nilesh

nilesh, 5 days ago to fediverse

Has anyone built something like "Login with #Fediverse / #ActivityPub" as social login / oauth identity? #Mastodon perhaps?

nilesh, 7 days ago to ubuntu

Has the #Enshittification of #Ubuntu begun?

.deb packages are no longer installable: https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-24-04-disappointment/

nilesh, 14 days ago to twitter

With its long-form Articles feature (for Premium+ users), #Twitter is going after not just #Substack, but also blogs. This worries me because it might actually work. This level of centralization won't be healthy, because it actually prevents innovation and experimentation for building better reputation systems. We will be stuck with Twitter's algorithms for a long time.

nilesh, 21 days ago to random

I am happy that fake news is getting a lot of attention in Indian civic discourse. (for eg: the latest Dhruv Rathee video)

I think, a lot can be improved by a simple insistence on links to sources rather than forwarded texts/images/videos. This establishes a trail of credibility and brings skin in the game for content creators.

This applies as much to mainstream media as it does to whatsapp groups. It's 2024 and we should demand that online articles provide links to the sources they refer to.

nilesh, 23 days ago to programming

Have a strong urge to invent a new cloud-native, AI-native, dependent-typed #programming language.

nilesh, 3 months ago to random

This is the most beautiful (and bizarre thing) I have seen in 2024: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2024/02/12/fractal.html

The boundary of neural network trainability is fractal. 😲 Who knew?

nilesh, 3 months ago to random

Wikipedia's dark mode has been under development since April 2023.
It was first requested in... (checks again) 2010.

nilesh, 4 months ago to programming

Who in Bangalore is ideating/experimenting on the future of coding - with the belief that the common practice of #programming is tragically less humane than it could be?

I'm putting together a curated IRL meetup this weekend. Who must I invite?

nilesh, 4 months ago to random

Perhaps we should think of "Learn to code" like we think of "Learn to cook".

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nilesh, 4 months ago to random

Example of LLM hallucination wasting humans' time 😦 https://hackerone.com/reports/2298307

nilesh, 4 months ago to random

Community software is so terrible because selling to enterprise teams is much more lucrative. Higher revenue per user and lower UX expectations (not having to compete against consumer messaging apps). 😞

impactology, 5 months ago to random

The fact that millions of people apply for an exam to gain access to education and only few hundred or thousand get the access will never cease to horrify me

https://mastodon.social/@impactology/111356969293218351

https://mastodon.social/@impactology/111357117657429168

https://mastodon.social/@impactology/111356967546301767

https://mastodon.social/@impactology/111357059726905992

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nilesh, 5 months ago to mastodon

Wish more people knew how nice things are here in mastodon.

Between hachyderm.io, fosstodon.org, mathstodon.xyz and social.kernel.org, I have a critical mass of interesting people to follow here - not to mention people like @simon or @pluralistic running their own instances.

I do wish #Mastodon had more diverse folks from tech industry, but definitely don't want it to become like Twitter.

nilesh, 6 months ago to linux

Only discovered today that #linux kernel developers have their own #fediverse instance (running Akkoma) at https://social.kernel.org/ 😮👏

Here's the post by Linus Torvalds that is doing the rounds currently:

nilesh, 7 months ago to random

Does anyone want to help me implement AI-powered data enrichment for learning resources for https://learnawesome.org/ ?

Here is one possible approach: https://github.com/learn-awesome/learndb/issues/66

Gargron, 7 months ago to twitter

Making people pay to tweet should be the nail in the coffin for #Twitter; but then again I thought turning it into a glorified Parler would've been that nail already. As they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

nilesh, 8 months ago to random

#Chandrayaan3 lander spotted by the high-resolution camera on Chandrayaan2 orbiter!

nilesh, 8 months ago to random

I don't understand what people are smoking when they argue that "India shouldn't be spending $$ on space missions because there's widespread poverty".

At less than 5 Rs (6 cents) per citizen spent, #Chandrayaan3 is the best bang for buck ever, in terms of cultural inspiration alone! 😁💪

chargrille, 8 months ago to random

Are there people out there who are looking at AI/LLM-generated content as pollution?

Because that is the analogy that makes the most sense to me. It's creating huge externalities for the profit of a few - proliferating enormous amounts of digital pollution (as well as real-world greenhouse gas pollution).

The more AI/LLM churn out content for the internet, the dirtier the water, so to speak. Or the air. And the less it functions for users.

musicmatze, 8 months ago to fediverse

#fediverse killed #blogging

At least for me.
Even though my blog is a #writefreely instance that federates.

simon, 9 months ago to random

Answered a question on Hacker News about using ChatGPT for programming tasks with a bunch of my own examples... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37126182#37127206

Comments so far include "If someone on my team was doing things this unusually they’d probably be let go" and "sorry but these examples are not impressive at all and by no means a representative of any serious programmer's workload"

A lot of people out there are absolutely determined not to take the practical utility of this stuff seriously!

johncarlosbaez, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

"Stock and flow diagrams" are a nice graphical tool for modeling systems. People have had success teaching them to students starting at a young age. It's a way to teach them math, economics, ecology, and other subjects in a unified way.

When you include functions describing the flows - shown as faucets here - you can turn these diagrams into differential equations. But you don't need to do that for young kids: there's a lot you can learn from these models in a purely qualitative way. Basic concepts like feedback, etc.

And once you introduce the flow functions, you can let software solve the resulting differential equations and graph their solutions even before the kids know anything like the definition of derivative! This is a good way to gently get them interested in calculus.

For example, below you can see a model of reindeer population on an island created by middle school students. The population soared and then crashed:

"Students built System Dynamics models to study human population dynamics, non-renewable and renewable resource utilization, economic influences, etc. In these lessons students were asked to build the model, anticipate model behavior, explain discrepancies between anticipated model behavior and actual model output, analyze feedback, then test policies on the model to determine leverage points."

For details try this:

• Diana M. Fisher, Systems thinking activities used in K-12 for up to two decades, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2023.1059733/full

#MTBoS #ITeachMath #MathEd #MathsEd

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