMs are the only facet of AI. Between 2022-2024, I had a knee jerk reaction of explaining that AI is more than LLMs and that LLMs are really a small subset of the entire universe of AI, yadda yadda yadda. Now I've given up and roll my eyes as someone tries to tell me about the cool new Claude skill they built.

    What's funnier is people think I hate LLMs. That couldn't be further from the truth; they are a fantastically interesting and innovative technology! "Attention is All You Need" is a great paper, and super impactful. I just hate that people are outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot and neglect the rest of my field of study.

  • Dr Douchebag to med bay

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  • "The Host," which is also the first episode with the Trill.

  • Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They're the Bad Guys

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  • The job market in tech is not good right now, so they may not. I have a friend who is a dev and was getting heavily recruited by Palantir because he had a clearance already. The money was really good, and he was at the cusp of taking the job because he had been ghosted by other companies for months and only had a handful of interviews after being laid off six-ish months ago. Luckily, another place gave him an offer for a bit lower compensation, which he took. If that other place didn't come through, though, I think he would have gone with Palantir so that he could get some income.

    ETA: That said, Palantir is evil, and my friend was in that position because of the BS that is the US economic system, which is perpetuated by the people at Palantir.

  • Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators

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  • The “well rounded person” shit is only ever given as a justification for forcing STEM majors to pay for liberal arts courses. I’ve never seen it go the other way, and it should. For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.

    Absolutely! I say this as a Comp Sci major who loves the humanities (and almost studied History). General education should encompass introductions to both the STEM and humanities areas. It is equally frustrating when I can't walk through a 7th grade level algebraic function with someone with a Master's degree in International Relations and when I can't reference a fairly common part of mythology with a software engineer.

  • Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators

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  • I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s only a small percentage that are real degrees these day but it’s definitely lower than it should be.

    I agree. I think a lot of degrees are still real degrees, but the entire ecosystem has been degraded to the point that quality across the board has diminished. So, the most "rigorous" degrees now are equivalent to a run-of-the-mill degree a generation ago and so forth. Ultimately, the run-of-the-mill degrees of yesteryear are now just diploma mill degrees.

    I hate to say it, but a lot of it is e-learning and online degrees. It's a lot harder to engage with material, with a class, or with the professor themselves behind a screen hundreds of miles away. Even when you put everything into the work, it still just is not as engaging because you don't have the same dynamic because you can't just drop by your professor's office for office hours or get the same level of help or group learning. In undergrad, I used to help others in my classes, and vice-versa, while also going to office hours to clear up details. Online, if it's not impossible, it's at least orders of magnitude more difficult. So, the quality of learning drops a ton.

    If I go back for another Master's or a Doctorate, I will only do in person classes.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • I want to see the timeline where Sisko declares DS9 an independent state.

  • MAGA has been swooning over an Army soldier and her pro-Trump message. She is AI

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  • Of all the things in the photos that actually made sense. It's weird, though, and threw me for a loop when I first saw uniforms and such and had to ask back then.

    On uniforms, vehicles, etc. the flag is sometimes "backwards" so that the union (the blue and stars) are "forward facing." The idea is that the flag is flown from the left side in normal orientation, so the union is closest to the pole. If the person or vehicle were carrying a real flag, based on what side a person is observing, the flag may be "mirrored." In other words, the flag is moving with the person or vehicle and not the opposite way. You'll see that orientation a lot on American military and para-military uniforms.

    I never understood why we don't just put a normal oriented flag on the opposite shoulder for the same effect, but hey...America is weird.

  • MAGA has been swooning over an Army soldier and her pro-Trump message. She is AI

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  • Any MAGA who fell for this is beyond stupid (plus utterly unfamiliar with the military). Her uniform is wrong (skirt WAYYY too high). No one wears dress uniforms underway at sea in general, ESPECIALLY an enlisted soldier (who would likely be nowhere near a ship, even more especially in dress uniform). The ribbons on her dress uniform not only change from picture to picture, but are also the wrong size (sometimes) and not even actual US ribbons. I've never seen a regulation name tag say "US ARMY" and not a name. The undershirt in her camis isn't regulation. And this was just a quick look at the photos and only tangentially around the Army at work.

    Oh and that's before the visible glitches because it's AI. This is laughably low effort.

    EDIT: Damn, they didn't even use a real ship as the background. It's supposed to be a destroyer, and there are no US destroyers with an aft-facing bridge or part of the superstructure forward of the bridge windows. Just truly WTF

    EDIT 2.0: I just saw a couple other photos because I got curious. One has her as a one-star general 😂, and a couple others have her wearing a (shitty looking) Combat Infantry Badge, which is only awarded for being in combat. So, I guess women CAN hack it in combat! Hegseth must be in shambles.

  • French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle tracked via Strava activity in OPSEC failure

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  • There are a surprising amount of false positives when using object detection on maritime imagery. While a carrier is a spec, there are a ton of specs in the ocean that can look similar enough. Plus, weather has a huge hand to play. If it were always perfectly clear, then it's an easier problem, but one cloud can really mess up the detection. Ultimately, ship detection is a difficult problem (not intractable but still hard).

  • French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle tracked via Strava activity in OPSEC failure

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  • Sort of. Satellite resources are surprisingly scarce, so a lot are focused where people are, i.e. land. Plus, for the imagery sats that are focused on the ocean, ships are also tiny in a literal ocean of blue. It's just a spec. While the resolution could be good, have fun looking for that spec. That's why most countries use signal collection to locate vessels at sea. (I'm over-simplifying a lot, but you get the picture)

  • politics @lemmy.world
    astronaut_sloth @mander.xyz

    Hegseth Orders Rare, Urgent Meeting of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals

    www.washingtonpost.com /national-security/2025/09/25/hegseth-generals-quantico-meeting/
  • politics @lemmy.world
    astronaut_sloth @mander.xyz

    Air Force will stop teaching about Tuskegee Airmen

    archive.ph /ReYWZ
  • politics @lemmy.world
    astronaut_sloth @mander.xyz

    Hacker Is Said to Have Gained Access to File With Damaging Testimony About Gaetz

    www.nytimes.com /2024/11/19/us/politics/matt-gaetz-hack-testimony.html
  • politics @lemmy.world
    astronaut_sloth @mander.xyz

    The Truth Too Many Democrats Need to Hear

    www.rawstory.com /raw-investigates/too-many-in-democratic-leadership-are-reading-this-election-catastrophically-wrong/