boatswain

joined 2 years ago
[–] boatswain 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's absolutely feasible; it's just not painless. The network effect is real. This is something most of us here on the fediverse should be well familiar with: I'd wager we've all left a big proprietary centralized platform for a smaller one with less content that doesn't exactly fit our needs. Yes, it can suck; yes, you'll miss out on content and discussions that you would have seen before; yes, you'll be fine in a year anyway.

That said, it sounds like Discord is doing some backpedaling at the moment, and that the vast majority of people won't have to do this. If that's so, there's some time before it enshittifies further. I'm going to use that to check out alternatives. My first step will be spinning up Matrix and a Discord bridge to see if that meets my needs. Then some of the other platforms, probably Stoat and Spacebar. I'm going to treat them as beta tests and give lots of feedback to the dev teams, which I hope will help incentivize development. I might even throw a few bucks at promising projects.

The ultimate end of centralized platforms is decay. It's time to get serious about Discord replacements, at least for me.

[–] boatswain 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] boatswain 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Sounds like it's experimental at the moment:

Voice/Video when?

Currently there is experimental voice/video WebRTC support in Spacebar. UDP connections are not currently supported.

This is a very difficult feature to get working, especially given that we must implement it the exact same way as Discord.com for client compatibility, so if you find any bugs please open an issue in Spacebar server.

We would also be incredibly thankful for any assistance.

https://docs.spacebar.chat/faq/

So might not be ready for primetime. Voice is pretty critical to how I often use Discord. Video less so, but still important.

[–] boatswain 6 points 4 days ago

The article is primarily about one particular machine learning powered device that is making a lot of mistakes. It explicitly includes the above paragraphs to explain that it's not talking about LLMs for the most part (though it does start to mention their increasing use later)

[–] boatswain 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

There's also https://spacebar.chat/, which I've been hearing some buzz about, but not really here; not sure if that's because there are known problems with it or what.

Edit: it looks like voice and video are just experimental right now, so might not be a good replacement for many: https://docs.spacebar.chat/faq/

[–] boatswain 1 points 4 days ago

Last time I tried to play around with Stoat, I never even got a verification email, so taking an hour sounds like progress I guess? I'll have to try again.

[–] boatswain 5 points 4 days ago (6 children)

I've been hearing good things about https://spacebar.chat/. Stoat (formerly Revolt) is out there as well. Matrix is another possibility, but it's more for individual channels rather than whole servers, so doesn't fit some use cases.

[–] boatswain 11 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Crazy, it's almost like LLM's aren't doctors...

Directly from the linked article:

AI encompasses more than LLMs, however, and the technology made its way into medicine long before AI bots appeared. The field dates back more than 70 years: A key moment was when British mathematician Alan Turing asked in a 1950 paper, “Can machines think?”

The FDA authorized its first AI-enhanced medical devices in 1995 – two systems that used pattern-matching software to screen for cervical cancer. The type of AI used in medical devices today is often called machine learning, along with a subset known as deep learning, which are trained on data to perform specific tasks. The technology is used in radiology, for example, to enhance and analyze medical images. It can help diagnose cancers by identifying tumors that doctors may overlook.

[–] boatswain 10 points 4 days ago

I get it, but if bigger projects don't move to alternatives, those alternatives have a lot less pressure to evolve. If a big project bites the bullet and moves, then there are more technically minded folks with a vested interest in making the platform better.

[–] boatswain 5 points 2 weeks ago

The IT guy wasn't a trainee; the trainee is the one who noticed him.

[–] boatswain 19 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

There's a typo in your headline; you probably mean "a world when... were still valid" rather than "before".

[–] boatswain 3 points 4 weeks ago

The interesting thing here is that to maintain a trademark, you have to defend it, or you lose it. I'd think that would mean he's going to have to get litigious and start suing anything that looks like it violates his trademarks.

5
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by boatswain to c/cybersecurity
 

Looks like they're pretty concerned with the possibility of mass discrimination by AI, perhaps in the wake of the news about United Healthcare using AI to decline coverage. This could be useful to people:

If you believe that you or someone you know has been subjected to unlawful discrimination due to a health care provider’s or health insurance plan’s use of AI, please let us know by submitting a complaint to my office: https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/

 

Hi all, I recently got into the world of ergo mech by borrowing a friend's old Iris v2, and I really love how powerful and customizable things can be with QMK firmware.

Recently, my old n52te has started to show signs of age after a dozen or so years of abuse. If you're not familiar, they look like this:

There's definitely stuff that could be improved on--just being able to build your own firmware for it would be amazing. Having one or two more thumb buttons for layers would be sweet as well.

The community of ergo mech keyboard builders are doing some super cool things with 3d printed builds and all kinds of neat stuff. Since I've just been dipping my toes in, my question is: does anyone know of any good replacements for my n52te? Is this something anyone has tried tinkering around with?

Thanks!

 

I'm trying to figure out the best way to deal with some homebrew stuff I'll be dealing with in my 5e campaign.

If you're not familiar with Ancestral Weapons, it's a pretty cool system that gives you the ability to have weapons that level up with your players. The players get points periodically that they can spend on upgrades to their weapons.

I'll be using a variation of this setup in my campaign, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do so. My initial thought was a scene for each character's weapon, with some Monk's Active Tiles to handle a "talent tree" kind of interface where a player could select and then lock in which powers they want.

That doesn't really take care of updating the item itself though, which means that the players would have to update things manually ("oh, I need to make this sword +2 now" for example) after using the scene as a kind of calculator.

So maybe there's a better way: make the weapons Actors of their own, with special character sheets or something? Or maybe there's an existing mod I can use? Any thoughts or suggestions on the best way forward are appreciated.

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