Anxiety has been through the roof this past week. My weekend hasn't been too great either on account of a hole in my insulation causing my water to freeze on Friday. Hoping that it comes back tomorrow once temperatures start staying above freezing.
picked up the new foster dog, coco on saturday. she’s acclimating pretty well, considering she went from a free roaming outdoor only dog on 17 acres to a downtown indoor dog on 1/3 of an acre. my old man australian shepherd is having a harder time accepting her, but we’re getting there with short 5-10 minute intros where he’s on leash so i can redirect when he gets too in her face. the little chihuahua mix has always been good with other dogs, so no surprise that they’re interacting really well.
coco goes to the vet later today, and fingers crossed there’s no major issues.
update: she’s in perfect health! no parasites, healthy weight, good teeth and eyes.
Everything I've seen about hyper-specific-specialty-data-trained, limited purpose AI - particularly for medical screenings - looks promising. The idea of a FOSS AI trained locally on my own collection of documents is intriguing, but I have a hard time believing that it will be useful beyond asking it to pull up any notes relevant to keywords of any given project I'm working on.
Conversely, nearly everything I've seen about general AI/LLMs, including my own (limited) experiences, provides little reason to believe the hype espoused by the folks promoting them.
Interacting with ChatGPT (or any LLM chatbot) without a goal is akin to buying a tool you have no projects for. And just as a hammer can't provide plans for a grotto, chatbots can't really talk me into there being a reason to chat.
I'd also be curious to train a local model on my past work, but it feels like it might keep my attention for a bit and then I'd run out of transformative ideas. At this point, I know this is the inescapable future, but I'm swinging wildly between thinking we're going to find huge advantages and, well, apologist item descriptions.
My interactions with it were done to get a higher level of polish on some business related spreadsheets I was working on. I can manage certain tasks, but I don't use those skills often enough to warrant scaling my knowledge and practice to that level. A buddy recommended using one to give me the necessary formulas, so I tried it out.
Not one suggestion from the bot worked, and as it apologized and offered other non solutions I noticed recurrences of previous answers and a degradation of the quality substantial enough for a relative novice like myself to spot the issues before implementation. Perhaps it will advance past this point, but I'm unsure that the people in charge of them are really the folks needed to actually hit that target.
Personally I think a little fiscal conservation would be wise at this point.
Costs can, and do eventually, rise. Hardware fails, and other things can happen as a surprise; and I'd rather that Beehaw not be insolvent when those things happen.
While I get the wish to do fun things to enhance the community; I think we need to be keeping an eye on things too. A few bad months where users are squeezed and unable to contribute could also severely impact Beehaw; particularly in and around monthly costs. At no point should Beehaw admins be paying out-of-pocket for things if Beehaw itself as an organization has the funds to properly pay things.
If we do genuinely have too much funding in excess; examining how we could expand Beehaw or make it better is another way you can responsibly re-invest the funds into making Beehaw better.
Additional servers/services might be neat; things like:
A Mastodon server, if one doesn't already exist
A Matrix homeserver, if one doesn't already exist
A lightweight Pixelfed / image hosting/posting Service, if one doesn't already exist
Various and miscellaneous game servers/services like Minecraft or other popular multiplayer game servers/sessions/instances.
Of course such things could also require additional staff on hand, so I understand that you might want to entice someone to help manage these extra things first.
I think that question is definitely a worthy cause, but entirely misplaced. As others said, they donated to Beehaw not to some other foundation or charity. Rainy day fund is better than an oh shit, we're broke moment. I am extremely grateful to those who have and continue to donate towards Beehaw's Cause. We need to make sure that money is used, when needed, as expected.
That money should be used to keep the server(s) running, as well as expanding if/when needed. Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.
The funds aren't sitting there doing nothing. They're available in case Beehaw ever needs them. I didn't donate to a non-descript charity. I donated to Beehaw with the understanding that those funds would be used to stabilize the organization, whether it changes from Lemmy to some other platform, or whether it experiences another sudden quadrupling of membership overnight. That's what the money is for. If you put it in some kind of HYSA, it could be growing at 5% per month. Why shoot yourselves in the foot by giving it away?
I noticed the same a couple months ago. After the API shutdown stuff happened, I largely left reddit. I would only go there for things I needed, like information and news related to my field.
But in October, I started going back more, and even commenting. And almost immediately, I got the "well ackshually..." comments and just so much unneeded aggression. People just looking to be right by ignoring 99% of the correct information in a comment and focusing on that 1% that's weak or, sure, wrong. And it was over dumb stuff, too.
After being on reddit for 13yrs straight, I guess I learned to be blind to it all. Like I knew it was happening, I saw it all the time, and I'm sure I know I even did it myself here and there. Hell, I was/am still a mod on a reddit; I saw it everyday. I did start getting tired of reddit and redditors about a year ago, but I just kinda brushed it aside.
Anyway, it wasn't until leaving and going to Beehaw and Tildes for a few months, and then going back, that I realized how bad it actually was on reddit. It's so glaring to me in threads all over the place. And that there was no desire to improve or change things. That that's just reddit's culture and that's how redditors like it.
As such, I've still kinda kept some distance from reddit. I'm still there, but I don't think I'll ever go back to how I was using the site pre-APIgate.
Further, I actually get angry when I see people on Lemmy engage in that redditesque way of just looking for confrontation and being smartasses. We left reddit; why are we bringing that mentality with us? If I saw someone on a Beehaw community acting that way, I call it out.
That's one of the reasons I support Beehaw potentially leaving Lemmy to do its own thing. I see Tildes and see how a standalone forum and community can exist and function well and productively, without all the "gotchas" and just unnecessary aggression. That's not to say Beehaw (or Tildes) is perfect. That behavior can be found everywhere. But at least there's a desire to try to stamp that out.
Shut your whore mouth! On occasion, a post might just slip by the assholes. Make another blanket statement like that and I'll swat your grandma live on 8chan.
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