• 0 Posts
  • 932 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle


  • This depends on how the verification is done, in my opinion, as well as whether there is a presence of more anonymous alternatives.

    If the EU has a system which does not rely on third parties for verification and allows the platform to verify directly with a government-run service, then the only real issue there is lack of anonymity, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on a platform if there are also popular anonymous alternatives people can use when they want to.

    The article doesn’t go into how ID verification will work though. If it’s through third parties like how the US does it, then that’s disgusting and waiting to be breached.










  • If he doesn’t care or need to verify it, then it doesn’t really matter.

    These tools are great at creating demoable MVPs. They’re terrible at creating maintainable codebases, and cannot be relied on to generate correct code. But if all you need is a demo or MVP, then it’s likely you don’t care, and that’s often the case for personal tools that non-coders want to use.

    The people using it to manage their personal finances are nuts though.


  • If your “friend” does not currently serve for a relevant military, then their battle may be best spent at home for now.

    For a US person, the obvious answer would be protesting, reaching out to representatives, and advocating against more unnecessary violence. For non-US, the first two don’t have the same effect, though your country could politically pressure Trump via threats of sanctions or such.

    If they request volunteers and your “friend” can do that, then that’s how they can use their experience, assuming they want to of course and understand potential consequences of doing so if their government doesn’t approve of it.


  • Ironically, it felt to me like the post deified algorithms itself, but this is the main takeaway:

    We should neither mystify, nor deify these systems, because it makes us forget that we have built them ourselves and infused them with meaning.

    An “algorithm” is nothing more than a set of instructions to follow to complete some kind of task. For example (and closely related), a sorting algorithm might attempt to sort a list by randomizing the list, then checking if it’s sorted and repeating if not (bogosort).

    Lemmy uses an algorithm to sort posts by “most recent”, for example, and I think that having a “most recent” sorting option is noncontroversial.

    Where algorithmic feeds become problematic, in my opinion, is when they start becoming invasive or manipulative. This is also usually when they become personalized. Lemmy, Reddit (within a subreddit), and other kinds of forums usually do not have personalized feeds, and the sorting algorithms for “hot” are usually noncontroversial (maybe there’s debate about effectiveness, but none usually about harm). Platforms like FB, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, YT, etc all have personalized feeds that they use personal data to generate. They also are the most controversial, and usually what is referred to as “algorithmic” feeds.

    These personalized feeds are not magic. They often include ML black boxes in them, but training a model isn’t sorcery, nor are any of the other components to these algorithms. Like the article mentioned, they are written by people, and can be understood (for the most part), updated, and removed by people. There is no reason a personalized feed is required to invade your privacy or manipulate you. The only reason they do is because these companies are incentivized to do so to maximize how much ad revenue they make off you by keeping you engaged for longer.





  • If you already know some programming languages, look for some kind of GUI or game library for it to see if you can use it. If not, something like Blender might be easiest to make in C++, Rust, C (if you’re a masochist), or maybe Zig. This may also influence the shading language you choose. Start with this.

    You will need to know some shader language. You have a few options there, but the most popular are GLSL and OpenGL (though I’d prefer GLSL). There’s also WGSL and some others, but they aren’t as popular. Prefer whatever the graphics library you’re using wants you to use.

    Math is very heavy on linear algebra. Look up PBR if you want to render realistic 3d shapes. Google’s Filament is well documented and walks through implementing it yourself if you want, but it’s pretty advanced, so you might want to start simpler (fragment colors can just be base color * light color * light attenuation * (N*L) for example).