xq_icebreaker

To reference Stack Overflow moderator Machavity, AI chatbots are like parrots. ChatGPT, for example, doesn’t understand the responses it gives you; it simply associates a given prompt with information it has access to and regurgitates plausible-sounding sentences. It has no way to verify that the responses it’s providing you with are accurate. ChatGPT is not a writer, a programmer, a scientist, a physicist, or any other kind of expert our network of sites is dependent upon for high-value content. When prompted, it’s just stringing together words based upon the information it was trained with. It does not understand what it’s saying. That lack of understanding yields unverified information presented in a way that sounds smart or citations that may not support the claims, if the citations aren’t wholly fictitious. Furthermore, the ease with which a user can simply copy and paste an AI-generated response simply moves the metaphorical “parrot” from the chatbot to the user. They don’t really understand what they’ve just copied and presented as an answer to a question.

Content posted without innate domain understanding, but written in a “smart” way, is dangerous to the integrity of the Stack Exchange network’s goal: To be a repository of high-quality question and answer content.

AI-generated responses also represent a serious honesty issue. Submitting AI-generated content without attribution to the source of the content, as is common in such a scenario, is plagiarism. This makes AI-generated content eligible for deletion per the Stack Exchange Code of Conduct and rules on referencing. However, in order for moderators to act upon that, they must identify it as AI generated content, which the private AI generated content policy limits to extremely narrow circumstances which happen in only a very low percentage of AI generated content that is posted to the sites.

c/o https://social.coop/@[email protected]/110490440953441074

This person has nailed the hypocricy:

The enforcement of copyright law is really simple.

If you were a kid who used Napster in the early 2000s to download the latest album by The Offspring or Destiny's Child, because you couldn't afford the CD, then you need to go to court! And potentially face criminal sanctions or punitive damages to the RIAA for each song you download, because you're an evil pirate! You wouldn't steal a car! Creators must be paid!

If you created educational videos on YouTube in the 2010s, and featured a video or audio clip, then even if it's fair use, and even if it's used to make a legitimate point, you're getting demonetised. That's assuming your videos don't disappear or get shadow banned or your account isn't shut entirely. Oh, and good luck finding your way through YouTube's convoluted DMCA process! All creators are equal in deserving pay, but some are more equal than others!

And if you're a corporation with a market capitalisation of US$1.5 trillion (Google/Alphabet) or US$2.3 billion (Microsoft), then you can freely use everyone's intellectual property to train your generative AI bots. Suddenly creators don't deserve to be paid a cent.

Apparently, an individual downloading a single file is like stealing a car. But a trillion-dollar corporation stealing every car is just good business.

@[email protected] @technology #technology #tech #economics #copyright #ArtificialIntelligence #capitalism #IntellectualProperty @[email protected] #law #legal #economics

Writing is a skill and like any other skill the only way to get good at it is to practice. Blogging is ideal for this. Blogging is hardly ever long-form writing so writing posts is a good way to practice in bite-sized chunks. A side benefit of writing is that it’s a necessary component to being a good thinker and writing, as Paul Graham says [1b], is a precursor to thinking. Guo agrees with this and also notes that writing helps him clarify his thinking.

He gives several other reasons to blog including

• Sharing knowledge
• Learning things
• Learning how he’s wrong

[1b1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1639954042372730881 [1b2] https://nitter.net/paulg/status/1639954042372730881#m

This is a small curated list of servers to help new users joining Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. All the servers listed have public sign-ups open, have promised to obey certain standards of reliability and responsible moderation, and have opted in to being listed here.

a curated list of servers that comply with certain standards of moderation and reliability

c/o https://social.coop/@[email protected]/110327847898986508

Criteria:

p.s. Some differences between FediGarden and JoinMastodon:

-Servers with over 50k total users will not be listed

-Both Mastodon and non-Mastodon Fedi servers can be listed (though there are still only a few of these at the moment)

-Lists have an ever-changing randomised order and do not prioritise large servers or servers with immediate signups

-Forks are indicated too, if people want a Glitch or Hometown server for example

-Founding dates are shown

https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110327890887600075

What you're missing is the comforting certainty that there's Somebody In Charge. And that this Somebody cares about you, cares about the money they can make off of you, and certainly cares about the 'content' you're producing for them so that they can both mine you and others for precious, precious moneybucks and sell you to their advertisers.

Well, sorry to break it to you, but there are Many Someones In Charge and no one--not anyone--literally no one at all--can tell them all what to do.

Ever hear the expression about herding cats?

That's the decentralized anarchy at the heart of all of this, and what makes it work is communities talking with each other openly, and being able to disassociate from communities that do not suit them--or that might be actively destructive to them.

In many ways, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. The current renaissance in open source LLMs comes hot on the heels of a renaissance in image generation. The similarities are not lost on the community, with many calling this the “Stable Diffusion moment” for LLMs.

In both cases, low-cost public involvement was enabled by a vastly cheaper mechanism for fine tuning called low rank adaptation, or LoRA, combined with a significant breakthrough in scale (latent diffusion for image synthesis, Chinchilla for LLMs). In both cases, access to a sufficiently high-quality model kicked off a flurry of ideas and iteration from individuals and institutions around the world. In both cases, this quickly outpaced the large players.

These contributions were pivotal in the image generation space, setting Stable Diffusion on a different path from Dall-E. Having an open model led to product integrations, marketplaces, user interfaces, and innovations that didn’t happen for Dall-E.

The effect was palpable: rapid domination in terms of cultural impact vs the OpenAI solution, which became increasingly irrelevant. Whether the same thing will happen for LLMs remains to be seen, but the broad structural elements are the same.

Discussion thread for this topic found here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813322

Also, the AGPL isn’t something that commercial operations are afraid of. There are plenty of examples of industry using AGPL software.

The problem (problems, in reality, are actually just opportunities for solutions) is that scheming “software and appliance” companies wish to close source their products (whether they created them or not) under their proprietary brands. They can, and have, launched litigation against those infringing upon or co-opting their trade and service marks, even patents based on their own products - that sometimes was developed and sold without a single scrap of code authored by them. The only thing a permissive license requires is a Copyright notice, somewhere obscure.

“Ohh yeah, we did include a bit of some open source code” is all they gotta admit to when pressed - they never can be forced to divulge that they didn’t write diddly squat!

Maybe… Just maybe… It’s… Your code.

With respect to the patent, all they need to do is change one little thing about the process in which the existing software worked and patent that. Whole 'nother thing though and I’m not here to teach how to engage in patent trolling, like we did at IBM, lolz.

When they do add to that code, their code is under a completely arbitrarily determined proprietary license, locking down the entire product (written by someone else), as closed source under the terms of a license they decide upon - nothing at all remains of the permissively licensed product… Except that obscure little Copyright notice somewhere.

AGPL merely enforces that anything you add to an initially AGPL licensed work must be made available on demand by the people using your product…

Classic educational video.

Nice use of demonstrations and archive material.

We are going to need an Activity Pub 2.0 which fixes the major pain points in the eco system. It must be backward compatible with 1.x, but will introduce new, more scalable, extensible, interoperable ways of doing things for a larger federation and ecosystem. Systems using 1.x can signal it, and those using 2.0 should accept 1.x activities. Those using 2.x can run an upgraded protocol, and when signaling has reached a certain threshold, the old 1.x API can be sunset.

I think the first task on this track is to broadly outline the high level areas that need an upgrade, before drilling into the details. Split AP into its logical functions e.g. identity, payload, discovery, serializations (including parsing), namespacing, ontologies, authentication, signatures, c2s/s2s, large media types, version signalling, extensibility, authorization etc.

Different people will want to work on different things, so maybe the first step is to poll people to see what they want, what are the pain points, and then propose a new spec that gets most of it in.

I understand the reason for this - organization and coordination are difficult tasks. And the team responsible for resolving conflicts should not itself be a source of misunderstanding and conflict.

For this purpose #discord is a very useful, but flawed tool. And alternatives (e.g. #Matrix, #IRC, #Email and #Jitsi) have their own issues - some are just down to network effects, others actually lack features making them less useful for coordination.

https://social.coop/@[email protected]/110294521149402911

But one thing I do want to talk about is the recent idea, I saw probably during a discussion of @atomicpoet:

#Fediverse #autonomous #moderation - the idea that both moderation actions and the coordination of moderation teams should be completely run through the #Fediverse - thus removing a disconnect between #userspace and #moderatorspace on a technological level.

https://social.coop/@[email protected]/110294531671678800

The advantages to organizing #moderation on the fediverse include in my opinion:

• better #privacy, as even when using unencrypted DMs, as long as they stay on the instance being moderated, the instance retains #digitalsovereignty.
• better interactions between moderators and members. #Mastodon, especially, creates an illusion that only one person/account is the face of the instance. That this false for most instances, is a well-known fact. But this is not reflected by the #Mastodon software.

https://social.coop/@[email protected]/110294839498602666

Ive been using Trello for more than 5 years to collect my thoughts, excerpts, and notes to finally realize that I'm pretty locked in. It took me one weekend and some Python to create a workflow to migrate all my boards, including attachments to Obsidian … If you're stuck too, let me know via pm, and I'm glad to share my experiences …

#obsidian #trello #research

Just discovered Combobulate:

Combobulate takes the syntax tree created by tree-sitter and uses it to provide structured editing and movement. It can do it better than traditional, imperative or regexp-based approaches, because it has a perfect understanding of your code. That means there’s never any ambiguity as to whether { ... } is a statement block or an object in Javascript, for example.

https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/combobulate-structured-movement-editing-treesitter

https://github.com/mickeynp/combobulate

c/o https://social.coop/@[email protected]/109788552701305561

Im looking forward to Emacs 29 maturing so that I can utilise this functionality.

XTDB is a general purpose database with graph-oriented bitemporal indexes. Datalog, SQL & EQL queries are supported, and Java, HTTP & Clojure APIs are provided.

XTDB follows an unbundled architectural approach, which means that it is assembled from decoupled components through the use of an immutable log and document store at the core of its design. A range of storage options are available for embedded usage and cloud native scaling.

Bitemporal indexing of schemaless documents enables broad possibilities for creating layered extensions on top, such as to add additional transaction, query, and schema capabilities. In addition to SQL, XTDB supplies a Datalog query interface that can be used to express complex joins and recursive graph traversals.

https://github.com/xtdb/xtdb

https://www.xtdb.com/learn

Here is a problem with most open-source software projects have, including most #Fediverse software —

• there are no or very, very few: • UX researchers, • UI designers, • illustrators, • industrial researchers, • QA specialists, • project managers, • strategists.

This is bad!

If you want to produce 'good' software that people will want to and like using, you need these people!

Someone needs to do these roles!

Some software developers can also do some of these roles. And that is awesome. But most software developers cannot

I see this same problem with a lot of #Fediverse software, too

The thing is, I know there are people with these skills — UX researchers, UI designers, illustrators, industrial researchers, QA specialists, project managers, strategists — who want to get involved with #openSource projects.

But they don't know how.

Displaying information through maps has shaped how humans sense space and direction. Communicating effectively through maps is a challenge for many cartographers. For example, symbols, their color, and their relative size have an important role to play in the interaction between the map and the mapmaker.

The study of Geo-ontology also has interested researchers in this field. Geo-ontology involves the study of the variations among different cultures in how they view and sense landforms, how to communicate spatial knowledge with other cultures while overcoming such barriers, an understanding of the cognitive aspects of spatial relations, and how to represent them in computational models.[7] For example, there might be some geographic meaning that might not be well explained using words. There might be some differences in understanding when spatial information is explained verbally instead of non-verbal form.

c/o doopledi, in room Social Coding FSDL https://matrix.to/#/#socialcoding-foundations:matrix.org

This is galaxy-chat-server, a prototype of a chat system designed within an implementation of a standards-compliant Gemini server.

galaxy-chat-server is a fork of egalaxyd, a gemini/spartan file server https://sr.ht/~slondr/egalaxyd/

c/o https://social.coop/@[email protected]/110254055600009856

“AI goes around the internet and scrapes all of the lyrics but never provides any credits,” says Bryan-Kinns. “If an AI makes a song, gets famous, went to No 1, who would get money from them? Certainly not the people in the huge dataset of millions of songs. ...

Last summer, the [UK] government set out proposals to amend copyright laws that would allow AI creators to exploit musicians’ back catalogues without permission or compensation.

I like keeping track of things I do but I like doing it with as little overhead as possible. Hence I have years of food data tracking but that only really started being real when the ability to enter that data became so simple as to be effortless. The same is true for development on projects. I want to see how things evolved. When I look at something years later and think to myself, “What the hell was I thinking?” it’s nice to be able to look back at notes from that time. Likewise as I’m working on something and I have a thought pop in my head like, “We need to fix this later,” or, “Gee wouldn’t it be nice if this program did this thing,” it’d be nice to have a place to collect all of that and have it be something which doesn’t interrupt my train of thought. I’ve tried collecting that in issue trackers and the like but honestly I’ve never been able to keep up with that. Issue trackers that become the reservoir for things to do start having inefficient signal to noise ratios. Even when I thinned out old issues it often proved hard to find what I was looking for as well. Lastly it also disrupts the flow.

Carmack’s “.plan” file concept was an absolutely perfect solution to this problem. It’s a simple text file you have open and you put in short statements with a simple key that you can decipher instantly. It’s searchable so you can easily find stuff. It’s shareable so it doubles as providing status as well as a means of keeping track of your own thoughts. Lastly, everything about the project is in one place. I don’t have notes in one place, issues in another, feature ideas elsewhere, etc. While I liked Carmack’s idea I have tweaked it a bit for my own purposes.

The first tweak I have is that each project gets its own DevLog. I started off trying to have it in one big file but since I work on multiple projects it just didn’t scale well. Since these are text files there is no disadvantage to having them split out since search tools can just as easily traverse multiple text files in a directory as one big text file. In the rare cases where something I’m working on is related to both projects I make a footnote in the one about seeing something in the other or some other mechanism. It’s such an uncommon occurrence even on projects that have entanglements that I don’t worry about it.

===== References in text

https://bookshop.org/books/masters-of-doom-how-two-guys-created-an-empire-and-transformed-pop-culture-9780812972153/9780812972153

https://twitter.com/JohnCarmack

https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

Example GUI diagram making tool

Packages:

https://github.com/yukimochi/Activity-Relay

https://github.com/yukimochi/Activity-Relay/api

https://github.com/yukimochi/Activity-Relay/deliver

https://github.com/yukimochi/Activity-Relay/control

https://github.com/yukimochi/Activity-Relay/models

c/o https://social.coop/@[email protected]/110210693637375998

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

i hate to say it, especially as the person who started IRCv3 in the first place, but there is literally no world in which i would deploy a new project on IRC.

i can manage all moderation tasks on discord with terraform. that is something impossible to realize with IRC.

any project to take back mindshare from Discord has to frame their strategy from this perspective.

with Discord, or any other SaaS, you are dealing with a loss of software freedom, and that should be highlighted, but the solution is to provide a libre alternative that is competitive. IRC (and frankly Matrix) isn't that.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199185608729068

Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

this has always been the problem i was trying to solve. with atheme, with ircv3, with all of it. how do we provide community plumbing that is usable and scalable?

but IRC failed to evolve fast enough despite all of those efforts, because people didn't understand the real evolutionary threats.

the reality distortion field is a real threat to any free software project: it is very easy to become complacent, because the product is 70% of what is actually needed.

but as the world evolves, that 70% turns into 60% and then 50% and so on, while people resist the concept that product fit and focus are slipping.

everything is Fine™️ because everything is Free™️, and instead of focusing on the real threat (I have been saying that IRC would be eaten by proprietary services since the 2000s), people, thinking that everything is fine, actually, tend to focus on their little kingdoms rather than the big picture.

and so we slipped, and slipped, until eventually, IRC does 20% of what we want, and IRCv3 brings that to maybe 25%, and then when a rich charlatan buys the largest IRC network and ruins it, at least half the people still there who haven't left yet realize that, upon having their reality distortion field shattered, actually 25% of what is needed perhaps isn't the right thing, and they too move their projects to Discord or Slack.

this is a problem, and it needs to be fought, but any such fight needs to write IRC off as a loss and start over. this isn't about "how do we win over the 1990s chatroom user", it's about "how do we win over the 2023 discord user."

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199267432776043 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

like, seriously, you have no idea how frustrating it was to try to mold IRC into a competitive product. i tried for a decade. i even worked on this as a full-time SRE for a while (Ustream really needed UnrealIRCd to be rewritten).

we even had some wins, for a while: the decline of IRC's userbase was reversed and it even grew for a while.

but for the most part i had the pleasure of advocating that IRC developers do not do stupid shit, like add spying features (looking at you InspIRCd m_invisible.so).

at the ecosystem level, the strong desire of IRC developers to do stupid shit for short-term gains in users, outpaced the desire to promote the health of the ecosystem, and add new competitive features that end-users would care about.

this is because projects cared far more about admin mindshare than user mindshare, and basically shows how the whole IRC mentality is doomed to failure.

community infrastructure projects have to be community focused, not admin focused. Rob Levin (the founder of freenode) used to derisively refer to the people who didn't get this point as "traditional IRC users."

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199317380320492 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @[email protected]

incidentally, the fediverse is in a similar position, where it is threatened by the free software reality distortion field.

Mastodon isn't good enough for the long run. we laugh at BlueSky, but it is a legitimate threat, and it could very easily wind up eating the fediverse. all they have to do is make it more palatable to the mainstream.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/110199369743497066 Ariadne Conill 🐰 @ariadne EN

one last thing. the people who are suggesting FOSS chat alternatives to me.

you miss my point. you're offering me oranges when Discord has offered me an apple.

Discord is not "just a chat platform." I would describe it as an "integrated community management platform."

It combines chat with other forms of community media: forums, for example, and a rich suite of AV capabilities.

this is also a symptom of the free software reality distortion field: the alternatives suggested may be sufficient for some usecases, but that doesn't mean they cover the same niche as the product they are proposed as a replacement to.

it's the concision of experience that has allowed Discord to have such great success in their efforts to eat IRC's userbase.

Features:

• Lightweight, minimal dependencies
• Extensive support of ActivityPub operations, e.g. write public notes, follow users, be followed, reply to the notes of others, admire wonderful content (like or boost), write private messages...
• Multiuser
• Mastodon API support, so Mastodon-compatible apps can be used (work in progress)
• Simple but effective web interface
• Easily-accessed MUTE button to silence morons
• Tested interoperability with related software
• No database needed
• Totally JavaScript-free
• No cookies either
• Not much bullshit

c/o https://irreal.org/blog/?p=11279

James Dyer has a useful short post on indexing his init.el file. His scheme is simple. His init.el is broken into sections each of which starts with:

;;
;; -> Section-name
;;

Then he used occur to generate the actual index. Rather than call occur each time with the need to provide the regex, he wrote a 4-line function that does it for him. He doesn’t say whether he bound it to a key sequence but that, of course, is trivial.

...

cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/541248

cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/541247

The community browser offers the possibility to search centrally for Lemmy communities.

spoiler

There are still a few features planned...

source-code