kellogh

kellogh, 1 month ago to hiking

anyone know of a plant identification app that actually works in the spring when the leaves aren’t full adult size? seek isn’t cutting it #hiking #botany #nature #camping

18+ mekkaokereke, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

This is not good. A thing that gives me hope:

Iran has the capability to strike Israel in under 15 minutes. Iran has anti-ship drones that are almost impossible to shoot down. Iran could have shot first and stayed silent and then claimed responsibility hours later.

Iran chose to do a strike that provided hours of early warning. Iran used drones that are relatively easy to shoot down. Iran announced that they were retaliating before they did so.

gvwilson, 1 month ago to random

The first time someone showed me the World-Wide Web, it took almost two minutes to render the first page. I came away thinking, "Thanks, but I'll stick to FTP." I think about that a lot when I think about all the dumb mistakes that LLMs are making right now. I think that part of being my age is recognizing hype cycles when they're happening, but the other part is realizing that sometimes there really is something beneath the hype and greed and moral vacuity that's going to change everything.

gvwilson, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Starting to wonder if AI is like spreadsheets: for every programmer pointing out flaws and deficiencies, a double dozen people are using 'em to do something they find useful. 1/4

Added: please see https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/112265751571981599 for clarification.

hlfshell, 1 month ago to llm

Read through this paper last night https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04494
TLDR Deepmind repurposed a standard LLM to accept a singular tokenized gameboard (not game sequence) and produce an action-value function (probability of winning off of the move == score) out of the transformers in it. With no additional game search they achieved grandmaster equivalence; with two caveats.

#llm #ai #rl

mistersql, 1 month ago to random

This matches my experience, I can code for about 4 hours, especially if it is a solid block of time, 0 hours of meetings is alienating, more than 2 is a grind.

I'd add thought that in IT work, sometimes you need to do a heavy lift and focus on one thing continuously for a week or two. I can't do it all year and I can't turn on that level of motivation with a switch.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/news/the-surprising-connection-between-after-hours-work-and-decreased-productivity

gvwilson, 1 month ago to random

Etemadi et al 2024: "Augmenting Diffs With Runtime Information" https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11077 This paper presents a tool that compares the program states of old and new versions of code in order to identify unique variable values and adds that to the source code diff to help developers understand the impact of changes. #nwit

gvwilson, 1 month ago to random

El Haji et al 2024: "Using GitHub Copilot for Test Generation in Python" https://carolin-brandt.de/publications/elhaji-ast24.pdf "…within an existing test suite, approximately 45.28% of the tests generated by Copilot are passing tests; 54.72% of generated tests are failing, broken, or empty tests. Furthermore, if we generate tests using Copilot without an existing test suite in place, we observe that 92.45% of the tests are failing, broken, or empty tests." #nwit

carnage4life, 1 month ago to random

Larry Summers and others published a paper with an interesting theory on why consumers believe inflation is higher than the government’s CPI numbers. Since 1983, it has ignored interest rates even though they affect car and mortgage payments.

Using a pre-1983 CPI formula would have inflation around 18% versus the official 7.1% in November 2022. It’s a plausible theory that explains why people’s sentiment doesn’t match inflation stats.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2024/03/23/summers-inflation-reached-18-in-2022-using-the-governments-previous-formula/?sh=1edc93e62092

hazelweakly, 1 month ago to random

What's one of the silliest domain names you own? Mine is legit-elephant.lol and there's an entire story behind it. Some of you were even here for this!

C'mere and sit down, I'll tell you the story of the fateful night in the fediverse where Elon Musk flipped his lid and the entire fediverse flipped a middle finger to him.

The story begins during the winter holidays of 2022, back when hachyderm lived on Kris Nova's servers

It was a different world then, wasn't it?

bruno_j_navarro, 1 month ago to random

A former CIA officer explains how a vast, pro-Putin corruption network uncovered in Europe is a warning sign for the U.S.

https://newrepublic.com/article/180630/russia-corruption-network-europe-buying-politicians-america

saschameinrath, 1 month ago to random

The Broadband Nutrition Label is now the law-of-the-land! 15 years to go from genesis to implementation: https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/how-much-how-fast-new-broadband-labels-rolling-out-nationwide-consumers-fcc-federal-communications-commission-rules-nutrition-style-label-internet-service-providers-consumer-reports-penn-state-university

ovid, 1 month ago to Software

I love stumbling across great comments in code. Today's example found in client code:

"If [condition X] occurs, this will result in an infinite recursion loop until the heat death of the universe, possibly taking down a server just before that."

#software

Crazypedia, 1 month ago to Korean

Neat! I love learning about the history and evolution of languages, and how they physically moved around the globe. This is cool!

First languages of North America traced back to two very different #language groups from Siberia
#linguistics
https://phys.org/news/2024-04-languages-north-america-language-groups.html

Quinnypig, 1 month ago to random

Ah, excellent; Google Gemini can also be bullied into ranking US presidents by absorbency.

eniko, 1 month ago to random

It's still possible in 2024 to just make a website using straight HTML and CSS. That option never went away

potus, 1 month ago to random

When we want to know what's in our food, we read the label.

What if every good and service had that level of transparency?

Starting today, my Administration is requiring big internet providers to display labels that include prices, fees, speeds, and other critical information.

mekkaokereke, 1 month ago to random

People on Twitter are debating whether a person using uncommon words like "delve" are trying to sound smarter than they are, or worse, are ChatGPT bots, because "normal" people don't talk like that.

You don't have to get upset, or embroiled in the debate. Not worth the time or attention. But I'll share some important context as your friendly neighborhood Nigerian 🙋🏿‍♂️

Many Nigerians have bigger English language vocabularies and better command of grammar than the typical American or English person

chrisvitalos, 1 month ago to opensource

>“[#Opensource #AI] is really fundamental because it allows everyone to seize the technology, to diminish the fear of limited understanding or of not being qualified to use AI,” says Remi Cadene, head of robotics at #HuggingFace in Paris

>Open-source AI firms are meanwhile offering a better alternative to #SiliconValley.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-02/open-source-ai-is-alternative-to-microsoft-deals-with-openai-inflection?srnd=undefined

hendrik, 1 month ago to LLMs

#llms are the ultimate answer to the internet #google created: they avoid ads, ignore superfluous information of cooking recipe websites, and create a layer of privacy between you and the #internet. Well, at least as long as you can trust the provider of the LLM...

Content providers will feel that this hurts their pocket. It essentially gives everyone on the internet an ad blocker and this may lead to more paywalls. Will #ai providers start to buy information from these content providers? Or will they sell opportunities to place information?

dan, 1 month ago to random

Today is International Beaver Day, so there is no better time to tell you about my upcoming #osdi24 paper "Beaver: Practical Partial Snapshots for Distributed Cloud Services"... using pictures of cute beavers.

This project was led by Liangcheng Yu, along with his advisor Vincent Liu and other colleagues at UPenn. (1/6)

(photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver#/media/File:American_Beaver.jpg)

#distributedsystems #beavers #distributedsystemsexplainedbycats

mekkaokereke, 1 month ago to random

Writing a thread on onboarding here, because I don't want to write it in the other place.

Context:
Good engineer onboarding is DEI. Teams that have great onboarding, tend to be more diverse and inclusive. Teams that have poor onboarding, tend to be more homogeneous and less diverse.

That's because poor onboarding makes life harder for junior employees and remote employees. Underrepresented groups benefit disproportionately from remote work options. Junior employees are a more diverse group.

Fred, 1 month ago to productivity

Still looking for #productivity people and applications to follow in #Mastodon It's the only reason I still go onto Twitter. Please share any with me worth following, thanks. #todo #pkm #notesapp #todoapp #calendarapp

garrettdimon, 1 month ago to random

With the speed of browser and CSS improvements and capabilities, it doesn't seem unreasonable to imagine a future where JavaScript is no longer necessary for the vast majority of useful client-side interactions.

Not to say that everything possible in JavaScript would be possible via CSS, but enough could be handled better by CSS that the rest isn't worth bolting on any JavaScript.

If browsers bake in some easy-to-use, native, HTML-over-the-wire bits, JavaScript could go the way of Flash.

kellogh, 1 month ago to random

The Attack Turkey

this morning on the run i got to the top of the hill and was resting, bc i'm out of shape, and off in the distance i see a bird trotting my way

as it gets closer i realize it's a turkey. it had a big red gobbler and its neck was iridescent. It was actually really pretty, so i just watched as it approached