I’m thinking of things like heliocentrism where there was some modern discovery or revelation by science that invalidated a common assumption prior....
The funny thing about heliocentrism is, that isn’t really the modern view either. The modern view is that there are no privileged reference frames, and heliocentrism and geocentrisms are just questions of reference frame. You can construct consistent physical models from either, and for example, you’ll probably use a geocentric model if you’re gonna launch a satellite.
But another fun one is the so-called discovery of oxygen, which is really about what’s going on with fire. Before Lavoisier, the dominant belief was that fire is the release of phlogiston. What discredited this was the discovery of materials that get heavier when burned.
I think it’s better to think about what swap is, and the right answer might well be zero. If you try to allocate memory and there isn’t any available, then existing stuff in memory is transferred to the swap file/partition. This is incredibly slow. If there isn’t enough memory or swap available, then at least one process (one hopes the one that made the unfulfillable request for memory) is killed.
If you ever do start swapping memory to disk, your computer will grind to a halt.
Maybe someone will disagree with me, and if someone does I’m curious why, but unless you’re in some sort of very high memory utilization situation, processes being killed is probably easier to deal with than the huge delays caused by swapping.
Edit: Didn’t notice what community this was. Since it’s a webserver, the answer requires some understanding of utilization. You might want to look into swap files rather than swap partitions, since I’m pretty sure they’re easier to resize as conditions change.
Well… They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don’t have a lot of privacy. It’s necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.
So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can’t be stopped.
It seems to me, the dangers are more like…
Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.
It’ll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.
Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.
Then yes there’s EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I’m pretty confident the Lemmy developers won’t give them the time of day.
I’m not a Mastodon expert, but I’m pretty sure you can still get their memes if they reply to you (or @ you), or if they post to a tag you’re following.
I’m not sure this is a level headed take… They say, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Meta has already made it very clear who they are; I’m not sure skepticism is really in order.
It goes along with how they’ve stopped calling it a user interface and started calling it a user experience. Interface implies the computer is a tool that you use to do things, while experience implies that the things you can do are ready made according to, basically, usage scripts that were mapped out by designers and programmers.
No sane person would talk about a user’s experience with a socket wrench, and that’s how you know socket wrenches are still useful.
Here’s a random interesting car fact. The accelerator pedal only controls how much air makes it to the engine; it opens and closes a flap in the air intake called the throttle body. The car has a sensor that records how much air is coming in, the mass airflow sensor, which is just a wire in the airstream. Electrical resistance in metals is proportional to temperature, and the air rushing by cools the wire. The car’s computer is then programmed to inject fuel according to the estimated amount of air coming in, which is double checked with oxygen sensors in the exhaust (which detect uncombusted air, i.e., too little fuel).
The thing that amazes me the most about AI Discourse is, we all learned in Theory of Computation that general AI is impossible. My best guess is that people with a CS degree who believe in AI slept through all their classes.
Evidence, not really, but that’s kind of meaningless here since we’re talking theory of computation. It’s a direct consequence of the undecidability of the halting problem. Mathematical analysis of loops cannot be done because loops, in general, don’t take on any particular value; if they did, then the halting problem would be decidable. Given that writing a computer program requires an exact specification, which cannot be provided for the general analysis of computer programs, general AI trips and falls at the very first hurdle: being able to write other computer programs. Which should be a simple task, compared to the other things people expect of it.
Yes there’s more complexity here, what about compiler optimization or Rust’s borrow checker? which I don’t care to get into at the moment; suffice it to say, those only operate on certain special conditions. To posit general AI, you need to think bigger than basic block instruction reordering.
This stuff should all be obvious, but here we are.
This is proof of one thing: that our brains are nothing like digital computers as laid out by Turing and Church.
What I mean about compilers is, compiler optimizations are only valid if a particular bit of code rewriting does exactly the same thing under all conditions as what the human wrote. This is chiefly only possible if the code in question doesn’t include any branches (if, loops, function calls). A section of code with no branches is called a basic block. Rust is special because it harshly constrains the kinds of programs you can write: another consequence of the halting problem is that, in general, you can’t track pointer aliasing outside a basic block, but the Rust program constraints do make this possible. It just foists the intellectual load onto the programmer. This is also why Rust is far and away my favorite language; I respect the boldness of this play, and the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
To me, general AI means a computer program having at least the same capabilities as a human. You can go further down this rabbit hole and read about the question that spawned the halting problem, called the entscheidungsproblem (decision problem) to see that AI is actually more impossible than I let on.
Hello im a highschooler who struggles with everything and i have autism along witha few other things. i dont hav ea job and im afraid to drive ,not only tha tmos tof my tech is low end so im very limited....
You have to enjoy a hobby in itself, if you’re too focused on results then you’ll have problems with the gulf between your ability and your aspiration. Is there anything you’ve tried doing that you just enjoy doing? Like do you just enjoy banging on a piano or drawing or writing, regardless of the output?
There’s something important missing from most of the other answers. There’s a lot of different kinds of network and internet traffic. Web browsing, email, instant messaging, online video games…
By formal standard, certain port numbers are designated for certain functions. Web traffic happens on port 80. Incoming email is sent on port 143, outgoing email is sent on port 456 or 587. Something like Discord will have a specific port it uses for both sending and receiving messages. Word of Warcraft has certain ports its uses for telling the server when you cast a spell, and for the server to tell your client when you take damage.
So yes, ports are like PO boxes at a post office, but the analogy doesn’t quite capture it. Port 80 is always web traffic, and this is important, since your web browser requests pages on port 80, just as a web server returns web pages on port 80. The web server probably has other ports on it, like FTP (ports 20 and 21) or SFPT (port 22). If you connect to a web server on port 80, that means you’re asking for its webpages. If you connect on 20, 21, or 22, it means you’re trying to transfer files to it.
It’s older, but The Longest Journey is good. Unfortunately, the final game in the series kinda sucks.
While it’s an ensemble, most people would agree that the main character of Final Fantasy VI is a woman—they just might disagree about which woman is the lead.
I also liked the first Xenosaga game, but again, it’s a series that goes pretty badly downhill.
I guess the important thing to understand about spurious output (what gets called “hallucinations”) is that it’s neither a bug nor a feature, it’s just the nature of the program. Deep learning language models are just probabilities of co-occurrence of words; there’s no meaning in that. Deep learning can’t be said to generate “true” or “false” information, or rather, it can’t be meaningfully said to generate information at all.
So then people say that deep learning is helping out in this or that industry. I can tell you that it’s pretty useless in my industry, though people are trying. Knowing a lot about the algorithms behind deep learning, and also knowing how fucking gullible people are, I assume that—if someone tells me deep learning has ended up being useful in some field, they’re either buying the hype or witnessing an odd series of coincidences.
This is the curation effect: generate lots of chaff, and have humans search for the wheat. Thing is, someone’s already gotten in deep shit for trying to use deep learning for legal filings.
I guess there’s a sense in which all computer science is table lookups, but if you want a nauseatingly technical summary of deep learning—it’s high-dimensional nonlinear regression with all the methodological seatbelts left unfastened.
The only thing this says about us is that philosophical illiteracy is a big problem in the sciences, and that computer science is the most embarrassing field in all STEM. Otherwise, you know, people find beauty in randomness (or in stochasticity, if you prefer) all the time. This is no different.
Corporations don't just sit out on new technologies, and no matter how hard you try you can't force them to. Defederating from Meta's new project preemptively is naive, and will not do much of anything....
Similarly, if the Earth can’t survive Exxon, it was never going to succeed in the first place.
I just have to keep on hammering this point, because it pisses me off so, so much. Many people seem to believe that, since regulatory bodies can be captured, that regulation shouldn’t be done. This is called learned helplessness, and it’s something malicious people inflict on people they want to exploit.
It isn’t sticking your head in the sand to resist assimilation by an evil corporation.
Your post is arguing (by analogy) that we shouldn’t even bother trying. But I guess you don’t need a suicide note when you can just leave a copy of Atlas Shrugged by your body.
This is a very computer sciencey view, which is why I leapt past the intermediate logic straight to its conclusion. But I’ll spell it out.
There is no rules-based system that will actually stand in the way of determined, clever, malicious actors. To put it in CS-style terms, you’ll never cover all the contingencies. To put it in more realistic terms, control systems only work within certain domains of the thing being controlled; partly this is because you start getting feedback and second-order effects, and partly it’s because there’s a ton of stuff about the world you just don’t know.
If a system is used as intended, it can work out fine. If someone is determined to break a system, they will.
This is why the world is not driven by rules-based systems, but by politics. We’re capable of rich and dynamic responses to problems, even unanticipated problems. Which is to say, the only actual solution to Exxon and Meta is to fight back, not to bemoan the inadequacy of systems.
Indeed, this belief in technocracy is explicitly encouraged by malicious elites, who are aware that they can subvert a technocracy.
Things are politically stagnant because people believe that politics is about systems. Politics is about power, and politics will always be an expression of the dominant power dynamics. Governmental systems are just how power is explained to outsiders; it’s a mythology that’s told to disguise the real nature of power.
So the question of systems is a red herring, that’s been carefully instilled. This has been true for all history: Many kings don’t really rule, courtiers do. Only kings who can effectively wield power rule, and they’re historically in the minority. This should also be obvious in the US: corporate power is only ever checked in the presence of enormous public action. Not public bitching, public action—general strikes being the most important example.
Or to put it really bluntly, while there’s a lot of pageantry in politics, what politics actually is, is power struggles. But they sure don’t want people to recognize this, which is why there’s so much pageantry and partisanship.
This is also why the government is going so hard against Trump, but letting Pence, Clinton, and Biden slide. It’s not because they cooperated—if you or I had security clearances and just took documents out of a SCIF and kept them at home, we’d be in jail. It’s because Trump clumsily challenged existing power, namely the federal bureaucracy (which he conspiratorially calls the “deep state”), and he wasn’t up to the task.
Seeing a thread get locked just for asking if it's okay to disagree with trans people's identities really rubbed me the wrong way. I don't want moderators pushing their agenda on to me. If I see something I don't like, I can block that user or community. It'd be nice to block entire instances, but I don't think we have that...
I think there’s a more important question here… There are people who do access the room? Why? Who are they? That leads to the actually relevant question, how would those people secure a room?
If nobody needs to access the room, then the room shouldn’t be accessible. By that I mean, it should be underground with no points of access, just an inaccessible underground chamber.
It’s even more perplexing than that… One version of Web 3.0 is the crypto fantasy of being nickel-and-dimed for every single little thing. There’s another, older Web 3.0 concept proposed by Tim Berners-Lee called the semantic web.
I really like how products like chatgpt can make life easier and more efficient, especially for programmers. However im also kind of afraid of these projects centralised nature. Do you think there is a way to avoid the risks of smaller companies and individuals being reliant on a couple of huge companies for writing code, etc....
It’s funny to me that people use deep learning to generate code… I thought it was commonly understood that debugging code is more difficult than writing it, and throwing in randomly generated code puts you in the position of having to debug code that was written by—well, by nobody at all.
Anyway, I think the bigger risk of deep learning models controlled by large corporations is that they’re more concerned with brand image than with reality. You can already see this with ChatGPT: its model calibration has been aggressively sanitized, to the point that you have to fight to get it to generate anything even remotely interesting.
America (i.imgur.com)
What was the historical science debate that seems silliest in hind sight?
I’m thinking of things like heliocentrism where there was some modern discovery or revelation by science that invalidated a common assumption prior....
How much swap?
I’ve heard a lot of people say your swap should be 2x RAM… but do I really need 32GB of swap?
Memory Allocation, Default memory allocation strategy on Linux?
I lately learned about memory allocations and use of malloc. The malloc command is defined in the POSIX standard, as can be seen hereIt says...
In your view, what is a bommy knocker?
Only Google it after you answer please
Fosstodon's position on Meta's Threads (hub.fosstodon.org)
What's your "old person" trait? (feddit.ch)
My old person trait is that I think ‘ghosting’ is completely unacceptable and you owe the other person a face-to-face conversation.
I crave mental lint. Hivemind, please share your interesting facts
Bonus points for links for me to explore
The dreaded question asked to every millenial. "Do you still have your old pokemon cards?" (lemmy.world)
OpenAI being Sued for "Stealing" Peoples Content Online (www.firstpost.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.intai.tech/post/43759...
rule (lemmy.world)
What are the best hobbys for a highschooler with no skills? who is bored alot and autistic?
Hello im a highschooler who struggles with everything and i have autism along witha few other things. i dont hav ea job and im afraid to drive ,not only tha tmos tof my tech is low end so im very limited....
ELI5: In computer networking, what is a port?
I often see that network settings have a field for logical port. What is this field.referring to?
ronald rule (possumpat.io)
GOOD games with female protagonists?
yes, i know, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and horizon zero dawn exist, and id rather i dont know them, so what else you got?
AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian (amp.theguardian.com)
Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity. They are kidding themselves
If ActivityPub can't survive Meta, it was never going to succeed in the first place (kbin.social)
Corporations don't just sit out on new technologies, and no matter how hard you try you can't force them to. Defederating from Meta's new project preemptively is naive, and will not do much of anything....
roile (possumpat.io)
Title required (lemmy.world)
Thinking about leaving lemmy.world for a more free-speech focused instance. Does anyone have any ideas?
Seeing a thread get locked just for asking if it's okay to disagree with trans people's identities really rubbed me the wrong way. I don't want moderators pushing their agenda on to me. If I see something I don't like, I can block that user or community. It'd be nice to block entire instances, but I don't think we have that...
frog rule... frule... (possumpat.io)
What would be the best way to protect a room from unwated visitors in a low-tech fantasy world?
I need this for a book I'm writing. A lot of people know about the existence of the room I'm talking about, but almost nobody has access to it.
trulley (possumpat.io)
rule (possumpat.io)
ruleiverse better (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
AI and its centralisation
I really like how products like chatgpt can make life easier and more efficient, especially for programmers. However im also kind of afraid of these projects centralised nature. Do you think there is a way to avoid the risks of smaller companies and individuals being reliant on a couple of huge companies for writing code, etc....