Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

Hello Sigmoid Social users!

Wow, Sigmoid Social has been around for over 2.5 years now, how time flies...

Just want mention we are very much still around as administrators and moderators of this Mastodon instance behind the scenes.

We appear to have reached a steady-state of a decent number of users, and we love that some of you still benefit from this instance.

Please do message or email us if you want to suggest improvements or changes!

:gradient:

Who'd be interested in an event with talks and some performances around making notations and programming languages for pattern-making (textile, musical, choreographic etc)? Half focussed online, half focussed in-person, all streamed. Mix of open call and invited talks. All free/open access. Probably in January. Maybe called "Programming Of The Art Computer".

Office cleanout: finding these stickers brought back good memories. I truly loved Urchin — it was the best analytics system I’d ever seen, crunched your http logs and gave you great web stats.

It became Google Analytics.

Ever wonder why URLs today sometimes have the letters ?utm in them… it stands for Urchin Tracking Module!

Adventure was had

TIL that the purported skull of Mary Magdalene is enshrined in a gold reliquary in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, in France, and that reliquary is _the_ most Warhammer-40k-looking real thing I have ever seen in my life, bar none.

So… retired/unemployed programmers or employed ones who’d like to contribute to open source:

What do you think of a “Civilian Documentation Corps”¹?

There are tons of contributed packages to popular languages that are fine but underused because underdocumented. Some of the package owners are well-intentioned but no good at documentation or don’t understand its importance. Why not swoop in with an offer of help? (1/6)

rage against the state machine

I love raspberries, but artificial raspberry flavoring just tastes like death 🥲

@kaoudis I always thought the artificial banana flavoring was weird, until I tried a ripe (black /brown) banana...

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

Scott Aaronson's blog is always good reading; in this case, it's linking to other good reading. Excerpt:

"We’re still treating this as a business and technology story like personal computing or the Internet, rather than (also) a national security story like the birth of nuclear weapons, except more so. And we’re still indexing on LLMs’ current capabilities (“fine, so they can pass physics exams, but they still can’t do original physics research“), rather than looking at the difference between now and five years ago, and then trying our best to project forward an additional five years.”

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8047

This talk by @maggie was a real highlight of the local-first conference. A compelling argument, very well articulated https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

#llm I like saying weekend project, although tbt, I think the past couple years have been a series of "weekend projects." Anyway this weekend's project was benchmarking LoRA fine tunes with torchtune, axolotl, and unsloth w/ 4090, 3090, W7900, and 7900XTX cards. Besides getting some practice setting up configs for the different trainers, it was good to poke around w/ wandb a bit more for report publishing): https://wandb.ai/augmxnt/train-bench/reports/torchtune-vs-axolotl-vs-unsloth-Trainer-Comparison--Vmlldzo4MzU3NTAx

I am once again reminded that in the fediverse you never know what somebody is really responding to because you never know what's visible or invisible to you. Anywhere.

#federation #federationfail

A discussion of discussions on AI Bias:

https://danluu.com/ai-bias/

So it really is a time to be curious and not contemptuous in my opinion. There is a tendency to say either that tech is sacrosanct and cannot be criticized or tech is evil and must be obliterated. I pretty much felt the same working with the public education system. Tech is people, at least the parts of it that I am interested in engaging with and for whom I think applied psychology can be a benefit. Some compassionate curiosity about WHY we see utility in "contest cultures" can be very helpful

I'm very into learning programming languages:

a) kind of “badly” — often never learning major features or major parts of the ecosystem, or not using very popular tools
b) with a lot of confidence -- where I feel 100% confident in the limited subset of the language that I do use
c) over a long time -- sometimes only starting to use a 'basic' feature maybe 5 or 10 years in

4/?