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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Type in "Is Kamala Harris a good Democratic candidate

    …and any good search engine will find results containing keywords such as “Kamala Harris”, “Democratic”, “candidate”, and “good”.

    […] you might ask if she’s a “bad” Democratic candidate instead

    In that case, of course the search engine will find results containing keywords such as “Kamala Harris”, “Democratic”, “candidate”, and “bad”.

    So the whole premise that, “Fundamentally, that’s an identical question” is just bullshit when it comes to searching. Obviously, when you put in the keyword “good”, you’ll find articles containing “good”, and if you put in the keyword “bad”, you’ll find articles containing “bad” instead.

    Google will find things that match the keywords that you put in. So does DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Yahoo, whatever. That is what a good search engine is supposed to do.

    I can assure you, when search engines stop doing that, and instead try to give “balanced” results, according to whatever opaque criteria for “balanced” their company comes up with, that will be the real problem.

    I don’t like Google, and only use google when other search engines fail. But this article is BS.






  • To add about the distro framgentation, and particularly:

    If I run into a software I need and it specifically indicates it’s for another flavor of Linux than the one I run, how likely is it that I can get it to work on another distro without any real trouble?

    You might have. Some software is distributed as a portable binary and can run on any distro. However, many installers are distro-specific (or distro family-specific, since they’re made for a specific package manager). For example, a software packaged for Ubuntu as a .deb file would install fine on Ubuntu or Mint, and probably install fine on Debian, but if you want to install it on Fedora or Arch you’ll have to manually re-package it.

    Most distro-specific software usually ships debian or ubuntu package - so you might go with that for that reason. Or Arch/Endeavor: while you’ll rarely see an official Arch package, most often someone will have already re-packaged it and put it on the AUR.

    That said, for the major distros, the desktop environment makes much more difference than the distro.






  • It’s not an article about LLMs not using dialects. In fact, they have learned said dialects and will use them if asked.

    What they did was, ask the LLM to suggest adjectives associated with sentences - and it would associate more aggressive or negative adjectives with African dialect.

    Seems like not a bias by AI models themselves, rather a reflection of the source material.

    All (racial) bias in AI models is actually a reflection of the training data, not of the modelling.



  • In September the NixOS constitutional assembly should finish their work, and the community will be able to elect governance. I’m guessing that’s when the drama will start getting resolved.

    In the meantime, there are multiple maintainers that have left because of the drama - which is more troublesome than the board members leaving - but nixpkgs has a LOT of maintainers, and there are new ones joining all the time. It’s still healthy and won’t implode so quickly.