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Cake day: August 26th, 2023

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  • all good. i know it can be frustrating, to constantly repeat the same points. therefore tones may slip. if you allow me to give some advice, keep reading. otherwise have a great day, and ignore the rest of this post.

    i think it is useful to target the most powerful party: “you claim that …” (the person trying to learn something) becomes “they claim that …” (the company selling something). that way the person (if that person is genuinely trying to learn) is not pushed into a defensive stance.

    additionally dont forget that you may be an expert on a certain toppic. but others are not and therefore need much more context to pick up just the right keywords. e.g: what is DEXA and why does a scan for osteopenia matter for body fat? or is +/-5% your personal quality gate or is it a medical standard?

    anyway, i hope this shows why ppl may disagree with a post - even if agreeing with the main message. have a great day.


  • you don’t seem to get my point entirely, so ill try to explain it here. your standpoint seems to be:

    • body fat cannot be determined by impedance
    • the measurements are that unreliable that the mere presence of the measurement hurts more than it helps

    you present these points as expert, not as your opinion. in the comment thread you write: “I’m happy to delve into this subject in as much depth as you may be interested in”. when someone asks you for sources, supporting these points (presumably because they are interested) - you deflect and take a combative stance. it is deflection, as you ask the person trying to learn something, to find proof that your point is wrong. since you (initially) did not provide sources for your points - you seem to take the absence of evidence (from the companies selling these) as evidence, that it can not work and will cause harm.

    This line of argumentation makes me second guess your motivation. even though i agree with the overall viewpoint. i am not asking you to prove it is a scam. as you mentioned it is tedious and wasteful to prove every new scam attempt false. so if you shift your argumentation just slightly (which you did in your reply to me), the whole second guessing of motivation won’t occur:

    • The companies selling these products don’t provide any proof, that these scales work as advertised
    • especially in medicine it is required to proof, that the benefits hugely outweigh the drawbacks
    • who is more likely to tell you a falsehood: the person actively trying to sell you something or the one not selling anything?
      • -> be more skeptical of the person with a motivation to mislead you and ask them to provide proof and sources

    these points are a very strong argument IMO and don’t require to do any more research. but they seem much more genuine as you don’t appear go back on wanting to discuss the subject and don’t take a combative stance towards the person probably trying to learn something.


  • man i largely agree with what you are saying and there are tons of useless ‘fitness’ products.

    but you cannot claim to be “happy to delve into the subject” and when asked for sources simply deflect. you have to remember, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

    so if you want to believabily present yourself as an expert on the subject and have such an absolute standpoint - you need to present some good reasons. otherwise you have to soften your standpoint to something akin to: “there has ben no proof of its reliability”. everything stronger seems disingenuous.



  • as someone who has made it through multiple ‘agile transformations’ in large companies: that’s how it usually goes.

    however, that is the problem with people being stuck in their way and people afraid of loosing their jobs. PO is usually filled with the previous teamlead (lower management, maybe in charge of 20 ppl). PM & Sales have to start delivering unfinished Products! how else are you going to get customer feedback while you can still cheaply change things? A lot of the middle management has to take something they would perceive as a ‘demotion’ or find new jobs entirely - who would have guessed that with an entirely new model you cannot map each piece 1:1…

    Given these and many more problems i have seen many weird things: circles within circles within circles, many tiny waterfalls… some purists would call SAFE a perversion of agile.

    the point is: if you want to go agile, you have to change (who would have thought that slapping a different sticker won’t do it?). the change has to start from the top. many companies try to do an ‘agile experiment’: the whole company is still doing what they do. however, one team does agile now - while still having to deliver in and for the old system…






  • this is obviously talking about their web app, which most people will be using. In this special instance, it was clearly not the LLM itself censoring the Tiananmen Square, but a layer on top.

    i have not bothered downloading and asking deepseek about Tiananmen Square. so i cannot know what the model would have generated. however, it is possible that certain biasses are trained into any model.

    i am pretty sure, this blog is aimed at the average user. while i wouldn’t trust any LLM company with my data, i certainly wouldn’t want the chinese government to have them. anyone that knows how to use (ollama)[https://github.com/ollama/ollama] should know these telemetry data don’t apply to running locally. but for sure, pointing it out in the blog would help.




  • as @damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world already mentioned: GitLab CI

    Jenkins is a CI application from before CI was cool. GitLab CI is integrated and can trigger on certain events. Additionally you mentioned, that you want to publish on a public repo anyway.

    You are probably are comfortable with containers. So GitLab CI should be easy for you to learn - as it pretty much starts up a container to do certain tasks. I’ve seen suggestions for Kubernetes, which for sure is the more mature solution. But i would question, whether you need the added functionality and complexity of K8s for a home setup.

    To gain access to your local network, you can use the runner for a secure connection (as described by damnthefilibuster). or you could SSH into the machine, as long as you have it in a DMZ. Drawback is that you have to be more sure about your network infrastructure. Benefit is that it is a more general approach. Obviously you need to store all certs, keys and preferably even addresses in secrets, not the .gitlab-ci.yml.

    As you can see from this thread, there are many ways which lead to rome. My advice is to start with something simple and lightweight, which you understand. adding complexity down the road is easier, than removing it.


  • The main angle is not to ‘poisen’ the training set. it is to waste time, energy and resources. the site loads deliberately slow and produces garbage, which has to be filtered out.

    as i said: not a silver bullet. but at least some threads where tied up collecting garbage painfully slow. as the data is useless, whatever their cleanup process is, has more to do. or it might even be tricked into discarding the whole website, as the signal to noise ratio is bad.

    so i would still say the author achieved his goal.