With the simple change of encouraging and incentivizing cooperatives as a business model, we can solve the vast majority of the dystopian-level economic problems we are currently experiencing.

#Coops
#Cooperatives

@feld @paul_ipv6 @tychotithonus Money comes before people, is what I'm hearing. Especially if it's people who already get shit on by society.

@feld @paul_ipv6 @tychotithonus

"those people"

A quick check with a search engine informs me that 13% of the population is disabled. The number of people who will ever be disabled at some point in their lives is higher, around 25%. Those people are these people.

@thomasfuchs My guess is that all the answers will be way too short, due to sane character limits.

The entire #MachineLearning and #DataScience team, including me, just got laid off. :( :( :( :( :(

Anybody out there looking for an ML or software engineer with >30 years total experience and ~20 years in the industry?

I have extensive experience with #Python and #ML frameworks, particularly #TensorFlow, and I've worked on #NLP and #ImageProcessing both in the workplace and in personal open source projects. My resume is available here:

https://hosford42.github.io/

I'd love to work for a #coop or non-profit, if that's a possibility, but I'm open to other options.

If you work in this industry or know someone who does, please boost for reach.

#FediHire
#Layoffs

@mina @gaysteve Can it not? Given the current trends in popular thinking, this seems typical. Red meat makes you manly. Soy products make you enucht. Owning guns makes you manly. Treating women with respect makes you eunucht.

@Brendanjones @svenpilz @blinry Something else I commented about in another sub-thread is, there seems to be a connection between "voiceless voice" and abstract quasi-visual thinking. I noticed several other people saying they had both, but nobody yet has said they have one without the other. Curious where you two stand on that.

@svenpilz @blinry This is the closest to my experience of any of the comments I've read. (Also a programmer, btw.)

We have #WorkerCooperatives and #ConsumerCooperatives. And we have #WorkerUnions to fill the gap and force non-cooperative corporations to treat their workers fairly. But are there #ConsumerCooperatives?

#unions
#unionization
#cooperatives
#inequality
#ConsumerProtection

@Brendanjones @timthelion I definitely need to give it a try

@jonny They're also referred to as "semantic pointers".

@jonny IDK how precisely applicable they are to your use case, but hypervectors come to mind.

The hardest part of going plant-based for me isn't finding veggie-centered foods that I enjoy eating. It's feeling full for more than 30 minutes at a time.

@timthelion I've never tried it. What's the flavor like?

@diazona @jsbarretto I bet their open source work is probably still more positively impactful than their day jobs.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Unpacking the hype around OpenAI’s rumored new Q* model
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/27/1083886/unpacking-the-hype-around-openais-rumored-new-q-model/

@jamesbritt lol I might have done the same if I weren't already familiar with what is most likely its predecessor, A*.

Which tells you a little bit about what Q* probably is: A fancy search algorithm, and that's it. (That's also alluded to by Yann LeCun's tweet that's embedded in the article I linked.) Basically, they are adding lookahead instead of just generating one token at a time, to generate content that's more human-seeming because it's more tightly constrained within the probability distribution of human language usage. To even suggest this is some magical AGI breakthrough that deserves a moral panic is ludicrous, and can only be justified by the execs involved (1) not really understanding how the technology they're using even works and (2) being high on the feelings of power they get from the magical thinking this leads them to.

@inthehands @pippa @Adam_Cadmon1 The directness of those "hints" is *extremely* helpful to people like me. Thank you for explaining it so clearly. Like, I'm going to bookmark it because I might need it again.

@pippa @Adam_Cadmon1 It's possible it's the people and not the venue, I suppose. Some of it might just be cultural.

I'm probably guilty of this pretty often. I know that it's a thing for neurodivergent folks like myself to make less common connections between things. In our mutual discussions, it's very normal to take an abrupt turn in the conversation, and no one blinks.

I am only just now starting to realize that that bothers some people, rather than being a pleasant surprise. While I do care and want to do right by people who have different preferences, it can be difficult to know which side of that fence people sit in advance. It's also difficult to understand why it's upsetting, esp. when someone works differently from yourself. And then there's the difficulty in knowing what counts as the same topic vs a subject change, as people will often disagree about where that line falls.

Do you have suggestions on how to track these things, for someone who is trying to do better?

@pippa @Adam_Cadmon1 In retrospect, I probably should have read the rest of the conversation before I replied, and not just the couple of posts in the direct chain leading up to the one I replied to. That's probably a start.