Sergio
@Sergio@piefed.social
- Comment on Be that as it may, your bikes still suck. 1 week ago:
They also miss the data you give them!
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 2 weeks ago:
Right, but I think that’s a good thing, from an LLM-designers’ point of view. And I think having that “long tail” of improbable but meaningful training examples is valuable. Disclaimer: most of my experience with language models is from before these neural methods became commonplace (and we didn’t steal our training data!)
p.s. I kinda liked seeing the thorns, fwiw.
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 2 weeks ago:
We should use it until it becomes popular then stop using it bc it’s not cool any more.
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 2 weeks ago:
Harsh! I thought it was just someone with a non-English keyboard that wasn’t configured correctly.
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 2 weeks ago:
Lunar Astronaut 1: Heaven forbids that now?
Lunar Astronaut 2: Always has.
- Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character? 2 weeks ago:
That’s very interesting. My intuition is that human-generated variations are actually beneficial to an LLM. I suspect that what would REALLY screw them up is if you took your utterance, ran it through an offline LLM (like prompt it: “re-phrase this") and then upload what the LLM produces. But then you’d be looking at, and exposing people to, LLM output all day.
- Comment on Do Americans expect the NK protest to achieve anything? 2 weeks ago:
Politicians keep track of public sentiment, because it affects their jobs.
People generally don’t want to protest, they just want to get on with their lives. If large numbers get up and start protesting, that means there’s a lot of energy there which politicians can use for campaign phonebanking and canvassing and donations.
- Comment on She's a pain in my rear but she keeps me straight! 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on It's true... 3 weeks ago:
Here on the fediverse, you’re treasured NOW, fam!
- Comment on It's true... 4 weeks ago:
My BFF went to school to be a funeral director, where they learned how to embalm on donated cadavers. So when my BFF was dying, they arranged to have their body donated to a local medical university, kindof as a way of “giving back”. The program didn’t disclose exactly what the bodies would be used for, but they said many of them were used for medical training. Anyway, in both cases (embalming training and medical training) apparently “unusual” bodies are still useful. Also, it greatly reduced funeral expenses because the program provided free cremation afterwards.
So, people should still consider donating their bodies after death, someone will probably find some value in it.
- Comment on Happy Weekend Murica 4 weeks ago:
Insane Clown Posse - Fuck The World.
- Comment on What flavor are marshmallows? 4 weeks ago:
I’m glad to hear that. Otherwise we’d be confronted with the possibility of vast factory farms of mature beavers having their “castor sacs” milked daily.
- Comment on What flavor are marshmallows? 4 weeks ago:
Possibly. But there are several different types of vanilla. Also:
An estimated 95% of “vanilla” products are artificially flavored with vanillin derived from lignin instead of vanilla fruits.
and
However, vanillin is only one of 171 identified aromatic components of real vanilla fruits.
Also you may be amused to know:
In the United States, castoreum, the exudate from the castor sacs of mature beavers, has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as a food additive,[54] often referenced simply as a “natural flavoring” in the product’s list of ingredients. It is used in both food and beverages,[55] especially as vanilla and raspberry flavoring, with a total annual U.S. production of less than 300 pounds.[55][56] It is also used to flavor some cigarettes and in perfume-making, and is used by fur trappers as a scent lure.
- Comment on What flavor are marshmallows? 4 weeks ago:
OK, I’ll look at the ingredients.
CORN SYRUP, SUGAR, DEXTROSE, MODIFIED CORNSTARCH, WATER, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF GELATIN, TETRASODIUM PYROPHOSPHATE (WHIPPING AID), NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, BLUE 1.
https://www.kraftheinz.com/jetpuffed/products/00600699003285-marshmallows
Looks like there is some kind of “natural and artificial flavor” besides sugar and corn syrup. Wat are those? Dunno. Apparently it’s legal to have secret ingredients that are not disclosed unless a Non-Disclosure Agreement is signed.
- Comment on What flavor are marshmallows? 4 weeks ago:
There’s a distinct flavor
Yeah, when I was a kid, there were like 2-3 difference places I could get soft-serve ice cream from, and at one of them the vanilla flavor was marshmallow-like and it was my favorite.
I don’t have an answer, tho. For all I know, it was just a distinctive type of vanilla.
- Comment on photopea.com now locks out users blocking ads 4 weeks ago:
I think you’re taking heat a little bit unfairly. This is, after all, the MILDLY infuriating community, and it can be a hassle when something stops working for you, even if it’s perfectly reasonable for it to happen.
- Comment on Sleep Guide 5 weeks ago:
No way, that’s the guy who said the industrial revolution and its consequences are a disaster for humans.
source
/s
- Comment on It's true 5 weeks ago:
or the octagon of MMA
- Comment on What is a good source to read about thought experiments? 1 month ago:
Have you taken a look at the plato.stanford.edu entry on such, specifically the bibliography?
- Comment on Shakes pear 1 month ago:
- Comment on POV: me mentoring my juniors 1 month ago:
That sounds an awful lot like “don’t do anything that might upset the Christians.”
FWIW I interpreted this as unironically uplifting, along the lines of “Where the Wild Things Are”.
- Comment on Who the fuck needs an x axis anyway 1 month ago:
This graph will live forever, in intro classes, as an example of how not to do things.
- Comment on DO IT! 1 month ago:
“Who will simp the Simpsons?” -Juvenal, probably
- Comment on Well then 1 month ago:
See, when I was in grad school I once had to calculate an agreement metric from a bunch of labels on a corpus. No problem I said, the math is easy, I can write a script in an hour or so. Fam that mfing script took me two freaking days bc there were always some little bugs or weird edge cases I hadn’t thought of. So the deal I made with myself was: I would use Matlab or a stats library or something like that, BUT I would make sure that I understood the math beforehand.
But for whatever reason, I never had to calculate a standard deviation. Thinking about it, someone else might have done that for papers I was co-author on, though.
- Comment on Well then 1 month ago:
I’ve worked as a scientist for around 10 years (and as a research programmer in various labs for 5-6 years before that) and have never done a standard deviation calculation.
- Comment on Well then 1 month ago:
“Do you love being a scientist? Or do you love the IDEA of being a scientist?” - something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently…
- Comment on Be the change you want to see in the world 1 month ago:
with a few simple changes, this coulda been Loss.
- Comment on My instance is lagging behind 14 hours of federated content... 1 month ago:
see: https://grafana.lem.rocks/goto/gMske4jHR?orgId=1
I don't understand everything on this chart, but it looks like sh.itjust.works lagged a bit over the past 24 hours and is now catching up.
- Comment on PSA 2 months ago:
cylinder.
- Comment on Gosh darn it 2 months ago:
Nah, when I was a teen I was dealing with childhood trauma but didn't realize it til late 20s early 30s. Luckily I was then dealt a whole new unrelated trauma. So teenagehood was like 2 traumas ago.
