Hey language-learners, what's your tip for improving your ear? I can read French pretty well, with a glossary, and I can write it OK, but my hearing is garbage.
@atomicpoet this is Sony. They've shown in the past decade that they're unable to learn, they'll just try to squeeze the next one in a few months from now and hope nobody notices.
So there's a lot of kvetching, from myself included, about how the modern internet has gotten worse, usually due to a combination of SEO, social media gone evil, and the prevalence of money as more and more of a guiding factor in tech.
But of course the old internet had the problem of being fairly boring. The interesting question is how to get a third way. I've heard a few proposals:
@ZachWeinersmith FWIW, I disagree that the Internet of old was boring. Despite its technical limitations and questionable accessibility to the general public, it was in fact often much more interesting than the modem web.
(Also, the answer to the art issue is, a for many other things, universal basic income.)
This is probably just the communities I'm in, but it feels like whereas AI art had a fairly serious backlash, AI music has not? Is this your impression?
@ZachWeinersmith much less used, mostly trained on long-dead artists, longer history of procedural music generation with human-designed (as opposed to “scrape content everywhere”) algorithms. Very different situation.
A curious math problem I came up with: given a target, what's the fewest digits an integer must have (in a given base) to contain all integers from 0 to the target, as substrings?
e.g. for a target of 19 a candidate representative would be 1011213141516171819 in base 10, that has 19 digits. Can it be done in less, or is $\sigma_10(19) = 19$?
Can we find a general rule? Any properties of this function?
So I wanted to post a question about a #math problem, and I wanted to reach the widest possible math community on the #Fediverse. Aside from using the correct tag, my first thought was to find a #Lemmy or #kbin community/magazine to cc in the post. And … there isn't one. There's many. Just from a quick search I found https://lemmy.ml/c/mathematics https://lemmy.ml/c/math https://kbin.social/m/math
so now the question becomes … should I cross post to all of them? Or is that poor form?
I'm getting the impression that the kbin magazine would automatically include the post in the “microblog” section if properly tagged, which is actually one of the nice features of kbin, so maybe I can skip that one at least …
The problem with building a closed social network is that it sets up an all or nothing premise for users. They might like some of the signature features but they'll leave if there's not enough people to network with. That's a shame and a huge barrier to innovation and new social products.
The #fediverse changes that forever. People can now use the features they like from a mix of apps across a common network of people. This means we can take a whole new approach to how "social" and "media" should work including discovery, user experience and monetization that will be far healthier than anything we've had in the past.
@mike the only current limitation of the Fediverse is that to fully leverage the features of one server you'll need an account there and use its frontend. I look forward at an evolution of the system where the backend is fully content-agnostic and different frontends can be used with the same account. THAT will be perfection.
@clith@mike but Mastodon is only good (if at that) for microblogging. Its interface is designed for that. PixelFed, PeerTube, lemmy, kbin etc have very different interfaces optimized for specific ways to interact with posts, images, videos, etc. And while you can interact with content from any of these platforms from any other platform, the experience is … suboptimal —and that's assuming you can at all.
@clith@mike for example, Mastodon has extremely poor support for ActivityPub Image objects, which is why PixelFed actually shares Notes instead of Images (which would be more appropriate): it does it to work around a limitation in Mastodon's design that no frontend can fix, because the content mangling happens at the server (backend) level, see also https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/24079 . And if you want a more type-specific experience, you actually do need multiple accounts on different services.
@clith@mike this is overall detrimental to the Fediverse and ActivityPub. What would be a better approach? One where the server is largely content-agnostic, and just takes care of account management and content distribution, with frontends taking care of the presentation. This way you could have “the PixelFed experience”, “the PeerTube experience”, “the Mastodon experience”, “the Lemmy experience” etc all from one single account (and PixelFed wouldn't have to fake its content type).
@clith@mike there are projects working in that direction, such as Vocata https://codeberg.org/Vocata/vocata, that also draws the useful parallel on email, differentiating the MTA from the MUA.
@tchambers@fediversenews
honestly, I could see it coming a mile away, and I have no problem saying : good riddance. It was a futureless gimmick to capitalize on the 2022 Twitter exodus, possibly even intentionally to distract from the Fediverse, while playing lip service with vague promises. Its growth was inflated by a pyramid-scheme onboarding, and I still remember some of the shady stuff they pulled, like assembling fake profiles «this is where you could follow $person if they were here».
I understand the importance of alt text for images. But as I was drafting my image description just now a question occurred to me – in adding alt text to images am I also inadvertently making it easier for the AI bots to scrape my artwork?
@beach yes. IIRC that's why @harriorrihar doesn't do it. Ultimately it's a matter of personal preference on the balance between accessibility and this risk (for example, @davidrevoy provides extremely detailed ones instead), with a seasoning of visibility (images with alt text get boosted more and thus reach wider in the Fediverse, reaching more humans but also raising the chance it will be scraped).
10-year-old just got to function stuff and I'm having trouble explaining in general why you should care which variable is dependent vs independent? Other than that, in stats, you should know the direction of causality, does this sort of thing matter?
@ZachWeinersmith It matters in many contexts. Things like derivation, integration, injection, surjection etc all depend on the fact that a function takes elements FROM one set and transforms them TO elements of another set, and the properties of the “source” and “destination” matter.
The importance seems more tenuous for invertible real-value functions of real values because you can always think of the inverse function as being “equivalent”, but in the more general context it matters a lot.
The xz fiasco has shown how a dependence on unpaid volunteers can cause major problems. Trillion dollar corporations like Microsoft expect free and urgent support from ffmpeg volunteers. They posted on a bug tracker full of volunteers that their issue is "high priority". After politely requesting a support contract from Microsoft for long term maintenance, they offered a one-time payment of a few thousand dollars instead. Full story here https://x.com/ffmpeg/status/1775178803129602500?s=46
@tchambers this is an excellent example of how to do things wrong. The White House has the resources to set up its own Fediverse nodes. That it doesn't and instead endorses a proprietary platform is borderline criminal.
I’m guessing that Trump’s marketing strategy for his bibles involves driving around the dustbowl, obituaries in hand, and convincing recent widows that their late husbands had ordered them (COD, of course).
I'm rather new to the Linux ecosystem on my private desktop and with the new update for Stardew Valley, I installed the native version of the game via the provided .sh script. However, as bugfixes are already announced, I'm considering what to do when these updates hit the store....
@ZachWeinersmith absolutely in favor. It's interesting that you have trouble imagining it in practice because Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, a network of interoperable platforms. You can like, comment and share PeerTube videos or PixelFed photos from Mastodon, or post and reply to Lemmy threads, and so on
Today, 3/14, is Pi Day in the US, where the date corresponds to the first three significant digits of the eponymous mathematical constant. Europeans find this baffling, since there, under the metric system, Pi is exactly 10.
In light of recent events, I'm actually thinking about defederating the "opt-in" purists for the following reasons:
They did not actually opt into receiving my posts, therefore they shouldn't have access to them
They so far refuse to join or operate a whitelisted version of the Fediverse that is specifically opt-in
Despite this inconsistency, they are dogpiling and harassing people who do not share their vision of an opt-in version of the Fediverse
Each time someone who's a total beginner experiments with the ActivityPub spec, the opt-in purists respond with ugliness, and this is toxic to the future of the Fediverse itself
I do not want to subject myself to death threats, or worse, simply for expressing an opinion that is different from the opt-in purists
This is not something I'm going to pursue immediately, but certainly considering this quite heavily. Either way, if the opt-in purists won't create their own opt-in version of the Fediverse, then I'm likely going to opt out of federation with them.
@atomicpoet beyond purism, there's a matter of expectations. When someone posts publicly, they generally do so with the expectation that it may be read by anybody. But that doesn't mean that there's an expectation anybody is allowed to do whatever they want with what they read. I see a parallel with this in the difference between Internet search engines and “AI” scrapers.
Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu ( www.theverge.com )
How do I update native Linux games?
I'm rather new to the Linux ecosystem on my private desktop and with the new update for Stardew Valley, I installed the native version of the game via the provided .sh script. However, as bugfixes are already announced, I'm considering what to do when these updates hit the store....