The political ideas you can find on Reddit are much more diverse. There is usually at least some pushback against some of the most deranged statements.

This is it. Lemmy users are completely unaware of the extent to which they are not like normal people.

This obviously falls into the “documentaries and essays” category

jreg

I like using AntennaPod for podcasts and Spotify for music.

Thank you for writing the explanation! I still think that this doesn’t need a blockchain. Instances could broadcast user creation, so each instance could validate user age on its own (or ask other trusted instances when they first “saw” that user).

Fundamentally, blockchain solves the problem that there is no central source of trust, but in the Fediverse people necesarily trust the instance that they sign up, so a blockchain can’t add much in my opinion.

I see. I’m not convinced that proving the account creation date makes much of a difference here. Obviously the instance records when you sign up, so you would only need this to protect against malicious instances. But if a spammer is manipulating their instance to allow them to spam more, you have a much bigger problem than reliably knowing their account creation date.

this account holder has this name on that instance

How would that help? A spam bot could just make lots of blockchain wallets.

you get all sorts of unspoofable benefits from that

what are the benefits? I struggle to come up with any benefits.

If the animations look realistic, it’s almost certainly not predetermined

You could do a perfectly realistic simulation, record the path for each outcome and then play one of them.

Or, if the physics simulation is deterministic, you could store a set of starting positions and their outcomes.

I’m not an expert on Monte Carlo methods, but reading the Wikipedia article on Markov Chain Monte Carlo, this doesn’t fit what WFC does for the reasons I mentioned above. In MCMC, your get a better result by taking more steps, in WFC, the number of steps is given by the map size, it can’t be changed.

I don’t think WFC can be described as an example of a Monte Carlo method.

In a Monte Carlo experiment, you use randomness to approximate a solution, for example to solve an integral where you don’t have a closed form. The more you sample, the more accurate the result.

In WFC, the number of random experiments depends on your map size and is not variable.

it doesn’t train or self-improve like ML does

I think the training (or fitting) process is comparable to how a support vector machine is trained. It’s not iterative like SGD in deep learning, it’s closer to the traditional machine learning techniques.

But I agree that this is a pretty academic discussion, it doesn’t matter much in practice.

I think these two fields are very closely related and have some overlap. My favorite procgen algorithm, Wavefuncion Collapse, can be described using the framework of machine learning. It has hyperparameters, it has model parameters, it has training data and it does inference. These are all common aspects of modern “AI” techniques.

I’ve bought a lot of electronic components from AliExpress and 99% of the time I got exactly what I ordered. It just takes a long time.

The problem I’m having is that I don’t exist online when people try to look me up.

Is this referring to job applications or interpersonal relationships or both?

It doesn’t make sense for Lemmy (or Mastodon) to send your IP to other instances. Without that IP, all they have is your username. They can’t really track you based on just the username.

What a wild conspiracy theory.

Legally, they can’t collect and process any of the data unless you accepted a contract with them. Just by sending an upvote or a comment to their instance, you don’t agree to any of this.

And if they choose to ignore the law and just do it anyway, they still can’t, because all they have is the data that your instance sends them. They don’t have your geo-location, device Id, etc.

Interesting. It seems that Lemmy can see Mastodon users and send private messages to them. And I believe Mastodon users can create Lemmy posts, so potentially Threads users could do that too once Meta enables two-way communication.

I’m in favor of federation. The point of federated networks isn’t that there are no evil corporations, but rather that they can’t cause damage.

What Facebook can do:

• read your public data (they can do this wether anyone federates with them or not)
• let their users publish content to other Fediverse users

What they can’t do:

• serve you ads
• serve you an algorithmic feed
• impose their ToS or rules
• collect data for analytics/tracking/marketing
• force you to use a certain client
• make changes to the protocol or design

I think this is mostly relevant for Mastodon servers due to the format of the content, but the arguments are the same.

I was rooting for Makro