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Large Majority of Americans Want to End Electoral College
  • I'm conflicted on this. On one hand, there are clear problems with the electoral college situation right now, but on the other hand, getting rid of it means that the tyranny of the majority will become a bigger problem. It's unclear to me which is worse or how we can fix the latter.

  • TIL how much it clearly didn't stop at Aristotle and Alexander the Great
  • Still, some are closer to the source of these ideas than others, think about awards attributed to individuals for example.

    This is where the researchers would disagree with you. I don't know if you've ever been involved in research (or startups). There's a common saying that ideas are a dime a dozen. It's much more so the work you do that's important, not the idea itself.

    singers, actors, politicians, or youtubers

    Notice how being in the spotlight is an important aspect of all the professions you've listed. That naturally selects for people who are comfortable with or enjoy being on camera and are good at that kind of live performance. Similarly, science selects for people who are good at doing science. Sometimes, there's an overlap, but it's not that common.

    If you're interested in interviews with prominent scientists, Lex Fridman does quite a few of those. But if you want more people to do this, you'll have to contend with the fact that most scientists simply have no interest in being on camera and probably never developed the skills needed for it.

  • TIL how much it clearly didn't stop at Aristotle and Alexander the Great
  • We likely don't know much about the researchers of modern technology because they're often created by a huge team of hundreds of people. There's no single person responsible for the bulk of the work. In the case of ChatGPT and the line of work leading up to it, it was very much also the researchers' choice as well to not name a specific person as being the main contributor. For example, the transformer paper had all the author names shuffled so the credit doesn't all end up with one person.

  • It's official, Rust is an anti C/C++ elitist slur
  • Same. I keep thinking back to my time TAing for an intro programming course and getting students who just add random braces until their code compiles. That's me right now with Rust pointers.

  • Teach the children.
  • I have no idea what I'm even missing out on by not paying for Discord but others are happy to pay for it, so I think that's a pretty reasonable offering. I can't speak for the YouTube and Tiktok example though since I don't use those.

  • Academic writing
  • And that's not all. It's easy to tell someone the high level area that you're working on, but to explain the exact problem you're trying to solve and why it's interesting? That's a whole journey into many topics that are very unintuitive for human brains to grasp and sometimes require heavy mathematical abstractions to even see that there's a problem to begin with.

  • Reinforcement Learning @lemmy.ca howrar @lemmy.ca
    OpenAI: Learning to Reason with LLMs

    OpenAI just put out a blog post about a new model trained via RL (I'm assuming this isn't the usual RLHF) to perform chain of thought reasoning before giving the user its answer. As usual, there's very little detail about how this is accomplished so it's hard for me to get excited about it, but the rest of you might find this interesting.

    0
    How are funds allocated in OSS projects?

    Following up on another question about open source funding, how does it usually work when there is funding to pay for the dev's work, then someone new joins in and makes significant contributions? Does the original dev still keep everything? Do you split the funds between the devs? If so, how do you decide how much each person gets? Are there examples of projects where something like this has happened?

    4
    (OTHER) How are we doing?

    This community has been around for a few months now. How do we feel about it? Are things working out? Any plans for further growing the community?

    This is one of the topics I’ve been thinking a lot about quite a bit for the past few years (i.e. how to set up a community that values discussions with diverse viewpoints), so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts in relation to what I’m seeing here.

    1. I think such a community necessarily needs to be a full self-contained instance, or else you’ll get very little activity. Think about how these discussions usually start. Someone posts an article/meme/question/etc, a few people show up and comment with similar thoughts about it worded in slightly different ways, then another shows up and goes against the grain, everyone dogpiles on them, and that’s when the real discussion starts. Very rarely do people go out of their way to ask “what do you think of X controversial topic?” And even if you do, that only leads to a very high level discussion that very quickly gets stale. If you get discussion in the context of specific events, then these discussions can be grounded in reality and lead to more unique context-dependent takes each time it comes up.

    2. Regarding upvotes/downvotes: as stated in the rules, they should be used to measure whether a post/comment is a positive contribution to the discussion rather than the number of people who agree with your viewpoint. I don’t believe there’s a way to actually enforce this with the voting system we currently have, but I also think a relatively simple change can fix it. It will require a bit of coding.

      My proposal is a voting system with two votes: one to say that you agree/disagree, and another to say good/bad contribution. With this system, you can easily see if someone only thinks posts they agree with are good contributions, and you can use that information to calculate a total score that weighs their votes accordingly. It’s also small enough of a change that I think most people won’t have a problem figuring it out.

    Thoughts?

    Also, thank you Ace for taking the initiative in creating this place. It makes me happy to see that others want to see this change too.

    7
    How can we start making a change?

    There's many posts here with the purpose of convincing people to support electoral reform. Not so much that's actually actionable. What do we do if we want to change things? For a start, does anyone have information on who's responsible for the election system at each level of government in each of the major cities?

    2
    How do you feel about storing binary files with Git?

    I think it's generally agreed upon that large files that change often do not belong while small files that never change are fine. But there's still a lot of middle ground where the answer is not so clear to me.

    So what's your stance on this? Where do you draw the line?

    14
    Bug: Scroll position jumping around
    slrpnk.net The penultimate list of Free Linux games, with over 100 titles! - SLRPNK

    This list is a little old, so some of the links may not work anymore, but overall it’s still a pretty solid compendium for any budget concious Linux (or Windows) gamer! -------- Know of a game that should be added to the list? Leave a comment below! ^_^ Also check out: * The LibreGameWiki [https://l...

    I suspect this is a problem with posts that have extremely long bodies like this one: https://slrpnk.net/comment/8035803

    I'm trying to scroll down to the top first comment and inevitably overshoot. When I i try to scroll back up, it suddenly jumps back to the middle of the OP's body.

    1
    When can babies start eating bread? I don't know, but you can buy it for $37.39!

    I was looking up when babies can safely start eating untoasted bread and one of the images led me to this website that sells... stuff? Are they selling me the question? Who knows.

    Then if you scroll down to the related products, you can buy a basketball club for $30, down from $15!

    !

    I'm guessing this is some phishing website looking to steal credit cards. I also still haven't found an answer to my original question.

    0
    Reinforcement Learning @lemmy.ca howrar @lemmy.ca
    Introducing SIMA, a Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent
    deepmind.google A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments

    Introducing SIMA, a Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent

    A generalist AI agent for 3D virtual environments
    0
    Show link domains without opening it

    Is it possible for posts to show the domain (TLD and SLD) of link posts?

    Use case: I don't want to watch videos so I want to avoid clicking YouTube links. I would like to know that they are YouTube videos without having my phone spend the next minute trying to open YouTube.

    5
    datahoarder @lemmy.ml howrar @lemmy.ca
    How do you store your metadata?

    By metadata, I'm talking about things like text descriptions of a photo/video and where they come from, or an explanation of what a certain binary blob contains, its format, how to use it, etc.

    The best solution I have right now is xattrs, but those are dependent on the file system, and there's no guarantee that they will stay when the files get moved, especially if the person moving them is unaware of its existence. The alternative is to keep a plaintext file with this metadata alongside every photo/video/binary/etc, but that would be a huge pain to keep in sync since both files have to be moved together.

    So my question to you: do you keep this kind of metadata? If so, how do you manage them?

    0
    [Discussion] How can we deal with misinformation?

    With the rapid advances we're currently seeing in generative AI, we're also seeing a lot of concern for large scale misinformation. Any individual with sufficient technical knowledge can now spam a forum with lots of organic looking voices and generate photos to back them up. Has anyone given some thought on how we can combat this? If so, how do you think the solution should/could look? How do you personally decide whether you're looking at a trustworthy source of information? Do you think your approach works, or are there still problems with it?

    0
    General Purpose / Random stuff

    Is there a community meant for anything that doesn't currently fit into the existing communities?

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)HO
    howrar @lemmy.ca
    Posts 13
    Comments 923