i didn’t downvote you, and i went to school before a bunch of things but technology evolves and either we evolve with it or we end up being just straight up wrong in a modern context
i didn’t downvote you, and i went to school before a bunch of things but technology evolves and either we evolve with it or we end up being just straight up wrong in a modern context
not exactly because of pairs unless you’re talking about 1 and 0 being a pair… it’s because the maximum number you can count in binary doubles with each additional bit you add:
with 1 bit, you can either have 0 or 1… which is, unsurprisingly perhaps, 0 and 1 respectively - 2 numbers
with 2 bits you can have 00, 01, 10, 11… which is 0, 1, 2, 3 - 4 numbers
with 3 bits you can have 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111… which is 0 to 7- 8 numbers
so you see the pattern: add a bit, double the number you can count to… this is the “2 to the power of” that you might see: with 8 bits (a byte) you can count from 0 to 255 - that’s 2 (because binary has 2 possible states per digit) to the power of 8 (because 8 digits); 8^2
the same is true of decimal, but instead of to the 2 to the power, it’s 10 to the power: with each additional digit, you can count 10 x as many numbers - 0-9 for 1 digit, 00-99 for 2 digits, 000-999 for 3 digits - 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 respectively
and that’s the reason we use hexadecimal sometimes too! we group bits into groups of 8 and call it a byte… hexadecimal is base 16, so nicely lets us represent a byte with just 2 characters - 16^2 = 256 = 2^8
which is why we have kibi, mebi, gibi, etc
kilobyte (KB) is 1000, kibibyte (KiB) is 1024
at least according the the IEC, and id tend to go with them… SI units say that kilo means 1000
kinda the same reason people suggest something like linux mint over slackware, gentoo, arch, etc… mint is easy to install and is preconfigured to be an easy to use user desktop environment. you can configure any other option to be have like that, but they tend to be a bit more “DIY”, which is great if you know what you’re doing!
dedicated NAS OSes will have good software out of the box that make it easy to configure and manage various common disk-related configurations (RAID, SMB, NFS, etc). you can certainly do all this yourself, but it might not have a pretty, unified user interface, or you might have to deal with software that isn’t compatible with some version of a library that’s in your distro of choice… all resolvable things, but they take time to solve: anywhere from installing a package manually to applying a kernel patch and recompiling the kernel to get something to work
i’d avoid BIOS-based RAID… it doesn’t really offer many benefits over linux-based raid like MDADM, and MDADM offers a LOT of up-sides for portability, repairability, diagnostics, etc
let’s not go too far though… the holders of h264/h265 did put a lot of money and effort into developing the codec: a new actual thing… they are not patent trolls, who by definition produce nothing new other than legal mess
i think this is the perfect time for the phrase “thanks i hate it”
inhabiting a boston dynamics robot would probably be the best option
i’d say it could probably use airtasker to get people to unwittingly do assembly of some basic physical form which it could use to build more complex things… i’d probably not count that as “human assistance” per se
afaik activitypub/fediverse doesn’t have to be fully open… there’s private messages and followers only profiles on mastodon… sure, any server admins of your followed would be able to see anything you post (and thus in this case for threads for example, if you accept any follower from threads then meta can see your stuff) but this also doesn’t grant them a license to use the content
also, bluesky will eventually be the same: it only doesn’t have those issues now because they haven’t opened up their software… it’ll have federation in the future, which means it has to be somewhat programmatically open to others
i feel like i need to preface this comment with the fact that this is undeniably a bad thing and no amount of “but on the flip side” will change that, but it’s interesting to express regardless…
this could lead to a few interesting situations:
i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative
now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms
i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle
ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create
the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated
the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated
with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original
that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this
current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue
id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)
but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”
it’s only qualitative because we don’t understand it
when an LLM “experiences” new data via training, that’s subjective too: it works its way through the network in a manner that’s different depending on what came before it… if different training data came before it, the network would look differently and the data would change the network as a whole in a different way
and experience is ongoing learning, so if an LLM were training on things after the pretraining period then that’d allow it to be creative in your definition?
but in that case, what’s the difference between doing that all at once, and doing it over a period of time?
experience is just tweaking your neurons to make new/different connections
from what i understand, solid state batteries are legitimately about as revolutionary as lithium ion were because they are all of those things, and by their very nature they have a huge number of charge cycles
… whether this specific announcement results in a mass-production-capable battery is another story
change has nothing to do with people until it does… change is just change. change when it comes to people and social systems is effective only when it effects the majority of people that are touched by an issue. voting 3rd party after not for some time is change of a kind, but i wouldn’t call it social change
social change comes when a large number of people decide something should be different, and the mathematics and sociology behind first past the post means that it’d take something so close to impossible that it’s not worth classing in the realms of possibility for a 3rd party to have any effect on the political system
the reality of the system is that the US is a 2 party system… the statistics of FPTP, and the game theory that leads to defensive voting, spoiler effect, and any number of other bad outcomes ensures that
within such a system, you just can’t hope to have an outcome other than 1 of the 2 parties having any real impact, thus you have to change 1 of the parties to be the way you want it to be, or you must change the system
you could argue that voting 3rd party forces the parties to change their positions, but historically that hasn’t really happened so i personally wouldn’t hold my breath
vote defensively, and work to change the system… because changing the system is incremental, achievable, and less subject to the whims of a few
in fact it’s literally the basis for the “tools” functionality in the new openai/chatgpt stuff!
that “browse the web”, “execute code”, etc is all the LLM formatting things in a specific way
both sides support israel, 1 side is on the record as having said that israel’s reaction is overboard… no action still, but both sides are not the same
i’m absolutely not pink washing… republicans are horrific to queers… given that you’ve even suggested that, you’re pretty much beyond reason, but i will say: just look at the don’t say gay bullshit in florida… culture wars cause huge increases in suicide rates amongst the queer community
im not got blue no matter who; im vote in the way that’s most likely to produce a positive outcome in things you want to change… on every metric and category, right now, that’s getting as many people as possible to vote democrat… id suggest people look at republicans if they had policies that weren’t detestable around:
… but they don’t
i believe the general attitude on the threadiverse is that down votes are not a great option: they should represent low quality or untruth rather than simply dislike. given this preference, and downvote to hide might overload the downvote function: no longer is it a last resort, but it’s a normal part of browsing your feed. i’ve seen nothing but staunch opposition to overusing h the down vote feature in this manner