stay a while and dwell in the fediverse or are you afraid you might enjoy it?

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • While being an environment issue, the plastic wrappings have a practical purpose: protect food from roaches. In many japanese cities you cannot have food open without attracting gokiburi within a few hours. This is also why the japanese keep everything as clean as possible. Even in the shadiest places there is someone with a vaccuum and a stickytape floor roller(!) to prevent the smallest crumb from staying on the floor too long. Eating on the move in the streets is frowned upon, because fallen down crumbs attract roaches. Public trashcans are rare, because - you guessed it - roaches. You are expected to carry any trash back home and put it in a sealed bag in your trashbin. The typical size of japanese houses and flats does not offer much space for storing large food containers, so you buy your food in small portions.

    Of course a more environment-friendly wrapping would be better, but it has to be able to withstand a roach nibbling on it, which is not the case for various organic-based polymers.


  • Do not expect you can offer this service for a competive price against cloud prices. Caring for a company IT system is a big challenge and requires more work the more users there are.

    For a company this size: make a clear contract. Consider how much time you need for setup/installation, monthly hours for maintenance, monitoring and at least daily(!) backups. Let them choose if they want it with a failover and charge for the required hours and material. Also put in the contract when they can expect support from you, including a clause for a holiday substitute admin (if needed). Then put a pricetag on support hours for holding people’s hands when they “can’t find that file they uploaded a week ago and it is surely a server issue” and put a pricetag on engineering hours for any modifications they might want, like installing any plugins they deem useful for themselves. Hardware prices, traffic, rack space and power should be included as well. Have a good plan for updates, choose your distro wisely, do not rely on autoupdates.

    Play all this through in your head, add up the hours, choose a fair rate and then you have your pricetag.

    Cloud will always be cheaper, because they have their infrastructure already deployed. Building from the ground up is more expensive, but I think it is worth it. Will they?


  • But…isn’t unsupervised backfeeding the same as simply overtraining the same dataset? We already know overtraining causes broken models.

    Besides, the next AI models will be fed with the interactions from humans with AI, not just it’s own content. ChatGPT already works like this, it learns with every interaction, every chat.

    And the generative image models will be fed with AI-assisted images where humans will have fixed flaws like anatomy (the famous hands) or other glitches.

    So as interesting as this is, as long as humans interact with AI the hybrid output used for training will contain enough new “input” to keep the models on track. There are already refined image generators trained with their own but human-assisted output that are better than their predecessor.


  • GoogleTalk once federated with XMPP/jabber, good times until their userbase was big enough to deferedate again, crippling the jabber network. It will happen again if we let it.

    Metas plan is to draw users into their network and use the fediverse as an initial catalyst (“look! so much content already there!”). Once their userbase is large enough, they will deferate again claiming protocol difficulties or something equally vague, but they will just want to start rolling out advertising which would not be displayed to users from other instances. Most users will not keep two accounts and jusy stay with the big corp and leave the original fediverse again.