I use copilot on a daily basis for programming. It has made me much more productive and it’s a real pleasure to use it. Nothing overhyped about it.

Curious to see what it will bring for other domains, e.g. for dealing with emails.

I do agree that there’s a lot of filtering happening. Not a huge deal for more applications. Luckily you can run your own models that are not filtered. I can definitely see a future where you run your own models locally. Afaik Apple recently did some stuff around that.

I can strongly recommend the SponsorBlock extention (also available in revanched).

I was big into downloading before streaming services were a thing. Music streaming is one of the few services that’s totally worth my money: no hassle and I rarely have to resort to other platforms to find what I want (very different from video streaming, which totally sucks when it comes to that).

Lemmy devs expressed in an AMA that Liberapay is the preferred method of donation.

Check out the Law of One for some funky spiritual stuff. There might be something in there that makes sense of this reality for you.

It knocked my shoes off

Definitely dead here.

It’s bought by Avast. I immediately uninstalled it when I learned about the news. No way that they don’t want get a return on investment by e.g. selling your data.

Consent-o-matic is better (actually sets the minimum amount of cookies) and is developed by university employees, whom I trust more.

One you don’t wanna join ;) (Google). I’m still on the free tier of what’s now Workspace and intent to move, but I’m dreading the work that comes with it.

A year or so ago Google almost killed the free tier (look up gsuite legacy if you want to know more). Back then I prepared to move away and settled on Zoho as my replacement, but in the end Google responded to the community’s backlash and kept the free tier free for personal use (although there are some other restrictions put in place, so eventually a move is inevitable). Zoho might also give you the features you want.

I watched a video of a scam baiter recently. The scammer wanted playstation store credits or something. The baiter pretended to be an old lady that didn’t understand much. The scammer just had no patience at all. Calling her stupid in her face and all that. Apparently there are really bad scammers.

Did not know about that seeder. Super useful tool! Thanks for sharing.

I use my own domain and have support for aliases and also have a catch all. No need to selfhost for that.

I would not recommend running your own email server. Major email providers like gmail only accept email from servers that have all kinds of measures in place to make them as trustworthy as possible. That’s hard and probably not possible on a home internet connection.

Filtering incoming spam is also a pain in the ass.

It’s nice as an exercise to learn how email works, but I would not rely on it.

Oh, it should absolutely be the team’s decision and you’re also totally right that Kanban requires a more mature team. People indeed need to be able to recognise and ask for help when they’re stuck (which means being vulnerable, but also simply being able to formulate the right questions). People also need to be able to give feedback to their team members when they feel or see that someone is struggling or not delivering enough.

To facilitate I always have some form of retrospective in my teams, even when doing Kanban. Sometimes only once every other month, sometimes every two weeks. Highly depends on the maturity of the team and customer.

I work in a company where we say that everyone is an expert (and to a very large extent this is really true). We create teams of experts, including more business savvy people. Everyone respects each others expertise and makes sure they can apply it as best as possible. We don’t infringe upon each other’s expertise. We might ask another expert about the why or the how, but we should not assume we know better. Obviously this happens sometimes, but then we remind each other that we’re all experts and that an engineer wouldn’t like to be told by marketing how to do their job either.

I think this fits nicely with ‘stay in your lane’ and actually makes it easy to remind people to do so. It’s in the core values of the company that people excel in their lane and cooperate with people in other lanes.

I would even argue that points, stories and sprints are not things you need. If you go kanban, you don’t need sprints. You still need to be producing and you probably want to get a feel for complexity so you can prioritize, but that can be done without points.

Stories are also very scrum specific and you can turn them into whatever format you want. I usually still call them stories, but they’re basically just a little card that describes the context (why do want something) and the deliverables (what will be implemented to meet that want).

Correct, it’s not just regurgitating words, it’s predicting which token comes next. A token is sometimes a whole word, but for longer ones it’s part of a word (and some other rules that define how tokenization works).

How it knows which token comes next is why the current generation of LLMs is so impressive. It seems to have learned the rules the underpin our languages, to the point that it seems to even understand the content. It doesn’t just know the grammer rules (without anyone telling it, it just learned the patterns), it also knows which words belong to each other in which context.

It’s your prompt + some preset other context (e.g. that it is an OpenAI LLM) that creates that context. So being able to predict a token correctly is one part, the other is having a good context. This is why prompt engineering quickly became a thing. This is also why supporting bigger contexts is another thing (but a larger context requires way more processing power, so there’s a trade-off there).

It’s btw not just the trained model + context that gives you the output of ChatGPT. I’m pretty sure there are layers before and after, possibly using other ML models, that filter content or make it more fit for processing. This is why you can’t ask it how to make bombs, even though those recipes are in its training set and it very likely can create a recipe based on that.

Looks like it does: https://chat.openai.com/share/1b487711-c1be-468a-877b-98091449b55e

I asked it to translate ‘meeting agreements’ to Dutch and it came up with the word ‘bijeenkomstafspraken’, which is a valid but very uncommon Dutch word (I’m native Dutch and don’t think I’ve seen it before). If I throw it into google with quotes around it, the first page is results with ‘bijeenkomst afspraken’, where ‘afspraken’ is used as the past tense of ‘afspreken’ (to agree) instead of as its noun (agreements).

It btw also suggested ‘vergaderafspraken’ as a translation, which is a way more common word.

ChatGPT speaks other languages. It’s actually a really good translator.

I just asked it to describe an organization using UK English and it indeed used ‘organisation’ instead (didn’t check for other words).

I exclusively use Lemmy via voyager.

Markdown is notoriously understandized, so there are lots of unofficial extensions. This is a major downside of markdown, as you cannot trust a renderer to properly show the formatting beyond the basics.

It’s still really nice, because of two great features:

• it’s super easy to learn. Just look at a few examples and off you go.
• even when it’s not rendered, it’s still easy to read (which I think contributes to making it easy to learn).