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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2020

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  • lightstream@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlZen Z
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    3 months ago

    Imagine life in the post-apocalyptic hellscape. All electronic devices have been rendered useless due to the EMPs from all the nuclear blasts. You, with your unfathomable ability to tell the time from an old wind-up clock, are viewed as a literal god among men (and women)





  • Tramways and Light Rails are much more silent

    From inside, maybe? Berlin, where I live, has lots of trams all over the city. I admit I rarely use them as I much prefer my bicycle, but they are seriously noisy. During the day the noise is somewhat lost in the general cacophony of city life, but in the evenings you can hear them rattling and crashing along from streets away. And if you live on a road with a tramline, you just have to accept this horrible metal-on-metal screeching and rattling at almost all hours.







  • just fancy phone keyboard text prediction.

    …as if saying that somehow makes what chatGPT does trivial.

    This response, which I wouldn’t expect from anyone with true understanding of neural nets and machine learning, reminds me of the attempt in the 70s to make a computer control a robot arm to catch a ball. How hard could it be, given that computers at that time were already able to solve staggeringly complex equations? The answer was, of course, “fucking hard”.

    You’re never going to get coherent text from autocomplete and nor can it understand any arbitrary English phrase.

    ChatGPT does both those things. You can pose it any question you like in your own words and it will respond with a meaningful and often accurate response. What it can accomplish is truly remarkable, and I don’t get why anybody but the most boomer luddite feels this need to rubbish it.


  • I cannot wait until architecture-agnostic ML libraries are dominant and I can kiss CUDA goodbye for good

    I really hope this happens. After being on Nvidia for over a decade (960 for 5 years and similar midrange cards before that), I finally went AMD at the end of last year. Then of course AI burst onto the scene this year, and I’ve not yet managed to get stable diffusion running to the point it’s made me wonder if I might have made a bad choice.


  • Same. I had an Nvidia 960 for about 5 years on arch with very few problems. Maybe twice over that time I had to rollback to an older version temporarily due to some incompatibility with wine or such like.

    Towards the end of last year I finally decided to upgrade (mostly to play RDR2) and I went with AMD. I love the feel of using a pure open source gfx stack, but there is no real functional advantage to it.



  • lightstream@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy are folks so anti-capitalist?
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    1 year ago

    Capitalism requires coercion to function. The ‘incentive’ is goddamn starvation and being exposed to the raw elements with no shelter.

    You’re thinking of nature. It’s nature that does that.

    And it’s what we humans are fighting against, the natural order of things. Nature doesn’t care about the weak, it doesn’t care about justice. We’re in a battle to design and build systems that we can install on top of nature and which do provide those things. There is still much to be done, but over the course of human history we have accomplished a lot and we are in a better place today than we have ever been.

    The term capitalism has become a meme, conveying little meaning, just a word we can invoke to rally others in a brief cathartic moment of finger pointing and doom-saying. If it’s what you want to do then fine, go ahead and when you finish, wash your hands and clear your mind, then come back and help think of positive steps forward we can make as a society.



  • It’s worth mentioning that the word bilingual has different meanings in US English and in British English.

    For native British speakers, someone who is bilingual is someone who speaks two languages at a native level, while the accepted US meaning is someone who can speak two languages, especially with equal or nearly equal fluency.

    With the British definition, it’s pretty clear whether someone is bilingual or not. Most people are not, and it’s almost impossible for an adult to become bilingual later in life. Generally it only happens when someone has two parents each with a different mother tongue.

    The US meaning is much wider than the British one, and I guess it’s the meaning you’re intending with your question. It basically comes down to the definition of fluent. It’s completely possible to be fluent in a language while still having a foreign accent and still making the occasional grammar mistake. My personal definition of fluency is when you are able to talk to native speakers on pretty much any subject without serious misunderstandings. You don’t need to know every word you may encounter, as you can simply ask the other person what a word means just as native speakers do all the time.


  • Well there’s a huge variety of different accents in England, even more if you include the whole UK. British people themselves can struggle understanding other Brits from just 100 or 200 miles down the road. I say that as a Brit - I’ve worked in call centres where there would frequently be Liverpudlians, Geordies, Cornish etc calling back in a rage after being hung up on multiple times by colleagues who couldn’t understand them.