Right, so the light is actually pushed up by these buoyant forces and I guess that then also explains why it’s so dark underground. Fascinating how learning some little new details about the world can sometimes make it all just click together!

But does that mean that light is actually hollow?

Shpongle, when the walls melt.

Practical, but not really equivalent though because of nil punning.

Join and recommend smaller general instances like lemm.ee, vlemmy.net, and lemmy.one at random instead. Smaller servers have been upgraded for the surge of users too you know

That was basically my logic when I joined lemmy.world a few weeks ago. Oh well…

For years now I have only read ebooks on my phone, so one evening I decided to get back to the habit of reading real books.

So I take my time and carefully pick just the right book, gather some pillows, turn off the lights and lay comfortable on the couch. And after a few confused moments of flipping through pages I remembered that these fucking things didn’t work in the dark. And I really don’t like to read under a bright light anymore so back to reddit it was for that evening.

That said, I think I’ll skip this one, doesn’t sound too comfortable.

Speaking as just a hobbyist, a more developer oriented community focused on the topic would be nice, if someone is up to the task.

It’s currently hard to find any good information about how to actually use LLMs as part of a software project as most of the related subreddits etc. are more focused on shitposting and you don’t currently really want to talk about these in general tech/programming forums without a huge Don’t shoot I’m not one of them! disclaimer.

Regarding little Bobby, is there any known guaranteed way to harden the current systems against prompt injections?

This is something that I’m personally more worried about than Skynet or mass unemployment now that everyone and their dog is rushing to integrate LLMs into to their systems (ok worried maybe a wrong word, but let’s just say I have the popcorns ready for the moment the first mass breaches happen with something like the Windows Copilot).

At least I’m interested but more technical discussion about this would probably fit better in some comp sci or programming community? Though most of those are a bit hostile to the LLM related topics these days because of all the hype and low effort spam.

Is the whole “You are an LLM by OpenAI, system date is etc.” prompt part of the system message?

A few days ago when I was talking about controlled natural languages with it and asked it to give a summary of the chat so far in Gellish it spit that out.

If these commands were in a system message it would generally refuse to help you.

Doesn’t it usually fairly easily give its system message to the user? I have had that happen purely by accident.

I’m not sure if I’d call that reverse engineering any more than using a web browsers View Source feature.

But it’s interesting how it works behind the scenes and that only way to get these models to interface with the external world is by using the natural language interface and hoping for the best.

Yep, for example I think the joke about a guitarist fingering a minor is gone now from it’s repertoire. Finetuning and guardrails probably also limit its capability to “understand” jokes in general.

IME it’s explanations of jokes are usually really off too, probably partly because of the guardrails and partly because it’s understanding is so surface level.

Edit: tried to see if understands the joke about guitarist but now it refuses to even explain it and just flags the question and freezes.

This now begs the question for me as a user: Which one do I subscribe to if I want to stay informed? An article on one side could be submitted or gain traction when it does not on the other. But subbing to both could lead to a lot of duplicate articles being fed to me.

Theres nothing stopping the client from offering a different or entirely customizable view to the content.

For example the client could allow user to place those communities under a common News category in their client. Then the client would combine all identical links in the category according to some criteria (e.g same link posted in the same day would count as identical) and either merge the comments or let the user pick which communitys comments to see, or preferably both. So comments section could have a buttons for “Comments at news@beehaw.org”, “Combine comments” etc.

I think it should be possible to build a client that hides most of the details about different instances and such so it would function almost the same as traditional RSS readers.

I don’t know, Reddit and Lemmy differ from common social media platforms (I wouldn’t really call Reddit style platforms social media anyway) in that they are structured around different topics and categories and in that way are closer to earlier newsgroups, bbs’s, forums and such. So the main concepts aren’t really that new and weird, we have had subforums, topics, groups, channels and such for decades now.

To me subinstance sounds more like a technical term, but I guess people would just call them subs anyway. I think that’s a problem in general with deriving anything from “instance”.

I guess community does a good job at being a more human centric term. You have the technical side of things, servers and software (instances) and on those you have the actual user facing parts (communities) so in that way it’s kinda fitting.

Further overthinking about the terminology I just realised that Lemmy calls joining communities “subscribing” and Reddit calls it “joining”, while I would naturally think it would be more fitting the other way around. Naming things is hard.

There are probably better solutions but I guess simplest way would be to solve that at the client end?

Give users the option to merge community views from different instances (maybe too much hassle for the average user), have the client do it automatically for some specified communities, or have a mechanism by which the communities can hint the client to merge their content with specific “friend” communities.

From users POV the last option would be the easiest (but it should be possible to opt out of it or customize the behaviour). To prevent trolling and harassment the merging would require an authentication from all participating communities. That doesn’t prevent multiple posts on the same subject but if majority of users see the same combined content the likelihood of double posts decreases. It would still spread the load between instances, and if they want the different instances could specialize on different aspects of the subject.

Just a thought. I don’t know if it makes any sense from technical point, maybe it would be easy to implement without any changes on the underlying protocols or maybe it would require some ugly kludges and would just overcomplicate everything or is something not many people would even need or want.

Personally that term makes me a bit uneasy. To me it sounds too grandiose and organized just for something that might just be some random people shitposting or chatting about their interests. And actually having tight knit communities can easily lead to all kinds of negative effects, group think, hierarchies and drama.

Of course some subreddits, forums, lemmy communities etc can be actual communities but just as a personal preference I don’t like the idea of calling them that default.

Sentimental in the sense that I have been a Reddit user for 16 years and this makes me feel really really old. And in internet years Reddit is even older, I would have excepted it to die already years ago and it seems exceptional that it has kept going for this long.

Back when Reddit was starting to get popular I was mildly annoyed and suspicious of it and all these other new fangled web2.0 things but slowly it replaced random forums, news groups, irc and other old school platforms for me. To me Reddit sits somewhere between those and the more modern and “social” web platforms and as such it feels like a relic from the early 2000s that probably has no place in the modern internet. Bit like me myself actually (“Hey, you should post that on Reddit!” is the usual ironic response that I get from my kids whenever I say something really funny or insightful…)

And like others here I’m worried about all the niche communities and losing the vast source of content that Reddit has accumulated. Sure, most of it is low effort shit as usual but especially with how bad Google has become Reddit is now my first choice when I need to get an overview of some new topic.

That said I have been planning to delete my Reddit account for a while now. After all these years it has got stale, the hive mind is predictable and it feels like I have seen all the same conversations and topics already too many times. I don’t need to read any threads on more popular subs since I already know what the most upvoted opinions, memes and jokes are going to be. And it seems like every few years they piss off their userbase in some way, who then threaten to quit and find something better and surely this the end of Reddit, and then nothing happens.

It’s old. I think it’s time to let it go now.