I really enjoyed Lain as a work of speculative fiction, especially watching it in 2019 and being able to compare and contrast the portrayal of computer’s effects on society with what “actually” happened as we moved more and more of our lives onto the internet.

The “actual” story/plot (message?) only really came together after watching a long YouTube video (actually, I read the transcript / script as a blog post so it wasn’t as long for me to get through it). If I had had the patience I think I would have preferred rewatching until I “got” it, but there’s so much else out there to experience. Maybe some day I’ll sit down and do a “proper” rewatch.

A good part of the initial enjoyment for me was the vibes and letting the different scenes slowly add up onto each other in the back of my mind.

As others have said in this thread already, it’s not necessarily the most coherent nor meaningful story as it is conveyed. Being depressed can unironically help it make sense (though I would never ever recommend getting depressed just to better understand Lain or any story really, your mental wellbeing is more important!).

The shots of telephone lines with audio of power line hums and the weird purple/red splotches are probably some of my favorite bits, and they’re what I immediately think of whenever Lain gets brought up.

I came across https://defed.xyz/ the other day, but it doesn’t seem to fully report everything.

I don’t think anyone can host a relay right now aside from bluesky.

People can host their own data / Personal Data Server, which is somewhere between self-hosting a mastodon instance and creating an account on someone else’s instance. The actual equivalent would be self-hosting your masto account separately from any instance (which is just not a thing with the current state of mastodon nor activity pub).

I like the idea, but then who gets to decide who is and isn’t a credible source? Is it only intra-account verifying? Can anyone verify anyone else, or do you need to be authorized by bluesky to start verifying others?

Succinctly put, though I got some cognitive dissonance when the author wrote about bluesky being their choice of decentralized network to get involved with without even mentioning the hosting costs involved with running a bsky relay (or whichever component of the ATP network actually holds the data “firehose”).

According to this article it took a server that costs around $150/month over 4 days to spin up a working relay, most of which was spent ingurgitating half a terabyte of data (that’s what ended up on disk in any case). Far from exorbitant, yet if I want to self host for my own personal needs it’s still gobs more data and compute than any activity pub software needs.

Maybe my view of “decentralization as in democracy” is just fundamentally different from the author’s. I get the feeling that to them, as long as each friend group has 1 self-hoster in it then democracy through decentralization is preserved. This would make sense that they orient themselves towards something like bluesky and the AT protocol. Personally, I don’t think we should be satisfied with that level of decentralization/democracy - it’s a nice start, but we should strive for reaching at least 50% of people self-hosting an activity pub instance to truly achieve the type of decentralization that serves democracy. Of course, I’m not aware of any activity pub software that can be selfhosted by even 10% of the population, currently, so there’s definitely a lot of work to do before my vision is feasible.

Thank you!!!

Doo you happen to have a good, informative link? Or perhaps a company name I could look up?

This sounds incredibly cool.

Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me

Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me

Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!!!

Those that wear ties are justified

For wearin the suit, you’re the chosen white

Ooooh, that’s a good first test / “sanity check” !

May I ask what you are using as a summarizer? I’ve played around with locally running models from huggingface, but never did any tuning nor straight-up training “from scratch”. My (paltry) experience with the HF models is that they’re incapable of staying confined to the given context.

I’m not sure if this is how @hersh@literature.cafe is using it, but I could totally see myself using an LLM to check my own understanding like the following:

1. Read a chapter
2. Read the LLM’s summary of the chapter
3. Make sure I can understand and agree or disagree with each part of the LLM’s summary.

Ironically, this exercise works better if the LLM “hallucinates”; noticing a hallucination in its summary is a decent metric for my own understanding of the chapter.

Week starts with church day, as God intended!

(I don’t actually know the reason, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the reasoning for the Gregorian calendar)

That happened to me at first as well. What made it feasible was to reconsider how I was approaching the fights

I haven’t seen inside out 2, but the first one remains one of my favorite Pixar movie ever. I think addiction would make a perfect addition for inside out 3, or whichever number they’ll be on when Riley is old enough for a Pixar movie that talks about addiction to be made about her.

“dise-player, carder”
Ah, so this is probably some law trying to curb gambling-
“tenys player” wait, what? Were people betting on tennis matches back in the day or something?

I wonder what other applications this might have outside of machine learning. I don’t know if, for example, intensive 3d games absolutely need 16bit floats (or larger), or if it would make sense to try using this “additive implementation” for their floating point multiplicative as well. Modern desktop gaming PCs can easily slurp up to 800W.

the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.

Even though I fully expect the police here aren’t doing as much as they could (I mean come on, are they expecting phones to come with wiimote hand straps?) , I’m at least glad their public rhetoric is that they can’t “arrest their way out of the problem”.

I imagine that’s poor compensation when you’ve just had your phone snatched, however.

Comme by !rance@jlai.lu !

Je pense qu’on est moins nombreux mais on s’y amuse quand même.

There was a good (albeit short) conference at FOSDEM2020 that gave an overview of a bunch of different “prior work” with regards to government using open source: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/municipal_government/

With regards to other comments about Munich, the speaker touches on that case starting at 7 minutes into the conf, and highlights how it differs/differed from other, more successful, cases.

Wow, I think that’s the first fedi instance I’ve ever seen that’s more or less dedicated to a single video game. Very cool.