All of them.

Hi 30, I’m dad

Sure. America has its slimy tendrils in everyone else’s business, so it’s only fair that you have a say.

USA sux

“Gradient descent” ≈ on a “hilly” (mathematical) surface, try to find the lowest point by finding the lowest point near an initial guess. Hopefully, the lowest point near your initial guess is low enough to pass as a solution to your problem.

“Gradient” is basically the steepness, or rate that the thing you’re trying to optimize changes as you move through “space”. The gradient tells you mathematically which direction you need to go to reach the bottom. “Descent” means “try to find the minimum”.

I’m glossing over a lot of details, particularly what a “surface” actually means in the high dimensional spaces that AI uses, but a lot of problems in mathematical optimization are solved like this. And one of the steps in training an AI agent is to do an optimization, which often does use a gradient descent algorithm. That being said, not every process that uses gradient descent is necessarily AI or even machine learning. I’m actually taking a course this semester where a bunch of my professor’s research is in optimization algorithms that don’t use a gradient descent!

They created a good product so people used it and there were no alternatives when it got shit.

They created an inherently centralizing implementation of a video sharing platform. Even if it was done with good intentions (which it wasn’t, it was some capitalist’s hustle, and its social importance is a side effect), we should basically always condemn centralizing implementations of a given technology because they reinforce existing power structures regardless of the intentions of their creators.

It’s their fault because they’re a corporation that does what corporations do. Even when corporations try to do right by the world (which is an extremely generous appraisal of YouTube’s existence), they still manage to create centralizing technologies that ultimately serve to reinforce their existing power, because that’s all they can do. Otherwise, they would have set themselves up as a non-profit or some other type of organization. I refuse to accept the notion of a good corporation.

There’s no lock in. They don’t force you off the platform if you post elsewhere (like twitch did).

That’s a good point, but while there isn’t a de jure lock-in for creators, there is a de facto lock-in that prevents them from migrating elsewhere. Namely, that YouTube is a centralized, proprietary service, which can’t be accessed from other services.

Literally every corporation does or attempts to do the same thing.

Exactly. Every single corporation is evil and should be dismantled 🔥🔥🔥. This is just one of a thousand reasons to do so.

“Absolute evil” is a bit of a stretch, but it’s YouTube/Google’s fault (by closing off and centralizing their video platform) that it is impossible to go elsewhere for videos.

“We are a free speech university. But to intentionally break the rules … now you’re in the world of civil disobedience and we’re going to think about consequences.”

“Decorum is more important than the human lives you’re protesting on behalf of.”

What a bunch of clowns openly railing against civil disobedience.

I didn’t ask for your answer, I asked for your opinion. I already knew that you didn’t have the answer. Nether do I.

Amen.

I do, however, have a great love for game theory, and game theory tells me that there’s only one correct decision to make where voting in the USA in 2024 is concerned.

Any recommendations for game theory resources? I’ve been putting it off for a while.

I hope this doesn’t come across as condescending. I don’t mean it that way but people often tell me I’m being condescending.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens? I’ve been there so many times. I feel you.

I wish you all the best in life. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you in any way, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you want a conversational partner or a sympathetic ear. I’m always open to discussing the world with intelligent people.

Will do. This honestly means the world because I don’t have a lot of players in my court.

If you’re interested in communal living or alternative lifestyles (at it pertains to anarchist communities), I’m happy to help there, as well. I think I still have some friends that know folx at Emma Goldman Finishing School in Seattle. Admittedly, I don’t know if they’re looking for any new members right now, but I’d be happy to put a word in for you.

Unfortunately, I’m kinda stuck on the “poor grad student” path. Got oodles of loans to pay off, but I also got tons of new tools and solutions to technical problems that I’ll likely never be allowed to work on. IMO I’d be more useful paying their bail funds as a successful engineer than living there and being a nuisance…because I am a nuisance to live with lol. I dormed for a few semesters and I can count on two hands the number of times I ever talked to my suitemates or neighbors, and one of them was a really nice dude.

The Answer.

From the song’s lyrics:

I don’t believe you have the answer

I’ve got ideas too

but if you’ve got enough naivete

and you’ve got conviction

then the answer is perfect for you

That’s kind of an obnoxious response when you yourself said:

I fear that you’re mistaking your own pessimism for absolute truth, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.

(emphasis mine) followed by:

What, in your view, needs to be done?

Like you basically asked for my answer after saying you’d be willing to be convinced. You asked “what needs to be done?”, and I replied with things that I think need to be done. If you didn’t ask, I would have kept my mouth shut because frankly I’m pathologically disinterested in telling people what to do, probably to a fault. If you weren’t convinced then that’s fine, but it’s just kind of obnoxious to ask for an answer and then chide me for giving you my answer.

When fascists take power it’s not unheard of for them to line up commies and anarchists against a wall and shoot them.

Yes, and that’s why we need to prepare ourselves for when they do, which they WILL do regardless of who gets elected as the figurehead.

I’m all for ideological utopianism

I’m not [2]! I have explained over and over again all throughout my responses in this post’s comment section that I have very practical motivations for why voting is a waste of time. I encourage you to go through my comment history and see what I have said to others in this thread.

but preserving your moral superiority…

Yo literally the first thing I posted in this comment section was a meme dunking on the delegates and their misery, which is bar none the most engagement I have received on any comment and almost all of it negative. No one here thinks I’m morally superior. And in case you were wondering, I don’t like me either.

So let’s explicitly do away with the moral superiority pretense [1].

… is little comfort when you and your family are staring down the barrel of a fascist’s gun.

Yes, exactly, that’s why we need to build our community defenses against these fascist pricks before they kill us, keeping in mind that we’re in a liberal dominated community on a “civility-at-all-costs” instance where we’re not allowed to talk seriously about revolution!

But as I have said to other users, particularly the comment you initially replied to:

I got no beef with people voting for Democrats in the general election, even though I disagree with their choice, because it doesn’t affect the outcome of anything. My beef is with these delegates, these people in a position of influence and power.

So go vote Democrat if that makes you feel safe, I’m not going to bring it up again because it doesn’t matter, but I’m not gonna pretend that it’s helpful.

But also keep in mind that these are the assholes who platformed a cop over a Palestinian in the middle of their genocide…

Again, I invite you to reread what I’ve commented to you so far, and to go through my comment history and see what I’ve said to others.

[1] Really, my position is, boiled down, that supposedly “practical” solutions that violate common morality (for example, letting people die to save money in *insert industry here*) are not really practical at all. This inextricably couples practicality to morality.

Frankly, as a human actor who fails to always act practically, I acknowledge that for similar reasons, sometimes I also fail to act morally, i.e. in laughing at the pain of other humans because they happen to collude with an evil institution. Hence why I reject the idea that I am morally superior, and that I have asserted as such anywhere in this comment section.

And in the sense that the means should reflect the ends, I admit that I haven’t lived up to my own ideals, out of anger and irritation at the constant stream of bullshit being foisted on me and everyone I know by these very Democrat ghouls.

But I don’t believe that I need to be a perfect moral actor to speak out about Palestine and the fascists at the DNC!

[2] For similar reasons as those in [1], ideology should be coupled to practicality, which itself should be coupled to morality. Hence why I’m not interested in anarchism as a utopian ideology where anything is prescribed, but as a practical solution for humanity to overcome capitalism.

Unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/JeMpG

We’re failures as shitposters when a shitpost generates that much drama

Hard disagree lol, I love when a shitpost actually gets people to debate about important things. So many people would just never think about that stuff otherwise.

Haha, that and the two running box fans I have on full blast pointing at my head and pillow are my greatest sources of comfort.

Yes I like being really really cold.

Not really? Although I’m probably way more tolerant to (wideband!) noise than others because I sleep literally inches from two box fans.

But you don’t need to run it while you’re sleeping. It goes from room temperature to ice in under 10 minutes (20 minutes for the “good” ice after the insides have had a bit of time to cool down).

To be clear, what I have is a Frigidaire portable ice maker. Here’s its Walmart product page, although I can’t vouch for Walmart’s website respecting your privacy.

I actually bought a knockoff of this a couple years ago off Amazon, and it worked for about a year, but:

1. The infrared sensor was crap from day 1, so I always had to manually override the machine’s decision that the ice was full, even when it was completely empty.
2. The water where I was living (dorm room in city) was much…harder I think? It was safe to drink, I even tested it myself, but whatever minerals were in it very quickly fucked up my machine’s internals. I’m living at my parents house with better water.

So far, the Frigidaire is a much better unit, and I use it tremendously more often because I don’t have to babysit the thing and constantly override the infrared sensor.

The water supply is just an ordinary tank. Basically just open the lid, dump a Super Big Gulp of water into the tank every few hours and you’re set. Everything is self contained.

It doesn’t keep the ice cool for you, i.e. it’s not a freezer. Once the ice gets dumped in the bucket, you’re on your own.

So if you go down this route, I recommend getting a decent version of it. Mine cost about $87 in store from Walmart but I really bought this unit as an impulse buy, so I imagine you can get it cheaper if you do some shopping.

That happened on reddit all the time, minus the instance part. Remember /r/freefolk?

The “instance part” is absolutely huge. If I wanted to, I could go start a /c/lemmyshitpost on SDF Lemmy [1] with a completely new set of rules [2], particularly a set of rules that possibly would violate Lemmy.world’s TOS or possibly even the law in Lemmy.world’s jurisdiction, but not SDF’s or their jurisdiction’s laws.

It’s not a big deal for the average user until the day you run afoul of the server admins.

[1] As of writing this, SDF does not have a /c/lemmyshitpost.

[2] I’m not interested in doing that lol, this is just a hypothetical. I’m annoyed at this most recent decision but nowhere near ready to leave over it.

No just one user lol

Very nearly! I have desk that I scrounged from the garbage literally right up against the bed and a nightstand right next to it. It’s on the desk since the nightstand holds my TV.

So it’s not literally on a nightstand, but it is literally bedside, i.e. I can use it without getting out of bed.

I think moderating comments needs to be banished.

Nah because then someone could just post (for example) medical gore in a “safe space” and it’ll just get downvoted but not removed.

It wasn’t gore, but do you remember the ThuleanPerspective (I think?) trolls from a little while back, spamming that racist photoshopped Simpsons comic by commenting it on literally everything? That effort was neutralized in the short term by deleting those comments on the spot, and then the users who posted them.

It is absolutely a useful tool, but like most useful tools it can be abused.