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.
We’re suppose to have our first big snow storm of the season, starting today. 4-6 inches (~10-15cm) or more. Currently only like an inch of snow. That said, as is often said in the Midwest: “It’s really coming down out there.”
More importantly, I told my boss, the CEO, about my job offer. I’ve had this job offer on the table for like the last 7mo, but the processing has taken forever (it’s a government job). On Friday, he sent me an email that he’s promoting me to a director (which was surprising to say the least). So I felt that I had to finally tell him. I didn’t want for him to announce to everyone he’s promoting me, only for me to be like “Yeah thanks bossman…I’m out. Cya!” I feel like that might humiliate him. Should I care? Maybe not. But he’s been a good boss to me. I feel like I owe it to him to not put him in that position. I’ve worked for him for like 7yrs total and he’s treated me well.
Obviously he’s less than enthused, but he gets it. I’ve been trying to get to a government job for awhile and to move out of here and he knows this. This isn’t my official notice; there’s a chance that something happens and I lose the job offer. But at least he knows what’s going on. He can figure out if he wants to put the promotion on pause or what.
Got a dogshit performance review because I did not conform to the pointless metrics we’re judged against, like ‘Positivity’ and ‘Responsiveness’ (because I didn’t smile every day and I don’t answer teams messages after hours.) I hate this job. Fuck capitalism.
Hang in there OP, I left the company I worked for early last year for reasons like that. Sure isn’t the easiest thing to do (x-gen here) but I feel like it’s always ^tm^ a good solution when your job sucks(the soul out of you).
I’m new to the fediverse and chose to join Beehaw because the community interactions feel positive like an active private forum that I’m on, but with the structural flexibility of a federated platform.
There is definitely a tone change between local communities and the outside federated feed, but I worry that secession and isolation will lead to community atrophy— it’s already a small instance and without the cross-pollination of outside users and content it may not have enough momentum to succeed
Without substantial growth after being cut off from the activity of the fediverse, Beehaw would not be large enough to stave off serious atrophy. The lemmy/kbin end of the fediverse is already very slow to begin with.
Beehaw was around much before the current “population explosion” of the Fediverse, though, and by all accounts was doing just fine. Naturally it didn’t have as much content as it currently does, but the sort of reddit-esque content flood that some people seem to need really isn’t a requisite for sites to thrive.
I’m on a small lemmy/reddit -like content aggregator / forum that has maybe a few hundred users, and while it’s certainly quiet compared to Lemmy nowadays, it’s got a small active community and nobody feels like it would need more “volume” to be a nice place to be.
I’ve said it a few times in similar conversations before … the big-corp mega social media era (~2008-2023, Twitter/Reddit/Facebook/Instagram) has had huge cultural effects on the internet that go way beyond whether you’re on one of the platforms or not and which will ripple into the future for a long while.
We’d all do well to consider what parts of that culture we carry in our expectations and behaviours … and the whole doom-scrolling through an all-encompassing feed as a form of entertainment expectation is a big one. Social media always needs to be a big place … is another one.
These aren’t all necessarily evil … but as universal expectations they certainly aren’t good either, IMO.
I think the worry is less about growth, and more about dying out. Too much external input can drown out the local conversation, but also too little external input can put too much pressure on the members to generate content, leading to burnout and also killing conversations.
It’s a precarious balance between “so much that it gets out of control” and “so little that there is nothing left out”.
Celebrated with the young 'uns till 01:20 in the morning and no hangover, so two good things - can still drink moderately and stay up past midnight! Yay!
Literally the hardest period of my life, but I am equipped with the best mental equipment I can so it’s all in - or, in this specific case of mine, i hope it’s all out (edit: luckily no life threatening situations, dw)
It’s been a bit of a shit one. Finances are rough right now as I’ve been looking for a job for quite some time, and I learned just yesterday that my roommate is moving out on the first of February and didn’t think it was something she really needed to tell me in advance. So I’ll be on the hook for the full rent amount, which is around twice what I have in my bank account right now.
I did apply for a really cool job with a queer non-profit, so fingers crossed I’ll get that and my luck will start turning around!
Personally what I’ve found works for me is to focus on news that’s local to me, the more local the better. So I start with news about my municipality, then my province, then my country, and I try to keep it at that for the most part. Of course, world news slips through, especially American politics, but I try to keep it at bay as much as possible.
I honestly had a bit of a nervous breakdown around the start of the war in Ukraine, doomscrolling through articles and updates everyday. I realized I needed to dial back and tried to cut out all news, and that just ended up making me more anxious. Focusing on local news has been the Goldilocks zone for me. I’ll still consume stuff about world news occasionally, but it’s usually in a way that relates to my country, for example articles about Canada’s support of Israel on the world stage.
Some news sources are definitely more inflammatory than others. I’m also of the opinion that television news in general is a farce, to the extent that the best “journalists” on TV in recent memory have been comedians like Jon Stewart and John Oliver.
I’m francophone and queer living under a conservative provincial government that dislikes francophones and queers, I do like to be on top of what rights they’re trying to attack this week.
Apart from that, I guess a general sense that you need to know what’s wrong if you want to fix it. Am I aware that I’m ultimately powerless to fix societal woes? Yeah, that’s why I cut back on the news, but cutting it out completely feels like giving up any hope of fixing anything. That’s just too much of a downer for me.
Barbershop. I know, weird, right? It gets weirder. This is a weekend event - a “brigade”. The best way to describe it is like a pick-up basketball tournament. 100 guys show up, they get randomly (by position forward/center/guard or bass/bari/lead/tenor) into 25 “teams”. Instead of basketball plays and general sport, we all learn - note perfect - twelve fairly complex songs. Each team gets assigned one of the songs and, after an hour of rehearsal, compete against one another (we have voice judges, like the Olympics have gymnastics judges). It’s all for shits and grins, but mostly for the brotherhood* of shared song. We split up and do programs for local school music departments, and all get together to form a 100 man chorus for a benefit concert the second nite. Unlike most choral events, we all know the same songs, so you find three others and go. All day and all night for two days. Lunches or dinners at local restaurants often turn flash-mob performance.
Again, it’s weird from the outside. From the inside it’s like 99 friends best friends or family members, but without the family discord.
*There has almost always been women in barbershop, but we were officially separated into our own societies/organizations until recently. Falling numbers will do that - it’s an old art form and the men who were around when it is popular are passing on. Anyway, several of these weekends are now gender inclusive and, from what I understand, awesomer as a result. I’ll get to go to my first in two months. We’re also adding semi-modern repertoire. Sugar (maroon 5) and Feel it Still (Portugal The Man) are on the song list, for example. Last weekend they threw in a Garth Brooks and Joe Diffy songs. Not 2023/24, but not 1923/24 either.
Wow. That sounds like a blast. Have heard some Barbershop & knew it is a US college tradition, but had no idea about the brigades.
As a curious aside, saw a thing on television just this evening about a Portuguese musical tradition which exists in their universities. The style & tunes are very different to Barbershop, and they make use of string instruments as well (though everybody has to sing) but they too have familiar repertoire and appear at various events on campus, as well as competing with other university troupes.
I’ve heard of that in Portugal! Barbershop is actually an art form that was appropriated from African slaves who brought an oral tradition with them to America and morphed from the spirituals they sang; it was developed more though the Vaudeville practice and modern barbershop (the organization and preservation of the art form) started as a lark in the 40s. The less I sing it, the more I enjoy it when I do - it’s very distinctive, so a little goes a long way.
A lot. Also, thanks for the heads-up on Kagi. Anybody have recommendations for a privacy-respecting search engine that isn’t run by chuds? Paid is fine as long as it doesn’t suck.
Kagi is hard because it is so very much better than any alternative I have tried. I don’t like the guy’s views but it would substantially impact something I do for work and pleasure dozens of times every day to give it up, so I’m really struggling with that.
I donate to a local group that provides housing for homeless youth. Before donating, always check where the money actually goes - there’s a few good websites for this that breaks down the org’s budget for CEO pay, marketing, etc.
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