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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • Not chatGPT. But AIs are good at one single thing and that is pattern recognition. And there is a lot of data to train and use those AIs on. Decades of data from your PCs, phones and tablets is on NSA servers. And yes, the NSA did shit like recording you through your notebook camera or recording your phone calls with your first girlfriend.

    AI will probably never replace human workers/engineers/artists/…, but sorting through your online history is exactly what AIs excel at.

    Also Dragnet policies are used by the police for a long time now. This is pretty much just that. Imo the main question is more if they want to burn that data on this task, because once they do this some people will adjust and it will get harder to get new data.


  • menementoMemesSoftware: Then vs Now
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    3 days ago

    I mean, I’d say it depends on what you do. When I see grad students writing numeric simulations in python I do think that it would be more efficient to learn a language that is better suited for that. And I know I’ll be triggering many people now, but there is a reason why C and Fortran are still here.

    But if it is for something small, yeah of course, use whatever you like. I do most of my stuff in R and R is a lot of things, but not fast.



  • menementoData Is BeautifulLanguages' population
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    3 days ago

    I was actually just adding more criticism. They obviously negated that people can have more than one native language. There is a lot to criticize on that presentation. I’d file it under “Data can be ugly” tbh.

    On the other hand, doing this “cleanly” is imo nearly impossible. The language situation is way to complicated to present “the demographic of languages of the world” in a single graph without oversimplifying and misrepresenting stuff.


  • menementoData Is BeautifulLanguages' population
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    4 days ago

    Some of the missing are left out languages. E.g. there are ~200 million speakers of turkic languages, but they only cited Turkish with ~71 million. Amd they didn’t include a single Bantu language. There must be more than 300 million Bantu speakers.

    It is also kind of weird that they give numbers to the tenth part while using wild estimates. Turkey has 85 million inhabitants and up to 10 million native speakers outside of turkey. There are no official ethnicity numbers from turkey as ethnicity is not registered. Also no one knows how many turkish speakers exactly live outside of turkey. But they give us numbers to the tenth part? The situation will be similar for the other languages.







  • Nowadays I work in urban hydrology and lead our team for general planning/asset management and data management of utilities company for a city in germany. I did my phd in river hydrology and hydrometeorology.

    I have to admit modelling nowadays is only ~30% of my job. I oftentimes wished that I would do more modelling, but thus is life I guess. Should still consider myelf lucky that I manage to still do that much modelling, thanks to my team being very competent, thus allowing me to manage with a very low hierarchy and still do some work myself (the pay gap is also quite small, so I guess that is fair).

    But remote work is difficult in that business. We allow a maximum of 50% and only 1-2 days per week for leading positions.









  • menementoAsklemmyHow do I quit smoking?
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    16 days ago

    You have to want to stop. I smoked 13 years, stopped several times, but the final real stopping was not that hard.

    What also worked quite well for me as a crutch were nicotine free cigarettes. I decided I’d smoke as many of those as I wanted. Started with 20 at the first day and it slowly reduced by itself over time, till at one point o completly stopped without even realizing it.