I’m not surprised they ultimately felt like GenAI isn’t useful to what they’re trying to do. Game dev has known about this type of generation for a while now (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_synthesis and the sources linked at the bottom) and it takes a lot of human effort to curate both the training data and the model weights to end up with anything that feels new and meaningful.

If I shuffle a deck of 52 cards, there is a high chance of obtaining a deck order that has never occurred before in human history. Big whoop. GenAI is closer to sexy dice anyways - the “intelligent work” was making sure the dice faces always make sense when put together and you don’t end up rolling “blow suck” or “lips thigh”.

It’s very impressive that we’re able to scale this type of apparatus up to plausibly generate meaningful paragraphs, conversations, and programs. It’s ridiculous what it cost us to get it this far, and just like sexy dice and card shuffling I fail to see it as capable of replacing human thought or ingenuity, let alone expressing what’s “in my head”. Not until we can bolt it onto a body that can feel pain and hunger and joy, and we can already make human babies much more efficiently than what it takes to train an LLM from scratch (and they have personhood and thus rights in most societies around the world).

Even the people worried about “AI self-improving” to the point it “escapes our control” don’t seem to be able to demonstrate that today’s AI can do much more than slow us down in the long run; this study was published over 5 months ago, and they don’t seem to have found much since then.

C’est hallucinant ce mélange d’ignorance et de mauvaise foi. J’ai mal à ma démocratie

Also, no federation on the NodeBB/piefed unless/until the users overwhelmingly ask for it.

NodeBB or maybe piefed to host announcements and provide a place for questions and feedback.

Consider creating an account for each household with a “correct horse battery staple” style password that’s easy to input on mobile, print out a little slip of paper with an explanation blurb and account name & password, and deposit in their mailbox.

Do not expect any users until you’ve hosted several game nights that had multiple attendees. From what you say you are the events committee, not the online life committee. I would thus recommend to stay focused on events until people bring up, unprompted, a desire for more casual day-to-day interactions. You want to be integrating into their existing habits, not trying to replace them. Let the “switching” happen on their own initiative lest they feel like they’re being co-opted for your own personal agenda.

Interestingly, that page cites vocata as related work

homer-simpson-“worst-so-far”-meme.jpg

I dislike yaml as much as the next person, but you can always “just” write Jason JSON (lol autocorrect). Unless I’m misunderstanding your criticism?

Forgejo has their own runner: https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/actions/runner-installation/

I’ve used it on my personal machine, was very easy to setup and mostly compatible with GitHub actions out-of-the-box (including things like actions/checkout@v4).

I see a new post.
I click, I read, I scroll on.
I am the lurker.

#haiku (<- test to see how far this propagates in the mastodon / microblogging part of the fediverse)

As well as 200 miles from every international airport inside the US.

Given the stochastic nature of LLMs and the pseudo-darwinian nature of their training process, I sometimes wonder if geneticists wouldn’t be more suited to interpreting LLM output than programmers.

It is, but maybe they mean they want no limit whatsoever on post length.

which, well, if your instance starts sending out megabyte-sized text posts I don’t expect it to stay federated with many others for very long.

I’ll be honest, that “Iceberg Index” study doesn’t convince me just yet. It’s entirely built off of using LLMs to simulate human beings and the studies they cite to back up the effectiveness of such an approach are in paid journals that I can’t access. I also can’t figure out how exactly they mapped which jobs could be taken over by LLMs other than looking at 13k available “tools” (from MCPs to Zapier to OpenTools) and deciding which of the Bureau of Labor’s 923 listed skills they were capable of covering. Technically, they asked an LLM to look at the tool and decide the skills it covers, but they claim they manually reviewed this LLM’s output so I guess that counts.

Project Iceberg addresses this gap using Large Population Models to simulate the human–AI labor market, representing 151 million workers as autonomous agents executing over 32,000 skills across 3,000 counties and interacting with thousands of AI tools

from https://iceberg.mit.edu/report.pdf

Large Population Models is https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09901 which mostly references https://github.com/AgentTorch/AgentTorch, which gives as an example of use the following:

user_prompt_template = "Your age is {age} {gender},{unemployment_rate} the number of COVID cases is {covid_cases}."
# Using Langchain to build LLM Agents
agent_profile = "You are a person living in NYC. Given some info about you and your surroundings, decide your willingness to work. Give answer as a single number between 0 and 1, only."

The whole thing perfectly straddles the line between bleeding-edge research and junk science for someone who hasn’t been near academia in 7 years like myself. Most of the procedure looks like they know what they’re doing, but if the entire thing is built on a faulty premise then there’s no guaranteeing any of their results.

In any case, none of the authors for the recent study are listed in that article on the previous study, so this isn’t necessarily a case of MIT as a whole changing it’s tune.

(The recent article also feels like a DOGE-style ploy to curry favor with the current administration and/or AI corporate circuit, but that is a purely vibes-based assessment I have of the tone and language, not a meaningful critique)

I would love to read that study, as going off of your comment I could easily see it being a case of “more than 10% of jobs are bullshit jobs à la David Graeber so having an « AI » do them wouldn’t meaningfully change things” rather than “more than 10% of what can’t be done by previous automation now can be”.

Data center municipal avec x Go de RAm, y Go de stockage et n coeurs de processeur alloués à chaque habitant. On pourrait envisager que ces quantités augmentent automatiquement avec l’âge.

Un ordi dans la veine des maisons passives : panneau solaire + écran “e-ink” par dessus des composants de smartphone, par ex.

Des gants pour la réalité augmentée qui simulent le toucher. J’ai pu faire la démo d’un stylet au bout d’un bras robotisé à un meetup XR il y a genre 5 ans, c’était bluffant comment ça pouvait reproduire l’expérience de tâter un ballon avec un bâton (je rencontrais non seulement de la résistance mécanique au “bon” moment mais j’avais carrément l’impression de pouvoir faire rebondir ce stylet sur la surface de la balle virtuelle). J’attends des gants, voir un espace de harnais ou baudrier, qui permettront pareil pour tout le corps.

The materials were also chosen with an eye on reducing maintenance and repetitive tasks for the yacht’s staff, so traditional materials like teak decks and wooden handrails are out, and composite alternatives are in. The diesel-electric power plant works alongside a battery storage system that allows Leviathan to operate for long stretches with no emissions, and it also features an advanced wastewater treatment system.

On the one hand, it’s nice that mr Newell seems to be reducing the footprint of their luxury yacht above and beyond most of what I have heard happens in the rest of the luxury yacht industry. On the other hand, I shudder to think of what the footprint for the manufacturing of this custom-designed, one-of-a-kind luxury yacht looked like. Not to mention ‘composite’ usually means some sort of plastic, so now there’ll be one more thing spewing microplastics directly into the ocean…

I want to chime in on the subject of community sidebars.

To my understanding, many of the mobile apps people use to interact with the fediverse (and more specifically the threadiverse) haven’t figured out a great way to render community sidebar content in a way that a new user knows that it exists. Sidebar content is accessible, but often hidden in a sub menu or a non-obvious interaction. I use Boost, for example; in it you swipe inwards from the right side of the screen to slide the sidebar into view. This isn’t surprising to me, a somewhat veteran Reddit user that expects communities to have sidebars and for those sidebars to be on the right side of the screen. However a user that doesn’t already know about community sidebars has almost no way of discovering their existence when they use Boost. Mobile apps have limited screen width so they tend to focus on their “principal use” (visiting a community to browse their posts), but if you don’t know that communities have sidebars in which they describe themselves and their posting and commenting rules it’s very easy to end up in OP’s position.

Not to excuse their comments nor question their ban; I agree with the decision by the mods of c/196 to not spend any more effort dealing with such an oblivious user.

I suspect many Lemmy clients are designed for experienced users who already know how to navigate the space(s) and how they function. Yet much of the “how do we introduce new people to the fediverse and onboard them?” discussions I’ve seen seem to settle on “suggest a generalist instance like LW or .zip, suggest a mobile app like Voyager, and make them start browsing! Newbs are put off by having to do work like read up on an instance”. I wonder how much this end up contributing to creating cases like OP’s.

Then again, !womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone was plagued for over a year by men claiming they were “just responding to posts in their /all feeds”. When told about the community’s rules and sidebar, the most common response was along the lines of “I can’t be bothered to read the community name before commenting on a post in my feed, now I need to navigate to the community and find their sidebar?? This community should find a way to prevent their posts from appearing in /all instead”. If these users aren’t going to the effort of reading the community name as displayed on posts then there’s no guarantee they would read community sidebars even if they were already on-screen, in front of their eyeballs.

Even in the comments on this post I can see the argument that basically boils down to “spaces that don’t cater to me should also bear the effort of keeping out of my way” being voiced.

According to this article written in July, it’s a bit more dire than that if you take a step or two back. Basically, openai and their copycats/derivatives are being held up by investments from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, who in turn are being held up by investments from Nvidia. If/when the whole chain collapses it’ll be more than 0.5% of earnings that disappear.

Quel manque d’imaginaire, n’empêche… T’es sur internet, t’as pas les contraintes habituelles de la télé, résultat : tu tournes une émission qui aurait sa place entre un épisode de Kohlanta et un de Toit le Monde Veut Prendre Sa Place.

J’en suis à me demander si c’est pas le seul canal restant pour un youtubeur qui a déjà tout fait pour assurer une certaine rentrée d’argent (sans tomber dans le traffic d’arnaques pour autant). Si c’est le cas, ça s’annonce très dur les fins de carrière de tous les autres youtubeurs…

Not that I disagree, just as someone who loves computers and programming it really feels like throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.

We could (should imo) be planning a sort of overthrow of the rich assholes who don’t share; make sure everyone has access to a computer, the electricity need to run it, and the knowledge to use it to their own benefit.

The second, longer quote in my previous comment is from the intro to a computer self-help/“how-to” book, Without Me You Are Nothing (pdf link).