A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • I meant both sex and gender. They regularly fail to tell me a lot for my own real life. I like some people and dislike others and it’s easier for me to talk to / work with / collaborate or empathize depending on various circumstances. Personality traits, shared goals… Maybe sharing something or it’s the opposite of that. I believe gender or sex or identity is a bit overrated and so is stereotyped thinking for a lot of applications. Or the need to conform to a stereotype. Dress and identify however you like, make sure to give your children an electronics kit, a plastic excavator and a princess dress… And unless that’s really important for some niche application, don’t feel the urge to look into people’s pants and check what’s in there.


  • You’re welcome. I mean it’s kind of a factual question. Is gender an indicator on its own? If yes, then the rest is just how statistics and probability work… And that’s not really a controversy. Maths in itself works 🥹

    I’d also welcome if we were to cut down on unrelated stuff, stereotypes and biases. Just pick what you like to optimize for and then do that. At least if you believe in the free market in that way. Of course it also has an impact on society, people etc and all of that is just complex. And then women and men aren’t really different, but at the same time they are. And statistics is more or less a tool. Highly depends on what you do with it and how you apply it. It’s like that with most tools. (And LLMs in the current form are kind of a shit tool for this if you ask me.)




  • LLMs reproducing stereotypes is a well researched topic. They do that due to what they are. Stereotypes and bias in (in the training data), bias and stereotypes out. That’s what they’re meant to do. And all AI companies have entire departments to tune that, measure the biases and then fine-tune it to whatever they deem fit.

    I mean the issue aren’t women or anything, it’s using AI for hiring in the first place. You do that if you want whatever stereotypes Anthropic and OpenAI gave to you.


  • I think after initial installation, you open a browser with the post-installation step and configure a username and password there. I’m not entirely sure, it’s been some time since I did it. But depending on installation method, I don’t think it has a provided password.

    General password advice: Check caps lock, and if you use like a German keyboard if ‘z’ and ‘y’ are swapped.



  • Concerning the IQ: App development and regular programming aren’t that hard. It needs some time and dedication, and willingness to learn how all these things work and tie together, but I think everyone with an average IQ could do it. It’s specific domains where you need a high IQ, like writing advanced signal processing algorithms. Or write very efficient algorithms or do detailed security audits. But App development is just moderately complex, you can get away with basic math… So I’d say it’s doable. Still needs quite some time and effort though. At least several weeks to months. And the Kotlin book I have has like 800 pages filled with information, and that just takes some time to work through. None of it is magic, though. You do one chapter at a time.

    Vibe coding is overrated IMO. There are applications and clients out there for whom it’s fine if you just do a piss-poor job and throw something together, and it somehow works enough. For a lot of things it’s not advanced enough, yet.




  • Yes. Steam is available on Linux, pretty easy to install and it comes with a compatibility layer (Proton) which works quite well.

    Linux is a bit different than Windows. But I’d say just using it is about as complicated as using Windows. You’ll just have to try and see whether you like it. And if it’s hard or easy for you to relearn a few things. I mean if you’re in the Browser and Steam all day, those will be the same applications and also look and work the same way. Other than that you could face some issues with gaming hardware and you have to fiddle with things, or everything works out of the box. You can’t tell beforehand.


  • I agree a copyright dystopia wouldn’t be any good. Just mind that wild west or law of the jungle is the “right of the strongest”. You’re advantaging big companies and disadvantaging smaller players or people with ethics or who are more open/transparent.

    And I don’t think legality with web scraping is the biggest issue. Sure I maybe could do it if it were possible. But I’m occasionally doing some weird stuff and most services have countermeasures in place. In reality I just can’t scrape Reddit. Lot’s of bots and crawlers just don’t work any more. I’m getting rate limited left and right from all big platforms. Lots of things require an account these days, and services are quick banning me for “suspicious activity”. It’s barely possible to download Youtube videos these days. So, no. I can’t. While Google can just pay for it and have the data.

    Also Reddit isn’t really the benevolent underdog here. They’re a big company as well. And they’re not selling their data… They’re selling their user’s data. They’re mainly monetizing other people’s creations.


  • Well, copyright law is kind of a bit older. When it was written, there was no AI. So it doesn’t address our current issues. It’s utterly unprepared for it. So people need to shoehorn things in, interpret and stretch it… Obviously that comes with a lot of issues, loopholes and shortcomings.

    But I can’t follow your argumentation. Why would they get away with this forever? When the car was invented, we also made up rules for cars, because the old ones for horses didn’t help any more. That’s how law is supposed to work… Problems surface, laws get passed to address them. That’s daily business for governments.

    And they don’t even get away with stealing this time. That’s what the article says.

    If you want to share a pessimistic perspective about governments and mega-corporations, I’m all with you. That’s very problematic. But some regions are better than others. Europe for example had a few clever ideas about what needs to be addressed. It’s not perfect, though. And copyright still isn’t solved anywhere. At least not to my knowledge.


  • I agree that we need open-source and emancipate ourselves. The main issue I see is: The entire approach doesn’t work. I’d like to give the internet as an example. It’s meant to be very open, connect everyone and enable them to share information freely. It is set up to be a level playing field… Now look what that leads to. Trillion dollar mega-corporations, privacy issues everywhere and big data silos. That’s what the approach promotes. I agree with the goal. But in my opinion the approach will turn out to lead to less open source and more control by rich companies. And that’s not what we want.

    Plus nobody even opens the walled gardes. Last time I looked, Reddit wanted money for data. Other big platforms aren’t open either. And there’s kind of a small war going on with the scrapers and crawlers and anti-measures. So it’s not as if it’s open as of now.



  • Yes. But then do something about it. Regulate the market. Or pass laws which address this. I don’t really see why we should do something like this then, it still kind of contributes to the problem as free reign still advantages big companies.

    (And we can write in law whatever we like. It doesn’t need to be a stupid and simplistic solution. If you’re concerned with big companies, just write they have to pay a lot and small companies don’t. Or force everyone to open their models. That’s all options which can be formulated as a new rule. And those would address the issue at hand.)