Notices by Dr James Ravenscroft (jamesravey@fosstodon.org)

@aral wishing I could vote - love and support from plague island #brexshit

@aral Araf is Welsh for "Slow" so that could have been pretty funny too!

@phiofx not sure I'd agree that the unbearable tech bros that comment on the orange site are broadly representative of techies in general. I'd suggest that they are the vocal minority. HN is wretched hive of scum and villainy. I'd identify as a "techie" but I also get angry as hell whenever I browse HN threads that go any deeper than "cool website bro" for all the reasons you outlined.

@datarama @phiofx that's the thing I guess, it's really hard to know what is representative these days because each site is it's own silo with it's own norms and overton window. Certainly HN is a pretty libertarian bubble. With the death of twitter etc I don't think there is a social network that is big enough to give a good cross-sectional sample any more, just lots of little bubbles!

Oh my goodness I love @garymarcus - absolutely spot on with this piece https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/about-that-openai-breakthrough

@phiofx @smallcircles @jryans@merveilles.town a silver lining of the silly hype is that it's led to some pretty impressive breakthroughs in desktop AI which is great for projects like this! Llama.cpp allows us to run state of the art LLMs on moderately specced pcs and smaller models (by today's standards) like BERT can run on a potato. Of course for many ML use cases simple models like logistic regression and random forest classifiers can get you there and they will definitely run on a potato!

Up in the Midlands visiting my parents this weekend. Had an early morning visit from their cat Bertie this morning #Caturday (https://brainsteam.co.uk/notes/2022/11/12/1668279717/)