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Cake day: July 10th, 2024

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  • The position with the vegan cats is basically indefensible.

    What do all organisms, including animals, need to properly maintain their metabolism?
    Nutrients.
    What are nutrients?
    A bunch of different chemicals.

    Depending on the specific organism, another set of nutrients is required, also varying in amount of course.

    All required nutrients for humans at least can be obtained or synthesized from non-animal compounds.

    From that simplified perspective, it’s absolutely rational to explore how we could feed animals like cats on a purely vegan diet.
    But it’s certainly nothing which should be left to do for the layman alone, as veterinarian care is advisable if harming the animal should be avoided.



  • Communism is an idea. Just as capitalism is.

    What fucked up things people do with that is an entirely different problem.

    You can have an oppressive communist regime. You can also have an oppressive capitalistic regime. Both could be really good and beneficial for everyone.

    Heck, even a dictatorship could be a good governing system given a wise and benevolent dictator who has the best of all in their mind.

    The problem with all of these economic, governmental and societal systems are humans. All of those systems require a specific set of properties from humans in order to work well. The problem is, that not all humans meet those requirements. There is no system which takes humans as they are, with all their good qualities and all of their faults, to get the best out of humanity for humanity.

    From an engineering perspective, this is really stupid. But it’s immensely difficult as well. There are no simple solutions to the complexity of humans and their interactions. Which is why systems with self-correcting mechanisms might have an advantage. For example, democracies. However, those too have many pitfalls to address.

    Point is, communism is not inherently bad. It can be good, if no one exploits it. Even capitalism can be good, if no one is greedy and exploits others. There’s a lot of ifs. Improve the system or change it. Whatever might be better. But I don’t think it’s as simple as blaming it all on one core idea of a system itself, rather than to look how badly it was implemented.





  • If we’re speaking of transformer models like ChatGPT, BERT or whatever: They don’t have memory at all.

    The closest thing that resembles memory is the accepted length of the input sequence combined with the attention mechanism. (If left unmodified though, this will lead to a quadratic increase in computation time the longer that sequence becomes.) And since the attention weights are a learned property, it is in practise probable that earlier tokens of the input sequence get basically ignored the further they lie “in the past”, as they usually do not contribute much to the current context.

    “In the past”: Transformers technically “see” the whole input sequence at once. But they are equipped with positional encoding which incorporates spatial and/or temporal ordering into the input sequence (e.g., position of words in a sentence). That way they can model sequential relationships as those found in natural language (sentences), videos, movement trajectories and other kinds of contextually coherent sequences.