I’m very happy to see that the industry has moved away from the blockchain hype. AI/ML hype at least useful even if it is a buzzword for most places
So true.
With LLMs, I can think of a few realistic and valuable applications even if they don’t successfully deliver on the hype and don’t actually shake the world upside down. With blockchain, I just could never see anything in it. Anyone trying to sell me on its promises would use the exact words people use to sell a scam.
Blockchain is a great solution to a almost nonexistent problem. If you need a small, public, slow, append only, hard to tamper with database, then it is perfect. 99.9% of the time you want a database that is read-write, fast and private.
While applying it where most shitcoins have applied Blockchain, I agree it’s all hype. But Blockchain doesn’t solve a non-existent problem.
Trusting humans is an inherent security flaw. Blockchain solves that problem. You don’t have to trust banks to not shortsell the housing market with your own money (causing a recession for the entire world) if you could cut humans out of the equation.
Forget money. Say the data that you want to be able to transact and operate on is health data instead of financial information. You could create a decentralized identity system based on people’s biometric information. From there, you could automate and decentralize governance in general.
Suggesting Blockchain solves a non-existent problem is like suggesting Lemmy solves a non-existent problem
Why would health data be something you want decentralized?
The only possible usecase I can think of for that is someone who has unique info that an emergency room would need. At that point, a medical alert bracelet would be the way to communicate that. Otherwise, I want to know exactly who has my medical information. That’s super sensitive info
Alright it’s early so I’m not structure this so much, but here’s my cypherpunk argument
So, a decentralized ID system could be implemented by having a microchip implanted in the heart. The measured signals are more unique than your fingerprint, and if someone stole it, they’d have to kill you by ripping it out of your heart.
But no one can trust a single company or government to make such a chip and not abuse that very rich health data which you can infer emotional states with. So instead a standard is developed so other people can develop the device independently.
But decentralization goes beyond just manufacturing of the device itself, but also in governance of the data it collects. It doesn’t matter if your data is encrypted on the way to a single corporations servers, they still own the data.
Furthermore, fully homomorphic encryption could be used to perform operations on encrypted data without ever decrypting it (unless you decrypt it with the keys from your microchip)
So decentralization and FHE can remove the element of human trust from both monitoring health and establishing an identity system. While being transparent but also keeping your personal information hidden. For me, trusting humans is a security flaw. If that element of trust can be automated away, it should be.
The problem has always been can you trust the people automating. With Blockchain, you can trust the servers are running the code that’s been agreed upon by the node operators and miners. With FHE, the data processed by the miners stays anonymous, and if you need to display that data say to a doctor, you have the ability to retrieve your encrypted data from a decentralized database (no one wants to manage their own data, like how most people don’t manage their own Lemmy instance)
Anyone can splinter off and change the code, but if its incompatible they’re isolated on their own network. Kind of like if sublemmy instances content moderation policy is incompatible with others, they get defederated
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But does it though? A blockchain is the ultimate zero tolerance policy. Lost your password? Grandma gave the house to a scammer? Too fucking bad
Cryptocurrency is basically like digital cash. No one can control how you spend it, or take it away. But you can’t undo transactions without tracking down the recipient, and getting them to give it back. If you don’t trust anyone, cash and crypto are the only real ways to pay for stuff.
Cryptocurrency is basically like digital cash.
Cash doesn’t leave you holding worthless numbers when the founders cut and run.
Well, it does in some economies, but not the ones that cryptocurrency advocates actually choose to live in. If you live in Menlo Park or Toronto or Phoenix or Dublin, you live in conditions that would not be possible without a stable “real money” economy.
This is exactly the same thing as cash. If you buy a major currency, like usd, euro, bitcoin, ethereum, etc, then it will be much more stable than some random currency. Would you trust a cash currency that was created by some random dude in an alleyway?
Only charlatans were recommending blockchain for everything. It was painfully obvious how inefficiently it solved a non-existent problem.
You could always tell because no one could ever really explain it in simple terms what it does or why it was useful, other than trying to defend NFTs existing and enjoying the volatility of the crypto market (not currency).
I mean it has it’s uses. You can consider it as a tower made up building blocks. We can write things into the blocks as we build the tower, and every block is inspected by people worldwide to make sure no one’s messing with it’s contents and they can’t be changed after the block has been placed.
It’s a really cool technology, but the main problem is that letting people around the world inspect and verify just isn’t needed in most use cases. It does a great job at removing the central source of truth, but rarely does anyone explain what the problem with a central source of truth was. Especially when you’re talking about a company setting, startups don’t want to build open source software without a source of truth, they want to be the source of truth
The biggest problem is that even OP is unaware of what is really being skipped: math, stats, optimization & control. And like at a grad level.
But hey, import AI from HuggingFace, and let’s go!
The worst part of ML is Python package management
The worst part of ML is Python package management
Do you have some time to talk about our Lord and Savior,
venv?Had to use wsl and manually set environment variables to get accelerate and bitsandbytes to work the other day, why can’t pip install just work? Venv is just another layer that conda should be solving, and even that isn’t enough to overcome Python’s craptastic nature
At that point you may as well go full Vagrant or start using Docker images.
And no matter how quirky or obtuse venv/conda/pip can be, they will never be as bad as Node. Ever. Node will hold that King Shit crown forever, or at least to God I hope it does.
Something worse than Node coming around and getting popular might just make me quit IT altogether.
Interesting, my problems with node are usually in the chaining build systems rather than pulling down dependencies. Tbh I prefer node, what problems have you with it?
Aside from the callback chains and API shit, my issues with Node rest almost entirely on the lack of a standard library, because that led to the state of NPM today, which is just an absolute garbage-fire shitshow as far as I’m concerned.
I have my own separate issues with NPM, namely its dependency resolution (my God, just take
dnf's dependency resolution algorithm and use it), trivial packages that other packages list as a dependency (is this an int? Is this running on Windows? Better take this one line and make it a package!), and the relative inability to remove a package from a registry (did a secret slip in there while testing? Tough shit!). The worst of that being the trivial packages, I think, because then you can end up with projects that can have a dependency tree 10s of thousands packages long.And all that bullshit wouldn’t be even 1/16th of the problem it is today if there were a standard library.
You should take what I’m saying with a grain of salt, though, I’m just a DevOps Sysadmin, and aside from running some software that uses Node, most of my experience with it is unfucking it when our devs come to me to fix the tangled monster they’ve created.
Accurate if the top of the staircase was out of order and they just went crashing back down
Where’s discrete mathematics?
Math? I write code, that’s words bro. Why would I ever need math?
This is sadly how a lot of Computer Science students think nowadays.
I think the problem is that they are trying to teach math to generalists where in front of them are students formed to understand programmatical problems.
Where the problems be restructured to a programatical problem, then it would work far far better.
Mathematical exercises aim to solve 1 problem with 1 given set of parameters, programatical exercises aim to solve 1 problem with ANY given sets of parameters.
And that’s what made me loose interest in math during my CS years.
Mathematical exercises aim to solve 1 problem with 1 given set of parameters
Maybe you just had some really bad teachers, but I couldn’t disagree more. A big part of maths is proving statements that hold very generally (and maybe making it even more abstract, e.g. applying it to anything you can add and multiply instead of just real numbers). It kind of starts when your answers start being formulas instead of numbers but it goes much further
I’ve been programming for like 5 years now and never even attempted anything AI/ML related
Same. I know my limits lol
Unless you’re dead set on doing everything yourself, it’s pretty easy to get into.
Get to it then
Going to be starting computer science in a few weeks. I feel like AI/ML is something you want an experienced teacher for instead of botching something together
Me, implementing a UNO reverse card in assempler
(It’s a joke, never worked with assempler but I hope I made my point)
What actually is supposed to be the ideal way to learn? Say, for someone trying to be a sysadmin
College
Here’s a nickel kid. Get yourself a better computer.
If you want to be a sysadmin learn Linux/Unix. Basic bash scripting might be useful down the line to help understand a bit of what’s going on under the hood.
IMHO networking would probably be a better secondary place to focus for a sysadmin track rather than OOP concepts, algorithms etc.
There is a website called roadmap.sh which has both Skill and Role based roadmaps to learn how to program. There is no actual “SysAdmin” role path since our job can technically have several routes by itself.
I personally use Debian at my org, and found Python and Bash enough to automate small things that need to be done in a regular basis.
But if for example, you were a Windows SysAdmin you’d have to learn to use PowerShell ~ or VBS (idk if those scripts are still a thing)~ .
And the handrails are YouTube.
Wouldn’t be surprised if now the steps are code and instructions provided by ChatGPT.
