• 0 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle
  • An important characteristic of a model is “stability.” Stability means that small changes in input produce small changes in output.

    Stability is important for predictability. For instance, suppose you want to make a customer support portal. You add a bot hoping that it will guide the user to the desired workflow. You test the bot by asking it a bunch of variations of questions, probably with some RLHF. But then when it goes to production, people will start asking it variations of questions that you didn’t test (guaranteed). What you want ideally, is that it will map the variants to the best workflow that matches what the customer wants. Second best would be to say “I don’t know.” But what we have are bots who will just generate some crazy off-the-wall crap, and no way to prevent it.
















  • The space station’s orbit has been adjusted continuously over its lifetime initially by attaching a shuttle to it and doing a burn of the shuttle’s engines and later doing the same with progress modules.

    My bet is the original expectation of the designers was to deorbit by attaching centaurs (or whatever) to the existing docking ports and rotate the beast to the right attitude for a deorbit burn.

    NASA has more recently said they want the reentry to be as steep as possible to minimize the size of the debris field, and is using that to justify the development of a new specialized deorbit vehicle. No doubt SpaceX will declare that Starship is the proper vehicle for this, and then will plow the $800 million into the Starship program. The money they got for Artemus is already long gone and Starship has failed to demonstrate key components of the Artemus plan. Dear Moon has been cancelled so NASA and Artemus are the only customers they have left. NASA knows that without a cash injection Artemus is at risk.




  • Yeah the fediverse has lower engagement all around because the community is a lot smaller. This is especially true in “long tail” communities. However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.

    That being said, while I appreciate the chronological feed I do wish there was some way to “weigh” less active communities so that I can see their activity in my feed without them being drowned out by the busier communities. I’ve noticed that I’ve gone to communities that I’m definitely subscribed to, and seen that there were several posts that I missed because the posts were drowned out by content in busy communities like, for instance, technology@beehaw.org