• 1 Post
  • 276 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle












  • Honestly I wish there were less communities. I’ve said this before, but people treat Lemmy like late-stage Reddit, expecting niche communities for everything, and we end up with hundreds of communities with no (or one, if we’re lucky) active members.

    This problem is then amplified by the fact that these niche communities are split even further across several instances, so our userbase ends up completely dissipated.

    I would love to see users focus on a smaller number of more general-purpose communities. Of course, these should still be shared across instances, but I think we would benefit a lot from having, say, a “video games” community instead of 500 specific game communities.

    As a side note as well, I don’t think we shouldn’t be “allowed” to create more niche communities (though if an instance admin wanted to regulate, that’s their call). I think this should be more of a user culture shift, if anything.




  • 1: Does IBM even have an LLM that would be considered “good” these days? Maybe they do, but I haven’t heard about it.

    2: If this was in 2019, no wonder it flopped. Only very recently have we gotten to a point where this should’ve even been considered (and then, in my opinion given the current state of LLMs, dismissed).

    3: More than 100 stores were testing this?? Did they not think to start with like, one store and see if that worked at all?

    4: While a short-lived victory, this is still a win for people that rely on these jobs. Good for them.


  • I’ve done this a few times through my life, especially lately as I’ve finally been getting my own life stabilized. Here’s some more “notable” examples.

    A family member, where I’ve been trying to mentor them and help them in every way I possibly can - sometimes at great personal cost - but as the saying goes, I’ve led them to water but I can’t make them drink. Still won’t give up, though.

    Another family member I’ve done the same for has actually been trying to take me up on it. Still early stages, but they’ve started on applying for college in a field they’re interested in. I’m helping them study since it happens to be adjacent to my own field, and I’ll help cover the bulk of the cost if they don’t qualify for gov’t funding. I’m really hoping things work out for them.

    The only time I’ve really actually seen obvious results is in my students where I volunteer teaching English. One student in particular really struggled to read even a single word, but in less than a year, they can now read most sentences on their own - which is honestly just insane to me.
    Obviously it’s like 99.999% their effort rather than mine, but I like to think I’m helping lol.

    …writing this all out makes me feel like I’m bragging or something. Really I’ve just been in a rough spot for most of my life, and now that I’m getting my life together I’m just trying to give back a bit where I can. I just want everyone to be happy, lol.


  • I assist teaching English to newcomers/refugees to Canada.

    The biggest thing it did for me was get me out of the house (I work from home), and I’ve met so many amazing people - both the staff and the students. It’s also just incredibly fulfilling to see students getting better with their English, and seeing how much it helps them in their lives - especially given how difficult their lives have often been given their circumstances.

    I really struggled a lot with nihilism and meaninglessness before I started volunteering, and while my overall view of the world hasn’t changed much, my life feels like it has “purpose” now, as cliche as that sounds.