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Cake day: July 1st, 2024

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  • I think you’re wildly underestimating the influence of those sites. And even beyond those sites, think about how many sites can only exist because of payments from ads served by those same operators. It’s true they don’t control the whole Internet, but they sure have a ton of power.

    I also don’t think the level of control Trump will have over PBS is worse than the influence he’ll exert over mainstream media sites through the threat of legal harassment alongside his indirect control of the discourse on Twitter.

    I guess mostly I remember the Internet in the days before it got so corporate, when it was wild and wooly, and all the sites were bizarre little labors of love created purely because someone just really wanted to post information about their Special Interest. (E.g., I had an old Tripod site that was just a detailed explanation of the shape of a module for a five intersecting tetrahedra origami model, complete with folding diagrams and descriptions of the approximations I’d used to simplify it and how the lengths related to each other. Then my hard drive crashed and I went to grab those files back from my site and discovered they’d deleted the whole thing because I hadn’t updated the site, which had never occurred to me because, well, it was just this info, it didn’t need updating. Those were the early days of corporatization.)

    So when I picture a public-subsidized Internet, that’s pretty much what I think of. People being people, sharing information out of weird enthusiasm. I think it would work in practice because we’ve had that kind of thing before. Lemmy is honestly kind of a similar thing right now; it’s just that some kind, generous souls are paying for the servers, which is likely going to be hard to sustain eventually.

    I dunno. It’s dark times for sure.



  • I think it’s reasonably likely. There was a research paper about how to do basically that a couple years ago. If you need a basic LLM trained on a specialized form of input and output, getting the expensive existing LLMs to generate that text for you is pretty efficient/inexpensive, so it’s a reasonable way to get a baseline model. Then you can add stuff like chain of reasoning and mixture of experts to improve the performance back up to where you need it. It’s not going to be a way to push the state of the art forward, but it’s sure a cheap way to catch up to models that have done that pushing.


  • I wouldn’t really say Republicans deliver what they say they’ll deliver. A week before election Trump was saying he’d have grocery prices lower on day one, and then as soon as he was elected he suddenly became aware that was complicated and the wouldn’t be anything he could do about it. Part of his campaign the first time around, too, was that he would provide a brilliant replacement for Obamacare, but after four years he’d done absolutely nothing on that front, and four years after that he still insisted he was going to do that, but admitted that he only had “concepts of a plan.”

    They carry out a lot of the culture war aspects of their promises. And they carry out the promises they make to their billionaire megadonors. Everything else they hope gets forgotten about.









  • monotremata@lemmy.catolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldDaily Driving
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    1 month ago

    There are a lot of reasons people might want to switch to Linux from Windows, but I don’t think it’s usually the GUI that’s the main problem on the Windows side. I think it’s pretty reasonable to want the GUI to work in the way you’re used to but still want an OS that doesn’t shove ads at you, install AI without your permission, bug you about Teams and OneDrive, reboot every time it needs to update anything, etc.








  • monotremata@lemmy.cato196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    2 months ago

    IIRC the application was just “edit.com”, as in “edit autoexec.bat”. The different kinds of memory were expanded memory, extended memory, and the high memory area; high memory was useful regardless which of the other two you were using, and those two were for the most part kind of interchangeable. You also typically had to mess with config.sys, which handled some things like the mouse driver. It was really common to have specific floppy disks that had only those two files on them (well, and were set to be bootable), so that if you needed a particular configuration for some game–maybe you didn’t load the CD-ROM driver, since that took up a lot of precious low-memory kilobytes–you could leave your normal setup alone and just stick your custom boot disk in for that program. Some programs were really tricky to make enough room for, even if you had a ton of RAM, because that privileged low ram area was so hard to manage.