it's possible Yann LeCun wasn't the right guy either. He seemed to be more focused at finding the next model architecture rather than iterating on the current LLM architecture to build a competitive frontier model.
local newspaper with an online version. You can then use the online version to try to use to hook the people into some alternative online platform for the community (a mailing list, a forum, something more advanced)
The amazing thing about QuakeLive is that it initially ran in a browser window. I'm not sure how it was implemented, but it was amazing and it supported Mac and Linux as well. I wonder why they then decided to make it into a Windows only desktop app.. :-(
The reason I use python scripts instead of spreadsheets for important calculations is that I can unit test the logic extensively and be sure that the code works as expected. This also makes sure I don't break stuff when adding functionalities / refactoring code.
I would never ever use Excel for something important, unless it's completely trivial (e.g., sum/average values of a column).
I assume the same applies to R vs spreadhseets, of course.
what do you use for syntax highlighting? I have tried a few options but can't quite get what I need. I like url hiding (or is it called folding?) that VimWiki does for md files, but I hate that VimWiki's does not really follow the md standard
> Last I read the UK intends to centrally retain proximity-contact data for 20 years. Rather than deleting when it is decided it's no longer needed to deal with the pandemic.
The UK has also refused to legally commit to not sharing the data with other government departments such as the Home Office (immigration and policing) and DWP (benefits).
that's scary..
any chance you can share the references for these?
> People don't like being tracked and Facebook has a long history of being deceptive around how and when it tracks people.
you are mixing unrelated things. As an employee of a company it's unlikely you can raise any concern about your privacy when working on the company's main asset.
> Facebook also has a long history of selling the data it collects as a result of tracking even when the people being tracked try as they might to opt out.
very sorry to hear that. Debit cards are convenient etc, but they don't offer much in terms of fraud protection. The general suggestion is to always use a credit card instead so that you don't expose your own money to theft, but the bank's.
I remember I accidentally come to know about Masters of Doom which got me interested in Game Programming. Googling around I found a number of interesting articles such as "1500 archers on a 28.8: Network programming in Age of Empires and beyond", and I eventually stumbled upon Fabien Sanglard's site. The guy is great and I waited eagerly for the release of his book (hopefully the first of a long series) :)
what leaves me skeptic about these kind of alternative services like GNUSocial and Diaspora is not much when, if ever, or how they will be able to attract the necessary critical mass of users that makes them relevant. Instead, it what would happen after that. The main two questions I would be interested in would be:
(1) do they scale to the size of, say, Twitter (~400M Daily Active Users, Facebook ~1B DAU)?
(2) what would be their business model?
The thing is.. hypothetically GNUSocial is very nice. It's free software, it's an open protocol, you are supposedly in perfect control of your personal data. In theory, there's no reason not to prefer it to the current state of things (if only you could make it appealing to your grandma or 14 years-old cousin).
However, when, for instance, the Justin Biebers, the Lady Gagas, the Obamas join it together with their hundreds of millions of followers, or simply when the tweets per minute reach hundreds of thousand or even millions, can the GNUSocial protocol ensure a reliable and responsive (~ real time) service? And if it does, what's the maintenance and hardware cost for the confederations? And how are they supposed to financially cover for it?
Sure, there are services based on open protocols that have been extremely successful at scaling (e.g., email, or bittorrent), still, they have different requirements than a social network. Can we make an open social network of independent confederations scale? Probably yes, but whether GNUSocial is ready for it or not is an open question (as far as I know..).
In any case, take the example of the email. The protocol is open, there's a "confederation" of independent providers taking part to it. It handles a massive amount of data every day. You don't even have necessarily to store your data on a cloud server. That's great.
Still, at the end of the day everyone uses free mail services (GMail, Yahoo, you name it), heavily maintained by hundreds/thousands of dedicated (and skilled, and expensive) engineers, storing gigabytes of your data (backed up and redundantly replicated over different geographical areas), and financing themselves using targeted advertising. Sure, you can pay your own, trusted, mail provider an annual fee and have (apparently?) complete control over your data. But how many people actually use these services outside of the work environment (where your employer actually covers the cost)? And I'm not talking about the community of hackernews readers. I'm talking about your non-techy friends, your relatives, the random guy/gal you meet at the pub, that is, the people that ultimately are necessary for your service to reach a critical mass.