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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • People can help you, but there is a way to ask, and learning how to ask is part of learning the OS. We are fascinated by problems actually.

    The problem is that people come and say things like “I tried to setup a fleegbat server and it doesn’t work!” and so for the helper it becomes a process of pulling the information out of the asker in a long and painful process of interaction and we just move on. Users who say things like “here is the error message I’m getting when I try to start up my fleegbo server, anyone understand this?” get way better help.

    Those who really want to learn it come to understand these things, those who just want to do something neat and not work their ass off will complain that it’s too hard.

    Those who do the work are rewarded in many ways. I drove a dump truck ten years ago, now I make twice what I used to, working with people who aren’t racist sacks of shit. They were my motivator to learn, I was tired of being among pigs every day.


  • JTode@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldIt's Hard to Stay Motivated
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    10 months ago

    I will be one of many saying this: if you want to self-host you need to learn Linux. It can be done, but this is not like taking a pottery class and you don’t really get to show anyone, the only people who will understand are people who are also able to do what you do. It’s rewarding on many levels, but pleasure and sociality are not among those rewards. :>






  • There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.

    But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his “saving the world through capitalism” schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps… perhaps… perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre’d zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.

    Nah he’s just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he’s taking whatever work he can get.







  • In what ways do you envision working with LLMs as an educator of children?

    I have used ChatGPT to explain to myself a number of fairly advanced technical and programming concepts; I work in Animation through my own self-study and some good luck, so I’m constantly trying to up my skills in the math that relates to it. When I come up against a math or C++ term or concept that I do not currently understand, I can generally get a pretty good conceptual understanding of it by working with ChatGPT.

    So at one point I wanted to understand what Linear Algebra specifically meant, and it didn’t stick but I do remember asking it to expand on things it said that weren’t clear, and it was able to competently do so. By asking many questions I was able - I think - to get clearer on a number of things which I doubt I ever would have learned, unless by luck I found someone who knows the math to teach me.

    It also flubbed a lot of basic arithmetic, and I had to mentally look for and correct that.

    This is useful to an autodidact like myself who has learned how to learn at a University level, to be sure.

    I cannot, however, think of a single beneficial way to use this to educate small children with no such years of mental discipline and ability to understand that their teacher is neither a genius nor a moron, but rather, a machine that pumps out florid expressions of data that resemble other expressions of similar data.

    Please, tell me one.



  • That’s a much more difficult one to defend, from a legal or ethical or moral stance.

    My opinion is that teaching a child religion as the only truth is child abuse, without telling the child that there are also people who believe there are no supernatural phenomena in the universe and explaining their best arguments for their viewpoint. It’s no different than existing in a society of hunters and not teaching the kid to hunt. We win by knowing more, not by being stronger or tougher or purer in dog’s eyes or whatever.

    But my opinion is no basis for passing laws and such. When you’re talking about who should take care of orphans, or of kids who have been subject to treatment that the law agrees is abuse, the mere having of bad viewpoints which are nonetheless legal is not sufficient grounds, if you ask me. Many religious people would consider my above opinion to be bad at best and hate speech at worst, for instance, but I think my wife and I would do alright taking care of a kid, if we had the time and resources to give.

    But IF the people proposing to take a child into their care are regular attendees of the meetings of an organization that is known to protect pedophiles, that is definitely grounds to turn down that application on very solid legal footing, if you ask me.