• 2 Posts
  • 57 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • Are you high? 🤣 Jokes aside, I would be interested to know why you are asking these questions.

    1. Yes, I am intelligent, a lot of people have been impressed by the speed I digest a new piece of information.
    2. I have wisdom to know that intelligence plays a very insignificant part in shaping my identity. As for putting my intelligence into good use, I am not sure I can answer yes. I am too idealistic for my own good.
    3. IMO humans are unique and similar at the same time. Though, we got to be careful when trying to identify our similarities (see biopolitics, especially M. Foucault).

  • I know you are asking for something different, but since there are already a few good answers, allow me to instead to reject the premise and give you a different.

    It’s not impossible to implement an AI solution within the context your provided. The problem is that it’s going to be expensive. However, you can offer to deliver something smaller, focus on the smallest but valuable contribution you can make. While cleaning up the data is still going to be a hell of task, if the scope is small enough it can be achievable. Then, you can communicate the difficulty to scale due to data issues which can help management undestand the importance of prioritizing data quality.

    If you have a bunch of sales data, maybe you can focus on deriving purchase patterns and build a simple recommendations engine. If you want to focus on marketing, you could try lead classification. Ideas depend on the domain of the company you work for.



  • I can provide some context from Greece.

    First of all, the unemployment rate is high. The official figure is currently at 12.5% but has been steadily decreasing from its peak of 27.7% in 2013. The real numbers are probably higher since people that haven’t been employed within the last few years are not accounted.

    As a result, labour rights are non-existent, overtime is rarely paid, wages have been stagnant since 2008, it is really common to work in unsafe conditions, and worker abuse occurs so often noone bats an eye.

    While we do have unions more often than not they are powerless. For example, last year we had a major train accident (57 people died), the goverment blamed the train workers, their response was pretty much “our strikes for the safety issues that lead to the accident were deemed illegal, while our attempts to raise the issues were dismissed by the ministry of transportation”.

    We have had major nationwide protests with more than a million of people taking to the streets, but noone feels like that ever lead to anywhere.

    IMO one of the greatest problems is the lack of information. Mainstream media are corrupt, and independent media are sabotaged or persecuted by the government. People do not know their rights, we have been trying to survive for so long that we cannot imagine a better future, and that allows employers to freely profit from laborers.

    One interesting development is that lately more collectives are popping here and there, from coffee shops to softwafe development houses, more and more people are fed up and try to take matters on their own hands (even if in absolute numbers they are still very few).


  • IMO it’s not about what metric is used, but how it is used. The current approach, completely avoiding any karma like mechanism, solves the farming issue, but IMO does not cater to the needs of every user.

    For example, I have ADHD and if accumulating karma gives me much needed motivation and feel good chemicals, I am going to take them.

    At the same time, holding a user to a higher regard because of their karma is stupid, it’s better to build real connections with usernames you recognise through continuous communication.

    Personally, karma was an easily digestable piece of information about how my outreach into the social media is performing. Accumulating karma helps me feel connected with the community, feel accepted.



  • Dopamine received, initiating hyperfocus protocol!

    As a rule of thumb, we’ve observed that a team of 5 trained moderators appears to provide ample coverage and redundancy for servers of about 1,000 active users

    That’s a fascinating bit of information. I would expect 5 moderators to provide coverage for more users. I am wondering how they came up with that statistic (will update the comment if I find an answer).

    Remember that offliine/IRL community management experience can be just as important as online experience

    Interesting idea, wondering what’s the IRL presence of the fediverse…

    If you’re building toward participatory or democratic governance, consider establishing a proposal and voting system (some teams we spoke with use Loomio, but multiple options exist) for major policy decisions.

    That’s soooo important, I love when communities create polls to decide on policy changes.

    Avoid promoting brand-new members unless you already have a pre-existing relationship with them

    I have followed some discussion on multi-level hierarchies on the fediverse, wondering if there are any instance implementing that…

    Consider charging for accounts or offering paid memberships.

    Hell no!

    We hope there will be more resources available in the future, particularly tooling around legal compliance. This is one of the big infrastructural gaps we point out in our main report

    That’s a big issue, I would be interested in hosting an instance available to other people, but I don’t want to end up in jail and I lack the resources to make sure that won’t happen…

    That was an interesting read, it seems there is an in-depth analysis of the report here.




  • While the consumption for AI train can be large, there are arguments to be made for its net effect in the long run.

    The article’s last section gives a few examples that are interesting to me from an environmental perspective. Using smaller problem-specific models can have a large effect in reducing AI emissions, since their relation to model size is not linear. AI assistance can indeed increase worker productivity, which does not necessarily decrease emissions but we have to keep in mind that our bodies are pretty inefficient meat bags. Last but not least, AI literacy can lead to better legislation and regulation.








  • It depends on the field you are studying. I was into CS, using Linux was recommended because the machines they used to test our code were also running linux.

    Most fields are going to be okay with linux, the only exception being fields that rely on specialized software like architects, engineers, and audio/video editing. Also, some software like MatLab are possible to run on Linux but it’s a pain to set them up.