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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Despite 81 per cent of Ontarians supporting such a system, last year the Ford government scrapped the non-alcoholic drink container deposit-return program, citing cost concerns “for small businesses and families,” without providing any estimates.

    Wait, what?! Does that mean I no longer get a refund for cans & bottles by taking them back?

    IMO the system had a problem where they didn’t increase the deposit to be in line with inflation. We were still getting 1990s return rates, so it simply stopped being worth while for most people.

    In a certain light, I do actually see a leftist case for removing the deposit: the poorer you are, the more incentive you have to bring back empties. Thus it can be viewed in the lens of any other fixed rate goods or service tax that disproportionately affects poor people.

    Then again, are distributors just going to keep prices the same and enjoy not paying out for returns? Most likely.





  • enkers@sh.itjust.workstoTechnology@lemmy.worldI am disappointed in the AI discourse
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    18 days ago

    Appreciate the correction. Happen to know of any whitepapers or articles I could read on it?

    Here’s the thing, I went out of my way to say I don’t know shit from bananas in this context, and I could very well be wrong. But the article certainly doesn’t sufficiently demonstrate why it’s right.

    Most technical articles I click on go through step by step processes to show how they gained understanding of the subject material, and it’s layed out in a manner that less technical people can still follow. And the payoff is you come out with a feeling that you understand a little bit more than what you went in with.

    This article is just full on “trust me bro”. I went in with a mediocre understanding, and came out about the same, but with a nasty taste in my mouth. Nothing of value was learned.


  • enkers@sh.itjust.workstoTechnology@lemmy.worldI am disappointed in the AI discourse
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    18 days ago

    I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an expert, and I don’t like to speak authoritatively on things that I’m not an expert in, so it’s possible I’m mistaken. Also I’ve had a drink or two, so that’s not helping, but here we go anyways.

    In the article, the author quips on a tweet where they seem to fundamentally misunderstand how LLMs work:

    I tabbed over to another tab, and the top post on my Bluesky feed was something along these lines:

    ChatGPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information. You cannot use it as a search engine. LLMs only generate statistically likely sentences.

    The thing is… ChatGPT was over there, in the other tab, searching the web. And the answer I got was pretty good.

    The tweet is correct. The LLM has a snapshot understanding of the internet based on its training data. It’s not what we would generally consider a true index based search.

    Training LLMs is a costly and time consuming process, so it’s fundamentally impossible to regenerate an LLM in the same order of magnitude of time it takes to make a simple index.

    The author fails to address any of these issues, which suggests to me that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

    I suppose I could conceded that an LLM can fulfill a similar role that a search engine traditionally has, but it’d kinda be like saying that a toaster is an oven. They’re both confined boxes which heat food, but good luck if you try to bake 2 pies at once in a toaster.





  • I have a hard time considering something that has an immutable state as sentient, but since there’s no real definition of sentience, that’s a personal decision.

    Technical challenges aside, there’s no explicit reason that LLMs can’t do self-reinforcement of their own models.

    I think animal brains are also “fairly” deterministic, but their behaviour is also dependent on the presence of various neurotransmitters, so there’s a temporal/contextual element to it, so situationally our emotions can affect our thoughts which LLMs don’t really have either.

    I guess it’d be possible to forward feed an “emotional state” as part of the LLM’s context to emulate that sort of animal brain behaviour.





  • Every tenth episode you have to watch Letterkenny.

    But honestly, it says in the article:

    Earlier Friday, Canadian media company Corus urged the CRTC to require traditional broadcasters and online players to pay the same amount into the Canadian content system. The broadcaster, which owns Global TV, said both should contribute 20 per cent of their revenue toward Canadian content.

    Currently, large English-language broadcasters must contribute 30 per cent of revenues to Canadian programming, and the CRTC last year ordered streaming services to pay five per cent of their annual Canadian revenues to a fund devoted to producing Canadian content.

    The foreign streaming services are fighting that rule in court and Netflix, Paramount and Apple pulled out of the CRTC hearing earlier this week.


  • enkers@sh.itjust.workstoScience Memes@mander.xyzIt's My Nature
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    1 month ago

    Yeah, that’s pretty pedantic. xD

    Text emoji is kaomoji, which is the Eastern branch of emoticons, so you’re right, technically it wouldn’t generally include o7, but that’s kinda splitting hairs.

    You’re also right, o7 has more broad uses than F, but they do both get used in a usually tongue-in-cheek “condolences” manner. So you can almost always use o7 in the place of F, but not necessarily the other way around.