Newtra

@Newtra@pawb.social

They/Them, agender-leaning scalie.

ADHD software developer with far too many hobbies/trades: AI, gamedev, webdev, programming language design, audio/video/data compression, software 3D, mass spectrometry, genomics.

Learning German (B2), Chinese (HSK 3-4ish), French (A2).

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Newtra,

Wow, I just scrolled through the front page and it was 100% depressing/anxiety-inducing news.

I don’t think I want this in my life.

Newtra,

I had no idea Omeleto existed. Looks like I’ve got a few weekends of watching their vids ahead of me!

Newtra,

Good to see them learning LaTeX young. It’s one of those life skills that no one should need, but everybody does need at some point

Newtra,

Why do I find “match-3” most offensive part of that thought?

Newtra, (edited )

Note: For this guide, we’ll focus on functions that operate on the scalar preactivations at each neuron individually.

Very frustrating to see this, as large models have shown that scalar activation functions make only a tiny impact when your model is wide enough.

arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202v1 shows GLU-based activation functions (2 inputs->1 output) almost universally beat their equivalent scalar functions. IMO there needs to be more work around these kinds of multi-input constructions, as there are much bigger potential gains.

E.g. even for cases where the network only needs static routing (tabular data), transformers sometimes perform magically better than MLPs. This suggests there’s something special about self-attention as an “activation function”. If that magic can be extracted and made sub-quadratic, it could be a paradigm shift in NN design.

Newtra,

Btw, there’s a deep annual survey at www.gendercensus.com . It’s not specifically about this community, and excludes purely cis-binary people, but has interesting data & trends if you’re into this sort of thing.

Newtra, (edited )

You’re right. Everything is suspiciously wordy, substance is sparse, and every headline is clickbaity. It’s like they tuned the content specifically for google, not human readers…

EDIT: Because my comment was also lacking substance: e.g. the Steam Deck review in “30 Best Retro Handhelds Of 2024 [All Reviewed]” says “Yes it’s big, and the battery life… pretty terrible”, then gives no further information about size or battery life, which seems extremely relevant to potential buyers. They wrote 8 paragraphs and shared only 3 shallow facts.

Newtra,

“zero commercial prospects”? That sounds exactly like the sort of movie I’d pay money for!

Newtra,

Google also is responsible for the SEO industry. They made ads hugely profitable, then started directing traffic to sites that serve more of their ads, regardless of quality.

Newtra,

I’d say it’s more like they’re failing upwards. It’s certainly good for AMD, but it seems like it happened in spite of their involvement, not because of it:

For reasons unknown to me, AMD decided this year to discontinue funding the effort and not release it as any software product. But the good news was that there was a clause in case of this eventuality: Janik could open-source the work if/when the contract ended.

AMD didn’t want this advertised or released, and even canned this project despite it reaching better performance than the OpenCL alternative. I really don’t get their thought process. It’s surreal. Do they not want to support AI? Do they not like selling GPUs?

Newtra,

With jobs, maybe. With careers, especially in STEM, you get lots of exceptions like extremely rewarding but low paying positions in academia, and tech companies that think they can just spend money instead of effort to fix their culture and broken hiring process.

Newtra,

Saying goodbye to their life in France, where they were paying around £2,574 (€3,000) in taxes every year,

So these people who were rich enough to own a second home wanted to spend more than 50% of their time in France, but were paying the vast majority of their taxes back to the UK?

No wonder the laws got tightened.

Newtra,

To accept it, you just move on with your life. Find the next thing you should do and do it. The more you dwell, the harder it will be to stop dwelling, so just break the cycle and go do anything else.

You will encounter plenty more people who are insistently wrong. Each one will affect you less than the last.

Newtra,

Western companies no longer operating in the Russian market, but still producing desirable content. … Western companies have ‘legalized’ piracy in Russia.

100% this.

Media is culture, and IMO people have a right to participate in culture. If it’s excessively difficult or impossible to legitimately access culture, one has the moral right to illegitimately access culture, and share it so others also have access.

It’s inexcusable to refuse to directly sell media. The internet has made it easier than ever to trade access to media for money. Geo-restricted subscription services should be a nice add-on option for power-consumers, not the only way to get access to something.

Newtra,

Assuming enthusiastic consent, good faith, and that you meant “sex/body they want” instead of “gender they want” (because gender is just a social construct):

On another hand, it would erase their identity as trans people.

I don’t think it would. Identities are built from life experiences, and having lived through transition they’d still be trans even if there were no traces of it on their body. A war veteran doesn’t stop being a veteran just because the war ended.

consider it a genocide

The definition of genocide depends on intent! Even in wars, etc. It’s only genocide if you’re specifically trying to erase/displace people/culture.

  • Trying to cure gender dysphoria: it’s not genocide, it’s medical treatment.
  • Trying to “fix” people to make them fit into society: it’s genocide.

turning them into what they want would mean there is no more trans people

There are identities that don’t stop being trans even if you give them the body they want:

  • A non-binary person’s desired sex/body and social gender might not match. Even with the perfect body (if one exists), they might still identify as trans because that body doesn’t match their social gender.
  • For genderfluid people, there might not be one singular perfect body. Even if their body constantly updated to suit them, they’d probably still identify as trans because they’d be constantly transitioning…
Newtra,

There’s a weird divide between self-determined identity and external classifications. Often, a culture forms around the label and the external label stops being relevant because the term has more social/cultural implications than practical implications. Some people internalize the label as that’s how they wish to steer their future interactions, and others ignore the label and move on with their lives.

You can watch all of Star Trek, and some parts of society will label you a Trekkie if they find out, but it’s up to you whether you choose to identify as a Trekkie, or just go about your life not making a big deal about it.

Newtra,

anthropomorphic behavior

Anyone else morbidly curious about what happens if they don’t fix the bill’s wording and accidentally ban “human-shaped behavior” at school?

Newtra,

The funny thing is that YouTube’s code is already so laggy that we all believed this without a second thought.

‘It’s difficult to survive’: China’s LGBTQ+ advocates​ face jail and forced confession (www.theguardian.com)

In recent years, China’s LGBTQ+ community has been swept up in the Chinese Communist party’s broader crackdown on civil society and freedom of expression. In May 2023, a well known LGBTQ+ advocacy group in Beijing announced it was closing due to “unavoidable” circumstances. Last February, two university students filed a...

Newtra,

Nooooo! Not Naomi!

I don’t really follow her content, but I love her existence and all her efforts towards education and awareness on many topics.

I hope she’s able to find freedom again somehow.

Newtra,

The website does a bad job explaining what its current state actually is. Here’s the GitHub repo’s explanation:

Memory Cache is a project that allows you to save a webpage while you’re browsing in Firefox as a PDF, and save it to a synchronized folder that can be used in conjunction with privateGPT to augment a local language model.

So it’s just a way to get data from browser into privateGPT, which is:

PrivateGPT is a production-ready AI project that allows you to ask questions about your documents using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), even in scenarios without an Internet connection. The project provides an API offering all the primitives required to build private, context-aware AI applications.

So basically something you can ask questions like “how much butter is needed for that recipe I saw last week?” and “what are the big trends across the news sites I’ve looked at recently?”. But eventually it’ll automatically summarize and data mine everything you look at to help you learn/explore.

Neat.

Newtra,

China is also still building new coal plants at a truly alarming rate.

Don’t let heavy carbon emitters steer the narrative this way. Building renewables is just the cheapest way to keep expanding your energy grid at there moment, but if you’re not actively taking power plants offline to reduce carbon emissions, you’re not actually getting greener.

EDIT: LMAO I’m being mass-downvoted. This is why it’s important to think critically about every headline about China - there is an army of propagandists trying to make sure you only see the good stuff.

Newtra,

This is awesome news. Not because of the car, but because it builds the supply lines for an alternative battery chemistry.

People have been using lithium-ion batteries for home and grid storage, which is nuts if you compare it to other battery types. Lithium is expensive and polluting and only makes sense if you’re limited by weight & space. Cheaper batteries, even if they’re bigger/heavier, will do wonders to the economics of sustainable electricity production.

Newtra,

I agree that older commercialized battery types aren’t so interesting, but my point was about all the battery types that haven’t had enough R&D yet to be commercially mass-produced.

Power grids don’t care much about density - they can build batteries where land is cheap, and for fire control they need to artificially space out higher-density batteries anyway. There are heaps of known chemistries that might be cheaper per unit stored (molten salt batteries, flow batteries, and solid state batteries based on cheaper metals), but many only make sense for energy grid applications because they’re too big/heavy for anything portable.

I’m saying it’s nuts that lithium ion is being used for cases where energy density isn’t important. It’s a bit like using bottled water on a farm because you don’t want to pay to get the nearby river water tested. It’s great that sodium ion could bring new economics to grid energy storage, but weird that the only reason it got developed in the first place was for a completely different industry.

Newtra,

Fucking finally! Now when will they let me transfer all the games I had to put on an alt account back to my main?

(Ok really it’s just 1 game that I haven’t played in ages. I’m not that horny. I just hate having multiple accounts as it eats up headspace)

Newtra,

Plural? How many idle games are we talking here?

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