can’t see how this can possibly be a good thing, you know it will mean funding with conditions.

Well, the things they are funding will get funded? How is that a bad thing?!

The conditions range from very broad, like “fix bugs” (curl), over somewhat specific like “improve cross-platform compatibility and the Linux RNG” (Wireguard), to very specific like “create a test-suite and drive development on the Fediverse account migration functionality” (ActivityPub).

You can see more for yourself at https://www.sovereign.tech/tech

All of these seem to be rather tame conditions that are just there to ensure the funds get used in the way they were intended to be used. And I don’t really see how that gives the STF any sort of direct control over these projects, while it gives those projects resources to achieve more than they might have otherwise. There are no long-term funding models that would enable implicit control over these projects.

android auto

First I heard of this, but since it seems to be just some software that runs on the hardware of car manufacturers it seems rather unlikely. But very theoretically possible, if the car manufacturer was using default process scheduling in a CPU constrained machine and now switches to real-time scheduling in an update. But that was possible for years before this news, the code has just been mainlined to the default kernel now. If the car manufacturer cared about that they would probably have done it already with a patched kernel.

You thought it was AI, but she just has ulnar polydactyly. How do I know this is ulnar instead of radial or central polydactyly? The wedding ring, it’s on the ring finger.

(/s of course, this is obviously AI. But yeah people with extra fingers do in fact exist. They or the parents often cut away the extra finger for cosmetic reasons.)

They never saw the message, they saw anon disconnecting, anon saw them disconnecting. Behind the scenes Blizzard made them shadow-ban each other, they will never share the same server shard again. Both sides think they won and Blizzard will continue taking money from both. /conspiracy

[…] a public institution is really not a great example of the general population […]

Which I touched upon in my disclaimer, but in some ways it is a great example. Public institutions are defined by the general population, indirectly through their representatives creating the rules that govern them, and directly through contact with the public at large. Now if all our institutions still use this very outdated technology, and you can have trouble convincing them - during a global pandemic mind you - that using email is just as safe as using fax (so not safe at all basically), then that speaks to a larger mindset in the general population.

Many in the general public are also a lot quicker, some might even say careless, with adopting new technology of course. But as a society we are rather slow, and there are surprisingly many individuals who are hesitant or entirely resistant to adopting new technology. The fediverse usage is a bubble in a bubble here.

The internet infrastructure is another good example for this on the societal level, as there were plans in the 1980ies [!] to lay out a glass fibre network between every publicly used building in the country, which would have gotten us a good part of the way towards adopting this new material at scale. But in the end it was deemed unnecessary and too expensive and the project got canned (mixed in with rumours of “close friendship” between the chancellor and a major copper producer). Instead now we have people running around thirty years later and collecting signatures at the door for last-mile fibre network projects that seldom make quorum and thus almost never materialise public funding.

2. […] But also how are Germans technologically behind regarding common personal life?

I bet you wherever in Germany you are, if you go to the website of your local city government right now they will have a still active fax number in their contact information. I guarantee it. Well if they have a website that is.

Which is a bit silly as an example but highlights the central problem, which is that adoption of new technology happens at a glacial pace, especially in public institutions. There are many reasons for that of course, some good, like the aforementioned inclination towards privacy, some bad like whatever allows fax machines to still be around.

And don’t get me started on internet infrastructure… In an international comparison we certainly aren’t leading the field regarding adoption of new technologies.

So WINE was just imagined into existence? Or maybe it was a wizard with a magic spell?

GP is simply wrong on this one. While it is an open source project with a lot of volunteer involvement, there are companies like CodeWeavers and Valve which directly or indirectly contribute to development. You can get support from CodeWeavers AFAIK, but that means paying them.

Why do people get so uppity when I simply ask questions? I never claimed that anyone owed me anything. I never asked for anything.

Well you did ask for something, which is replies to your questions. And your reaction to those replies, whether intended or not, comes off as “uppity” as well. Hence the downvotes and hostility (not to say that I support that from either side of the conversation).

I am unwilling to learn.

Then why are you wasting peoples time with asking questions?

I’ve wasted hundreds of hours trying to learn to use Linux for basic tasks after everyone assured me it was “so easy” and not gotten anywhere. I’m done trying to learn.

Running software on an OS it wasn’t made for is anything but a basic task. Try running various Linux software on Windows and you will see. If you want to run software made for Windows easily the way to do that is using the version of Windows it was created for.

What people mean by “basic tasks” is usually browsing and office, and there is Linux-native software for that.

Someone posted Zorin OS elsewhere, which appears to be exactly that.

Not really. It has deeper integration of Wine into the system by default, but it is still a Linux OS running a compatibility layer for Windows software. This will not save you if you are unwilling to learn, there will still be various problems. Some software will simply not work, or only partially work, or require additional configuration to work.

In summary, if your definition of “basic tasks” is running arbitrary Windows software then doing it on Windows is the way to go.

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I sometimes forget that this picture exists, and then I happen upon it in places like here and it just smacks me in the face how perfectly it encapsulates the total and utter loss of decorum in politics. I mean it was never perfect obviously, but in past times there was a somewhat reasonable expectation of politicians being civil and them losing their office if they were publicly caught out not to be. It was rare, but it happened. Yet here you have the supposedly “most powerful man in the world” just dropping every pretence and hustling for some company in a flagrant abuse of his office. It’s so brazenly corrupt. And the worst thing is this was just another Tuesday for Trump, mild shit-storm, on to the next fucked up thing he did. Society never even had time to realise what a historic moment this was. It was just dropped on the pile.

If you have a mouse wheel try pressing it down while hovering over a link. Should open in new tab.

Absolutely, what we have on the Discord in the way of documentation is a straight forward install guide with one screenshot and a download link (of the GitHub release) and a FAQ channel, which is basically just links to the GitHub for a good part of the answers. We also automatically mirror our changelog there. But that’s it, and it’s all on GitHub as well.

What gets sadly lost on GitHub sometimes is “emerging events” like a new release of ours or the game we mod breaking something, where we will get yelled at on the Discord immediately and might have a hotfix release out before anybody even managed to create a proper GitHub issue.

Edit: Oh and temporary workarounds. If we figured something out on the Discord it doesn’t get posted to Github necessarily even if there is already an issue. Hence why I’m looking into having a bot for that instead of literally having to copy and paste a message.

I hate how devs use Discord for documentation. All the info on there is fleeting.

Guilty as charged, but in our defence we mirror most of the info from/to GitHub best we can. Also you can make the information somewhat less fleeting by pinning comments to a channel, using forum channels, or creating channels where users only have read access. Of course this doesn’t prevent the data from going away if Discord does, but to be fair the same can be said about almost all other services as well. GitHub servers get ransomwared and they don’t pay? Yeah your changes until their last uncorrupted backup are gone now unless you had backups of your own.

The reason why we use Discord in the first place though is network effect. The amount of reports and questions we get on Discord is simply no comparison to GitHub. It’s more simply because more users already have Discord than do GitHub leading to a lesser barrier of entry (account creation/program installation), especially for gaming related projects like ours. Of course this creates some added bureaucracy for keeping track of important reports from Discord. It’s kind of manageable to do manually, but I have been looking into ways of having a bot transfer messages/threads to GitHub by simply replying with an !issue 4321 command or something. Sadly I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t get half the reports we do on Matrix/IRC/XMPP/whatever, same diff if we were to switch from GitHub to GitLab basically.

Lastly, a server owner (or someone given the rights by them) can get an API key that enables them to dump the full server logs to disk. So if you really want your Discord server content to be indexed by search engines the possibility to just host a copy of your logs as a static website is technically there (we admittedly don’t do this yet, not sure if there are existing projects for this).

Know what data source isn’t fleeting? Forums.

Guess you never were a member of a forum with private sub-forums that went out of maintenance? That info is just as gone as our Discord logs if the company croaks tomorrow. And the public part is only available if it was mirrored to web.archive.org or something, which isn’t guaranteed either.

In summary, yes Discord isn’t the shit, it’s just shit, but the people are there. If the mountain won’t come to you, then you must go to the mountain. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

a neural network with a series of layers (W in this case would be a single layer)

I understood this differently. W is a whole model, not a single layer of a model. W is a layer of the Transformer architecture, not of a model. So it is a single feed forward or attention model, which is a layer in the Transformer. As the paper says, a LoRA:

injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture

It basically learns shifting the output of each Transformer layer. But the original Transformer stays intact, which is the whole point, as it lets you quickly train a LoRA when you need this extra bias, and you can switch to another for a different task easily, without re-training your Transformer. So if the source of the bias you want to get rid off is already in these original models in the Transformer, you are just fighting fire with fire.

Which is a good approach for specific situations, but not for general ones. In the context of OP you would need one LoRA for fighting it sexualising Asian women, then you would need another one for the next bias you find, and before you know it you have hundreds and your output quality has degraded irrecoverably.

Yeah but that’s my point, right?

That

1. you do not “replace data until your desired objective”.
2. the original model stays intact (the W in the picture you embedded).

Meaning that when you change or remove the LoRA (A and B), the same types of biases will just resurface from the original model (W). Hence “less biased” W being the preferable solution, where possible.

Don’t get me wrong, LoRAs seem quite interesting, they just don’t seem like a good general approach to fighting model bias.

First, there is no thing as a “de-biased” training set, only sets with whatever target series of biases you define for them to reflect.

Yes, I obviously meant “de-biased” by definition of whoever makes the set. Didn’t think it worth mentioning, as it seems self evident. But again, in concrete terms regarding the OP this just means not having your dataset skewed towards sexualised depictions of certain groups.

1. either you replace data until your desired objective, which will reduce the model’s quality for any of the alternatives

[…]
For reference, LoRAs are a sledgehammer approach to apply the first way.

The paper introducing LoRA seems to disagree (emphasis mine):

We propose Low-Rank Adaptation, or LoRA, which freezes the pre-trained model weights and injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture, greatly reducing the number of trainable parameters for downstream tasks.

There is no data replaced, the model is not changed at all. In fact if I’m not misunderstanding it adds an additional neural network on top of the pre-trained one, i.e. it’s adding data instead of replacing any. Fighting bias with bias if you will.

And I think this is relevant to a discussion of all models, as reproduction of training set biases is something common to all neural networks.

“Inclusive models” would need to be larger.

[citation needed]

To my understanding the problem is that the models reproduce biases in the training material, not model size. Alignment is currently a manual process after the initial unsupervised learning phase, often done by click-workers (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, RLHF), and aimed at coaxing the model towards more “politically correct” outputs; But ultimately at that time the damage is already done since the bias is encoded in the model weights and will resurface in the outputs just randomly or if you “jailbreak” enough.

In the context of the OP, if your training material has a high volume of sexualised depictions of Asian women the model will reproduce that in its outputs. Which is also the argument the article makes. So what you need for more inclusive models is essentially a de-biased training set designed with that specific purpose in mind.

I’m glad to be corrected here, especially if you have any sources to look at.

Do you mean not initially designed to support? Because at least for displays and networking (in the sense of being able to send X events over the network) that seems wrong, a network capable display server is basically X’s entire purpose? And for keyboards and mice there are extensions now, so x.org as a standard now very much supports those by design. Actually to my knowledge Wayland basically just forked their keyboard standard, the X Keyboard Extension.

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Minors can use most of the internet safely.

I beg to differ. Minors can’t safely use the internet at all, it’s the internet. Every depth of the human psyche is mirrored onto it, and frankly any guardian letting a child onto it without at the minimum strong primers on its dangers is derilict of their duty. Which might have been excusable 20-30 years ago when everybody was confused about what the internet even is, but not so much in 2023.

If you make another deranged argument like that, you will get the banhammer.

Just for clarity, I’m not the person you said this to, but I think if you are out here threatening people with bans over a rhetorical question, you might want to take a break. Nevermind the disconnect between you saying you haven’t used it at all but purpoting to know exactly what kind of “content” was on it these last years, when it didn’t even really have content in the usual sense of the word.