hendrik

I’d say this is also a bit about extremism. I mean it’s not wrong to be entirely against AI. I don’t think I am. For example if we managed to do it ethically, I wouldn’t have much of an issue with assistance systems in cars, smart home voice assistants and machine translation. I’m more opposed the more it gets towards generative AI. And because we do it the opposite of ethical in practice. I’m not necessarily opposed because of the thing itself or towards the science behind it, but because of all the bad consequences it comes with. But people like me aren’t allowed a more nuanced opinion or to draw the line somewhere unless it’s a perfect 0% or 100% and I feel people expect me to take some super extreme position. I still consider myself part of the anti-AI community overall, but both sides frequently misunderstand me. So I’m still subscribed to your posts and put up with the personal hate.

(Edit: Of course the take in the screenshot is stupid, though. There are a lot of compelling arguments against AI. And whether it fixes your bike or computer code isn’t a matter of opinion, and it might benefit someone but that has nothing to do with justifying cost and side-effects of AI on other people.)

Na gut. Aber dafür gibt’s ja Action. Da kosten HDMI Kabel oder 10m Netzwerkkabel sowas wie 4€. Und die üblichen Adapter, Powerbanks etc gibt’s dort meist auch…

Ich finde Geschäfte eigentlich ganz nice um sich Produkte einmal anzuschauen, beispielsweise wie klobig so eine Smartwatch tatsächlich ist, das geht immer schlecht im Internet.

Ansonsten läuft ein durchschnittlicher MediaMarkt Besuch bei mir eher so ab:

Ich: Entschuldigen Sie, haben sie 10TB Festplatten?
Verkäufer: Nein, kann ich aber bestellen.
Ich: Danke, das kann ich auch selbst.

I am graduating […]

Sorry, I read that after I replied and edited my comment, but a bit too late… That changes some things…

I agree. There’s roughly two options. Either a static archive as your heritage. Or some writable file storage which can be kept up to date. And yeah, that needs payment, maintenance…

And from my observation, finding people willing to maintain something, or clean up after someone did some annoying things or filled up storage or whatever, is harder than setting up the technology.

Obviously that option would be preferable, though.

[…] or set something local, but set it behind some proxy

Maybe Cloudflare is your friend. They dominate the market of free reverse proxies / tunnels.

But I’m really unsure if I have any good recommendation that fits your situation. Ideally find a successor, next best thing is a Nextcloud, Google Drive, OneDrive or some of the other ones. And if that can’t be done, split it into manageable chunks by course and dump it to some one click hoster or archive.org. That’s all I can come up with.

And by the way, I did appreciate such archives and made use of them. And there’s a lot of reasons (cheating aside) to share notes, PDFs, try old exams to prepare…

The main issue is, you graduate as well and life will move on for you. You might move far away, get a full-time job, maybe have new hobbies or a family and time will come and you’ll stop supporting it as well. I’ve seen that all the time and most privately run things vanish sooner than later.

Of course the entities have to abide by the rules. We also did that… officially… It just happened to be the case that some of the same individuals also did other things after hours, and not in their role as members of the entity… And while mingling you’d find similar-minded people and/or successors for the inofficial operations. It’s a bit trick to get it right. The official entity of course denies any involvement, they can’t take any blame.

And I’d say if you’re the main/sole contributor of content, it’s questionable if this even survives long term. Unless people upload recent exams and material, the content will become obsolete after a few years. Professors will have changed the questions and assignments or the entire course is done by a new professor and the archive will slowly become obsolete. So you kind of need some community anyways. Or skip the hassle and just upload the thing to archive.org or some one click hoster.

Another option would be to talk to the dev club. Maybe they’d like to revamp their solution and take yours, or they have some idea about tech infrastructure.

Seems things have gotten more complicated in the age of cloud computing. I think these archives have always been a thing. In the good old days sometimes on their infrastructure, buried several layers deep in some windows network share or on some specific computer in the computer lab or maintained by the student body of a faculty… And there was always some secret file stash somewhere.

If you’re concerned with a long-term solution. Are there any entities run by the students? Associations or clubs interested in maintaining such a thing long-term? I mean technology aside, the real issue is that this is done by random individuals and they’re gone after a while. Ideally this is done with some help of an entity that lasts longer than that and passed down to future generations.

Hmm, das stimmt wohl. Es ist ja auch eine ziemlich vielschichtige Angelegenheit. Wobei es mich jetzt auf der simpelsten Ebene nicht überrascht, dass ein Mustererkennungs-Apparat wie das menschliche Gehirn Muster mag. So wie Rhythmen und Melodien. Das ist irgendwie notwenidgerweise genau das was es mag (Strukturen etc finden).

Der Vergleich zum Schmecken ist sicherlich auch interessant. Soweit ich weiß ist da evolutionär einiges angelegt: Fettig und Süß ist gut, Bitter eher ein Warnsignal. Und dann lernen wir aber doch Bier und Kaffee zu mögen… Oder auch nicht.

Ich denke aber in Konsequenz heißt das nicht viel. Hass, Verbrechen, Gewaltfantasien bis Mord sind auch irgendwie Teil von Menschlichkeit. Trotzdem werden sie reglementiert. Aber wir sind definitiv fasziniert und schreiben echt viele Detektivromane oder Filme über Massenmörder und Computerspiele über Krieg… Im echten Leben ist aber trotzdem nichts davon erlaubt.

Interessanter Artikel.

es gibt keine musikalischen Vokabeln, die man lernen müsste, um sie zu verstehen

Aber ist das wirklich so? Also so für Jazz, Blues und Pop gibt’s ja schon feste Strukturen und Vokabeln auswendig zu lernen. Und Musik ist ja schon sehr unterschiedlich, ob ich mir jetzt westliche Populärmusik anhöre, oder Klassik oder arabische Musik und soetwas wie traditionelle chinesische Musik ist nur Geklimper für mich, da fühle ich nichts bei. Vielleicht sind das doch Aspekte, die gelernt sind?

Maybe ask for the studies? I mean if that’s phrased as a fact… Why not read up on it? Maybe they’re mistaken, or you are.

Since both Debian and Arch aren’t atomic distros or offer rollback… The way I do it is connect my large external USB harddisk, do a backup and then upgrade. If there’s something wrong, I restore the backup, but in reality I was always able to resolve issues with the updates.

On my server I do LVM snapshots, that’s fairly easy to do. I avoid BTRFS since that messed up one of my filesystems a few years ago, but I heard it got better since and it’s not supposed to do that any more.

I think AVC1 is another word for H.264. That’s the oldest one with lots of hardware acceleration available in old devices and by far the biggest one in file size. VP9 should roughly be on a similar level with H.265. The main difference is that VP9 is supposed to be royalty-free and H.265 isn’t. The best one is of course AV1. But that also takes considerably more resources to encode and decode.

M4A and webm both aren’t audio codecs. They’re file container formats. I believe m4a takes AAC audio. And webm is a more general container format and it takes video as well. I think audio will be either Vorbis or Opus. And Opus is fairly good, especially at low bitrates. There probably isn’t a big difference to AAC, though.

Yeah, you’re right. I think we can circle back to your original post, which stated the term is unspecific. However, I don’t think that makes sense in computer science, or natural science in general. The way I learned is: you always start out with definitions. And mathematical, concise and waterproof ones, because they need to be internally consistent and you then base an entire building on top of it. And that just collapses if the foundation isn’t there. And maths starts to show weird quirks. So the computer scientists need a proper definition anyway. But that doesn’t stop us using the same word for a different, imperfect one in every day talk. I think they’re not the same, though.

I’m not sure about the robotics. Some people say intelligence is inherently linked to interacting with the real world. And that it isn’t a thing in isolation. So that would mean an AI would need to be able to manipulate the real world. You’re certainly right that can be done without robotics and limited to text and pictures on a screen. But I think ultimately it’s the same thing. And multimodal models can in fact use almost the same mechanisms they use to process and manipulate image and text, and apply it to movements and navigate 3D space. I’d argue robotics is the same side of the same coin.

And it’s similar for humans. I use the same brain and roughly similar mechanics that enable me to do it, whether I learn a natural science, or when I learn dancing moves or become a good basketball player. I’d argue that’s manifestations of the same thing. Also requires knowledge, decision making… And that’d make a professional dancer “intelligent” in a similar way. I’m not sure if that’s an accepted way to think of it, though.

Yeah, I’d say some select tasks. And it’s not really the entire distinction. I can do math equations with my cognitive capabilities. My pocket calculator can do the same, yet it’s not AI. So the definition has to be something else. And AI can do tasks I cannot do. Like go through large amounts of data. Or find patterns a human can not find. So it’s not really tied to specific things we do. But a generalized form of intelligence, and I don’t think that’s well defined or humans are the comparison. They’re more a stand-in measurement scale. But I don’t think that’s what it’s about.

Edit: And I’d question the entire usefulness of such a definition. ChatGPT can write very professional-looking text and things that pass as Wikipedia articles. A 5-year-old human can’t do that. However the average 5yo can make a sandwich. Now try that with ChatGPT and tell me what that tells about their intelligence. It doesn’t really fit as a definition because it’s kind of too broad and ill-defined and humans can do a wide variety of tasks and slight differences in focus changes everything around into its opposite.

Yeah, generative AI is a good point.

I’m not sure with the computer scientists, though. It’s certainly not any task, that’d be AGI. And it’s not necessarily connected to humans either. Sure they’re the prime example of intelligence (whatever it is). But I think a search engine is AI as well, depending how it’s laid out. And text to speech, old-school expert systems. A thermostat that controls your heating with a machine learning model might count as well, I’m not sure about that. And that’s not really like human cognitive tasks. Closer to curve fitting, than anything else. The thermostat includes problem-solving, learning, perception, knowledge, and planning and decision making. But on the human intelligence score it wouldn’t even be a thing that compares.

And “intelligence” itself isn’t very well defined either. So the only word that remains is “artificial”, and we can agree on that.

I usually try to avoid the word “AI”. I’ll say “LLM” if I talk about chatbots, ChatGPT etc. Or I use the term “machine learning” when broadly speaking about the concept of computers learning and doing such things. It’s not exactly the same thing, though. But when reading other people’s texts I always think of LLMs when they say AI, because that’s currently what they mean almost every time. And AGI is more sci-fi as of now, so it needs some disclaimers and context anyway.

Yeah, that news is a bit more than 2 weeks old already. IMO a great way to say “Fuck AI”.

Kann man so oder so machen. Letztendlich muss man irgendwie sein Auskommen miteinander finden, wenn man in einer Gruppe von Menschen arbeitet. Manche wollen dies, manche das. Also Viele Quatschen halt auch gerne. Man ist nicht unbedingt Freunde, aber irgendwie sieht man sich ja fast jeden Tag und verbringt viel Zeit mit diesen Menschen, da gehört Sozialisieren und Menschliches dazu, einfach weil Menschengruppen so funktionieren. Gibt auch Leute, die das nicht mögen, die müssen den Anderen dann irgendwie beibringen, dass sie lieber gerne allein gelassen werden wollen. Dann haben das alle zu akzeptieren, man geht miteinander und mit unterschiedlichen Bedürfnissen mit Respekt und professioneller Höflichkeit um. Und die Geschichte sollte damit abgehakt sein. Der Respekt und die Höflichkeit sind da für mich das Kollegiale.

Correct. We currently have some sentiment against liberal spaces and DEI programs and so on. And some people think it’s the war against straight white men. But having a men’s groups or women’s groups or safe-spaces to talk freely about whatever topics isn’t authoritarian. The opposite of it is equally true. You can’t discuss certain topics without the correct space for it, and not allowing them to discuss how they like is authoritatian as well!

Oh man, I’m a bit late to the party here.

He really believes the far-right Trump propaganda, and doesn’t understand what diversity programs do. It’s not a war between white men an all the other groups of people… It’s just that is has proven to be difficult to for example write a menstrual tracker with a 99.9% male developer base. It’s just super difficult to them to judge how that’s going to be used in real-world scenarios and what some specific challenges and nice features are. That’s why you listen to minority opinions, to deliver a product that caters to all people. And these minority opinions are notoriously difficult to attract. That’s why we do programs for that. They are task-forces to address things aside from what’s mainstream and popular. It’ll also benefit straight white men. Liteally everyone because it makes Linux into a product that does more than just whatever is popular as of today. Same thing applies to putting effort into screen readers and disabled people and whatever other minorities need.

If he just wants what is majority, I’d recommend installing Windows to him. Because that’s where we’re headed with this. That’s the popular choice, at least on the desktop. That’s what you’re supposed to use if you dislike niche.

Also his hubris… Says Debian should be free from politics. And the very next sentence he talks his politics and wants to shove his Trump anti-DEI politics into Debian… Yeah, sure dude.