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barsoap

@ barsoap @lemm.ee

Posts
9
Comments
743
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Well whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it

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  • If that's a steelman then it's definitely at forging temperature (which jet fuel btw can achieve easily), collapsing under its own weight.

    Try this: Is it consistent to believe that evolution is the means by which God created, and continues to create, creatures? Does "well evolution just happens" have more, less, or equally much of an argument for itself? Note: Blindly assuming naturalism instead of God's will doesn't count because neither of those are falsifiable.

    Thing is: There's more than one way to connect the data points into an overall theory. Those theories try to explain the data points by starting from made-up axioms, and naturalism is just as much made-up as the Spaghetti monster. Unless you want to posit some kind of Platonism?

  • Well whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it

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  • Psi research is a fascinating field, responsible for lots of improvements in study design, metastudy statistics and criteria, whatnot.

    Like, it is hard to control your experiment so that you don't accidentally measure side channels as telepathy or whatnot. Or subjects having hit rates because they have the same cognitive bias as experimenters selecting cards "at random". The list is endless.

    Sceptic: "Your study has these and these flaws". Psi researcher: "We're using state of the art experimental design, accepted in every other field, and are open to suggestions". Sceptic "...damnit". I guess at least half of Psi researchers are consciously trolling for the heck of it, the bulk of the rest is dabblers, full-on crackpots are actually a rarity. Crackpots don't tend to have the wherewithal to get their stuff into a form that's even remotely publishable.

  • Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated article summaries to Wikipedia

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  • It really depends on what you're looking at. The history section of some random town? Absolutely bog-standard prose. I'm probably missing lots of implications as I'm no historian but at least I understand what's going on. The article on asymmetric relations? Good luck getting your mathematical literacy from wikipedia all the maths articles require you to already have it, and that's one of the easier ones. It's a fucking trivial concept, it has a glaringly obvious example... which is mentioned, even as first example, but by that time most people's eyes have glazed over. "Asymmetric relations are a generalisation of the idea that if a < b, then it is necessarily false that a > b: If it is true that Bob is taller than Tom, then it is false that Tom is taller than Bob." Put that in the header.

    Or let's take Big O notation. Short overview, formal definition, examples... not practical, but theoretical, then infinitesimal asymptotics, which is deep into the weeds. You know what that article actually needs? After the short overview, have an intuitive/hand-wavy definition, then two well explained "find an entry in a telephone book", examples, two different algorithms: O(n) (naive) and O(log n) (divide and conquer), to demonstrate the kind of differences the notation is supposed to highlight. Then, with the basics out of the way, one to demonstrate that the notation doesn't care about multiplicative factors, what it (deliberately) sweeps under the rug. Short blurb about why that's warranted in practice. Then, directly afterwards, the "orders of common functions" table but make sure to have examples that people actually might be acquainted with. Then talk about amortisation, and how you don't always use hash tables "because they're O(1) and trees are not". Then get into the formal stuff, that is, the current article.

    And, no, LLMs will be of absolutely no help doing that. What wikipedia needs is a didactics task force giving specialist editors a slap on the wrist because xkcd 2501.

  • Nothing helps

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  • Best guess: "out for delivery" means "loaded into the van". Especially if the projected delivery time is rather late, that is, you're at the tail end of their round, it can happen that they won't make it. And because FedEx isn't being smart about things and flips route directions every day it can be that they won't make it the next day, either, because you're still at the end of the route. Only when your location is covered by another driver which doesn't have you towards the very end then is the package delivered.

    There's various ways to alleviate that, in particular switching around routes so the tail end problem doesn't hit the same people all the time, but I guess the penny-pincher MBAs that be at FedEx don't see it contributing to the quarterly results. Here in Germany it's usually along the lines of "we're fucking busy, sucks to be you, we brought it to a parcel pick up, go there, next delivery attempt in three days, then it's going to stay at the pickup until you pick it up or we send it back. Did you know that you can register with parcel pickup and have all your packages sent there also it's self-serve. Please, it's right next to the supermarket our backs hurt. Do something for the environment, :)!".

  • Pro-AI Subreddit Bans 'Uptick' of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions

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  • I feel bad for the schizos.

    Don't. We're not the ones affected here and definitely, definitely, don't have a monopoly on psychosis.

    Personally, I'm completely unimpressed by the random nonsense LLMs spit out because it's not my nonsense. There's certainly people way deeper down the rabbit hole than me but they, too, have an infinite stream of as-of-yet-uninterpreted subconscious stuff knocking at their door so I don't see why they would bother. And that's all before paranoia kicks in and it's the FBI trying to control you via the chat interface.

    Feel bad for your capacity to relate to others, instead. Cuddle it, give it space, stop defining it. I don't ever want to hear that "type of girl I'm interested in" talk ever again, do you hear me, you, you little ego, don't get a say in that, that's for another part of you to decide. Stop telling it what to do.

  • Pro-AI Subreddit Bans 'Uptick' of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions

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  • The issue is not lack of logic and consistency, the trouble is a completely different reference frame.

    Let me put it, to grossly simplify, in this way: Imagine you'd be dreaming while awake, no way to stop it, and would have to integrate all that craziness in real time. It's not that dreams make no sense -- they all have their rhyme and reason -- it's that they're talking a completely different language.

    You might be hearing, out of nowhere, a cello note off to the side, move your gaze there, notice "that's my trashcan that makes no sense", and then be lost, and panic, lose faith in your senses, and that way lies psychosis. More productively, you say "ok mind which thought with as of yet unformed discernible meaning was it that you wanted me to pay attention to", look for the place the thought came from (as schizo, you can tell with your kinaesthetic sense), consider it for a while, still being oblivious of the meaning, and then go on with your life.

    We're weird.

    Oh, back to randomness: It can get you out of a rut and I do suppose that's how Terry used it, aware of it or not, and framing it however he did. Could also be using it to self-soothe, as in, distracting from a negative spiral. There's worse habits.

    God, with almost 100% certainty, means "the genome and how it's speaking to me through my instincts" in his dialect. Because that's what it always means, what it always meant, for everyone, it meant that when it was the ancestors, it meant that when it became more detailed and became gods, it meant that when people realised all the gods are actually one thing, the theologists are just confused AF because politics and physics and cabbage-heads got into the mix. And so much for my schizo rant. Don't discount what I say because I'm crazy, the reason you consider me crazy is because it's true.

  • public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)

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  • I mean... my condolences and/or yay you get to be a honorary machinist?

  • Microsoft Gives European Union Users More Control: Uninstall Edge, Store, and Say Goodbye to Bing Prompts

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  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    The FSFE has an overview over the various terms but tldr FLOSS is the one that has the least amount of agitated neckbeards breathing down your neck because it a) includes both free software and open source and b) includes the "L" that clarifies that what's meant is free as in speech, not free as in beer.

    ...and I guess it's about software hygiene?

  • Microsoft Gives European Union Users More Control: Uninstall Edge, Store, and Say Goodbye to Bing Prompts

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  • The EU is pumping a lot of money into FLOSS, often not even for administrative use (like, say, lemmy gets EU funding), but at far as adoption rate in administration is concerned well the Commission is one of the worst offenders. As in municipalities realising they can't fully switch to LibreOffice because they need to apply for EU funds and the commission only accepts .docx. Parliament happily spending money on something and the executive getting around to getting its shit together are two different things.

    OTOH it's not all about Microsoft and the like, a lot of administrative software is special-purpose, written by private companies according to specs, paid for by public money. Making that kind of thing open source is a no-brainer. It's also a way better use of money to improve and customise some open source ERP than to go to SAP and get a customised solution there.

    And a lot of that has to do with lacking competency in administration -- outside of police, specifically IT forensics, it's usually quite dire. States have no issues figuring out whether a blueprint makes sense when they're issuing building permits, road and railroad engineering, of course they can do that, but IT? Nope. Bring in the private consultants and private consultants are basically the marketing arm of big software companies.

  • Prompt Engineer

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  • Yep exactly that. A fascinating side-effect is that models become better at logic when you tell them to talk like a Vulkan.

  • public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)

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  • Modulo everything, you need to have been a resident for at least five years to have any chance of getting security clearance. Also it would be "not a shredlet".

  • public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)

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  • Those boxes will be unicorns no matter what, though, also, they're not necessarily part of the general IT infrastructure. Someone in catastrophe defence might be running fluid simulations using some god awful expensive windows-only software but chances are they can manage their own box, and if not, the ministry will still have IT staff who can deal with that kind of thing.

  • public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)

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  • Blender got ported to Linux in 1998, to Windows in 1999. The modal interface and key command language is no accident, it literally is a 3d vi.

    Linux is generally strong when it comes to 3d graphics workstations, it inherited IRIX' market share, plenty of artists around, especially in the film industry, who'd go on a strike if you took away dragging windows with alt+LMB. Graphics, that is, CAD is dominated by Windows as CAD started out as 2d sketch software which ran on cheap DOS machines.

    Houdini is also Unix-native and Blender's only surviving competitor (considered by features, not industry inertia), Maya started out as cross-platform IRIX+Windows.

  • public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)

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  • public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)

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  • Dataport is kinda hit and miss when it comes to developing. It was created by taking the small IT departments of different ministries, agencies, etc, of multiple states, and putting them all under a common roof. They did that because they realised that standard state administration structures and IT weren't really compatible but on the flipside, they also funded a whole new organisation with people accustomed to those very structures, and as dataport is still a public law corporation the internal administration -- think payroll and everything -- will still be done by career state bureaucrats.

    It's a different kind of dysfunction than you see in the private sector but dysfunction nonetheless. OTOH working directly with FLOSS upstream will help: It's not that (sufficiently large) FLOSS projects don't have their own bureaucracy, and the bureaucrats that be on dataport's side will respect that.

    Regarding maintenance: Aside from hardware upgrades because they make sense (power consumption) or you want new features (latest addition: Graphics tablets to allow citizens to sign stuff without having to print things), there's a constant churn in software requirements as new orders come in on what to do and how to do it. Just because you wrote perfect software doesn't mean that parliament stops passing laws.

    As far as usability is concerned: Dataport will also have to train people, and they actually have the funds to do usability studies and such. Much will also depend on the different agencies they're working for, can't fix an agency's workflows for them, and that goes beyond mere IT. I guess a public-law consultancy does make sense but having a ministry for administrative affairs reeks of Sir Humphrey. I guess you could hide it by making it a subsidiary of the court of auditors.

  • public services of an entire german state switches from Microsoft to open source (Libreoffice, Linux, Nextcloud, Thunderbird)

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  • No idea where that number is from but at the start it's just going to be getting rid of MS Office and Exchange, switch to FLOSS telephony, not getting rid of Windows. Licensing costs for 30k seats are certainly higher but you have to offset that with not getting any support from MS any more. Dataport will need a couple of in-house developers to resolve issues and work with upstream. Actual development, not tier 1 support and translating administrative instructions into templates.

    Also for the state it's not really about the money, but sovereignty. 188k are also peanuts in 18bn worth of state budget, that's yearly maintenance for what 30km of state roads. Given that we currently don't have any potholes we can afford it.

    As to brainrot: Not really applicable. These are managed workplaces and not much will change on the end-user side.

  • A fake Facebook event disguised as a math problem has been one of its top posts for 6 months

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  • A fake Facebook event disguised as a math problem has been one of its top posts for 6 months

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  • I never understood how people couldn’t understand basic PEMDAS/BEDMAS/Whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it.

    There's no "whatever-the-fuck-your-country-calls-it", the US is the only country using it, and only up to high school. At least I'm not seeing any papers coming out of the US relying on it so at some point they're dropping it and do what everyone else is doing: Write equations such that you don't need a left-to-right rule to disambiguate things. Also, using multiplication by juxtaposition (2x + 4x2).

  • A fake Facebook event disguised as a math problem has been one of its top posts for 6 months

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  • It’s ambiguous which one of these is correct. Hence the best method we have for “correct” is left to right.

    The solution accepted anywhere but in the US school system range from "Bloody use parenthesis, then" over "Why is there more than one division in this formula why didn't you re-arrange everything to be less confusing" to "50 Hertz, in base units, are 50s-1".

    More practically speaking: Ultimately, you'll want to do algebra with these things. If you rely on "left to right" type of precedence rules re-arranging formulas becomes way harder because now you have to contend with that kind of implicit constraint. It makes everything harder for no reason whatsoever so no actual mathematician, or other people using maths in earnest, use that kind of notation.