I’ve found this to be the case a lot, too. I also spoof my OS because a lot of government sites will refuse to work unless it says Windows. It’s stupid, but here we are.

I got a laptop back in 2018, and it shipped really fast. It’s not my daily driver, but it works well when I’m on the road, and the battery life is pretty good. Granted, I replaced the OS with a distro I prefer and customized the hell out of it, so that might contribute to my experience. Tbh, I was pretty impressed with it (still am), and I was going to buy a Librem 5 when they came out. I wanted to wait and not just throw money at them because I didn’t want to get burned. After all the horror stories and crap reviews, I passed on that and won’t touch the company with a 10 foot pole, and I thank past me for not throwing money at them.

I think that the company started with noble intentions and made a decent product at first, but they got in way over their heads and now they’re floundering.

Except this is a state case. Unless he also has the Supreme Court of the State of New York under his control…he’s going to have a rough road ahead I think.

The truly unfortunate part is that this may be the only conviction we get. The documents case is being destroyed by the judge, and SCOTUS is likely going to tank the January 6th case.

The original paper itself, for those who are interested.

Overall, this is really interesting research and a really good “first step.” I will be interested to see if this can be replicated on other models. One thing that really stood out, though, was that certain details are obfuscated because of Sonnet being proprietary. Hopefully follow-on work is done on one of the open source models to confirm the method.

One of the notable limitations is quantifying activation’s correlation to text meaning, which will make any sort of controls difficult. Sure, you can just massively increase or decrease a weight, and for some things that will be fine, but for real manual fine tuning, that will prove to be a difficulty.

I suspect this method is likely generalizable (maybe with some tweaks?), and I’d really be interested to see how this type of analysis could be done on other neural networks.

My thoughts exactly. Growth is a byproduct of quality. Similarly, if the Fediverse grows too much and quality starts to slip, we should also let it shrink until quality comes back. I think our aim should be quality, and anything else is just a side effect.

Yeah, I agree. It was well-written, and I thought it was good, but saying this was the best SOTU of all time seems a bit far-fetched. Biden straight-up isn’t a great orator, and that’s fine by me. I would rather someone who can do the job than make wonderful speeches.

Now, how Biden dealt with the hecklers was pretty great, I’ll say.

I mean, not all will vote for Trump. I imagine some supporters will not vote, vote third party, or (gasp) vote for Biden. I think the majority will just vote for Trump because of the R next to his name, though.

This is awesome!

Then they’ll be the first to complain when they go overseas and people don’t speak English.

If I remember correctly, he didn’t want to nominate her. He wanted Liebermann and didn’t even like Palin that much. She was just sort of forced on him.

It’s not just convenient for them to do it; it’s how they are able to evade anti-trust action (not that the U.S. is great at it anyway but still). I also run my own mail server. It’s not impossible, and I wouldn’t even say it’s even hard. It’s just time consuming to set up (if it’s the first time), and there are a lot of hurdles to make it so impractical that it’s virtually impossible to the average person. Only the most patient or those who have a real desire to run their own mail server will even attempt it. Anyone can set up their own mail server, but most won’t because it’s not worth it compared to using something that just works from Google.

I’m a bit more optimistic about the future if Trump loses. To me, the Republicans are in the throes of a cult of personality, and from what I can tell, there is no Trumpism heir apparent. There will be people who try, like DeSantis, but no one has the singular charisma that Trump does.

My prediction is that after 2024, if Trump loses (which is a very big if), 2028 will have a warmed over Trumpist candidate, like DeSantis, who will probably lose. After that, they will have to figure out an actual platform, and around 2030 is when Trumpism will hopefully, finally die.

I agree with this in general, but you still may want to consider using Windows or Mac if there’s university only software that is Windows/Mac-based and doesn’t play nicely with VMs, which is really common in test-taking software (since it’s essentially spyware). An alternative would be dual-booting if you want to deal with that.

The reason I say this is that when I went back to school and started course work, there was an online class that mandated the use of certain test-taking software. I tried to get it to work in a VM (by masking the clues of being in a VM), and it kept shutting me down. I ultimately had to borrow a friend’s laptop to take all of my quizzes and tests, which was a real pain. Thankfully, I only had that one class like that, but any others would have driven me to get a cheap throw-away Windows-only box.

In the end, I’d stay away from bleeding-edge for school work, so Fedora is probably your better bet, but there may come a time that you will need to use Windows (much to your chagrin).

I think that’s exactly what the Republicans want.

For real, I really don’t understand how Texas isn’t being prosecuted for human trafficking.

As with everything else with these types, it’s “free speech for me, but not for thee.”

Anecdotally, this is exactly it. Talking to my parents is like being in a parallel universe because they think everyone thinks like them and “is just too afraid to say it” or “is being silenced.” The mental gymnastics are astounding.

You’re not wrong. I remember how Bush, McCain, Romney, Obama, Clinton, and others were called Nazis at different points. While it was never really taken seriously then (as it shouldn’t have been), the term has become virtually meaningless. Where the term was reserved for the worst-of-the-worst, for years, it was invoked at the slightest disagreement. Now that there’s a literal Nazi-adjacent person running and getting called out for it, it falls flat.

Building a signup wizard to use that information to select a instance would seem to be the best approach.

That’s actually not a bad idea. I’m not on board with mining contacts, but I think there’s a simple, transparent way to do this that can actually be fun: a personality quiz. Sure, if someone knows what instance to join already, they can override this. But if they don’t, they get like five questions, and then they are matched to an instance.

Congratulations on making the switch! I remember when I switched full time almost 10 years ago. It always feels like there’s something new to explore or to try with your computer. One of the most freeing things I learned was that most things are within my grasp if I put in the effort to learn about it. There’s nothing quite as fun as whittling the day away going down a configuration rabbit-hole to make something just right.