Not ideologically pure.

  • 2 Posts
  • 328 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 8th, 2024

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  • cabbage@piefed.socialtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.worldAm I ugly?
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    6 days ago

    Over on Reddit, people posting pictures of some good looking person and asking “am I ugly” is a pretty common way of farming karma. Whatever the fuck karma is, that’s beyond the point here.

    Reverse image search is a way to find where pictures have been posted before using Google. Here’s the search for your image. It appears Google and Reddit has gotten bad to the point where they say your picture was posted 7 years ago, even though this would appear to be false.

    Combine the two, and there’s a perfect storm where people assume you’re some 50 year old guy with a weird kink. Sorry about that.






  • If you want this as a platform to socialize, I think the best thing you can do is to follow your interests, see if there are communities in what you’re interested in here already, and if there are not see if you can get one started.

    One community I find particularly inspiring is !superbowl@lemmy.world, initiated by a single user (@anon6789@lemmy.world) who is making an amazing effort and now attracting quite a bit of attention from a bunch of followers.

    But of course, it can also be challenging to build a community, as well as time consing - I have to admit I don’t really interact that much with online communities myself these days.




  • I think, on your end, my user name probably shows as just “cabbage”, not “@cabbage”. Which indicates it’s a user name (not exclusive), not a handle (exclusive).

    Similarly, OP shows up to me as “Aurora (she/her)” rather than “aurora_glamour”, which is her handle. Piefed still displays the instance though.

    It might not be ideal, as it makes imposters possible. Then again, that has always been the case by using visually identical Unicode characters, so it’s not entirely a new problem.





  • ActivityPub is absolutely not suited for private communication. I guess you could in theory transfer encrypted content over AP as well, but it’s not what it is designed for and it generally makes little sense for content in a public forum like this. I don’t think anyone thinks otherwise.

    This is not what is proposed though. For E2EE, Rimu suggests the following:

    Encrypt all user communications, private messages, and sensitive data

    So to keep user data encrypted on the server, as well as looking into finding a way to encrypt private messages. I think it’s hard to argue this wouldn’t be at least a minor change for the better, giving instance administrators less insight into the private data of the users (and thereby also making them less vulnerable to law enforcement).

    Of course this wouldn’t make PieFed or Lemmy or whatever a good replacement for Signal. It is not supposed to be. It’s a public forum. But it can still do its best to protect the identity of the users in this public forum, even with the inherent limitations of the format.



  • I wish authors behind pieces like this would stop confounding AI and machine learning. People read stuff like this and end up believing that a language model managed to discover new metal alloys. The use of generative AI for an illustration certainly does not help.

    That illustration is, however, not the fault of the journalist - it’s credited a prompt by Skoltech PR. So the PR department of the research institute itself thought some generative AI image was the best possible way to illustrate this. Which makes me a bit sceptical.

    The cited lead author currently has one citation in Google Scholar, which seems to be the product of some workshop on LLMs. Another publication is on financial time series (famously not a field deprived of complexity), and now the author is suddenly an expert of metal alloys. I’m all for supporting young researchers, but I’m also a fan of trying to understand one field before jumping to the next.

    The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, a private institute in Moscow, started out in 2011 with scientific help from MIT and financial backing from the Russian state. In 2022 MIT cut their partnership for obvious reasons. I’m not sure this helps to inspire confidence, but then again I’m sure there are qualified people working there.

    Then we have the concerns voiced already in this thread - can we even count on any of these findings to hold at all, if they didn’t bother actually putting anything to the test beyond their possibly faulty model.

    Of course, this new paper is published in Nature, which is pretty renowned and has only occasionally fucked up by publishing grifters. And I don’t know the first thing about material science to assess the value of this research. Would love to hear if anyone closer to the field could give their take on it.