• 0 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle
  • Both. It’s satire.

    The “benefit” of world hunger is that it keeps people locked in their place and entrenches the status quo. This is actually true, and the author believes it, but he doesn’t like it.

    Many people benefit from world hunger though, and every time you hear that poverty is a hard problem to solve you should ask yourself, how much of that is actual problems and how much is the status quo resisting change?





  • It really comes down to what you’re used to. If you use Windows tools then you already know many of the workarounds for Windows and you don’t know the tools that haven’t been ported there.

    For example, you know not to use Python directly, but that you have to install anaconda instead, or whatever the current problems with Python development on Windows are.

    The big obvious thing that you can’t get away from is that you have to do things differently if you have develop for two different OSs with a view to deploying on Linux.

    In particular support for shell scripts is crap on Windows. I could learn powershell or there’s workarounds using WSL and a bunch of other stuff that I don’t need to care about, but I’d rather not bother.


  • I mean coding is difficult enough as it is, I wouldn’t choose to use an OS that makes it even harder.

    I use Linux because it makes my life easier. It has better support for development. Some of the other stuff is maybe not as easy or polished, but the support for dev tools and the ease of deploying to from local machines to servers that are also running Linux makes up for it.

    If I wanted more effort I’d still be using Windows. It would force me to work on cross platform development and deployment. The idea that there’s value in making things unnecessarily hard is just weird. I want Linux to be as simple as possible to use, so I can spend that effort on things that actually matter.







  • Honestly, if you’re sharing office files you’re probably using office 365. This means everything is a web app first and therefore Linux compatible.

    I tried using the desktop version of word on a Mac last week, and the latency was so bad on a shared document that I had to switch to the web app anyway.

    Basically, if you just want to use Linux you’ll be fine. If instead you don’t want to use Microsoft, you’ll probably have lots of problems.

    Microsoft have been brutally effective in getting their tentacles into academic institutes, and you’ll find that everything from email to logging into internal sites relies on an office 365 account.






  • OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzSardonic Grin
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    I’m not describing binary classification, I’m describing multiclass. “Group classification” isn’t really a thing. Yes, your ml system probably guesses what kind of plant it is and then looks up the ediblity of components.

    The problem with this is how they will handle rare plants that aren’t in the dataset, or that are in the dataset but with insufficient data to be recognised.

    Because multiclass assumes that it’s seen representative data on all possible outputs (e.g. plant types) it will tend to be dangerously confident on plant types it hasn’t seen before.

    This is because it can rule out other classes. E.g. if you’re trying to classify as rose, tulip, or daisy and you get a bramble, your classifier is likely to be very certain it’s a rose because tulips and daisies don’t have thorns. So your softmax score is likely to show heavy confidence in rose even though it’s actually none of them.

    This is exactly what can go wrong when you try to use the softmax/standard multiclass approach and come across an interesting rare mushroom or wild carrot. You don’t want it to guess which type of plant in the database it’s most like, even if this guess comes with scores, you want it to say that it genuinely doesn’t know and you shouldn’t eat it.


  • The key issue here is that ‘level of certainty’ doesn’t really mean what you would like it to.

    You get back a number yes, but it can change according to what’s visible in the background, the angle that the plants at, how close is it to the camera, and how nice the camera is you’re using (professional photographers use expensive cameras and take shots of different things to everyone else).

    Interpreting this score as “how safe is it to eat the plant” is a really bad idea. You will still eat the wrong plant. These scores can lead to very confident random guessing when you show it a plant it’s never seen before.

    And no, softmax is a trick for making the scores all sum to one, so you get back a confidence for every possible thing the image could be of.


  • Unofficial/self diagnosis helped me in my personal relationships.

    I mentioned to my partner that a doctor friend thought I had ADHD, and it really helped them not take some of my most annoying traits personally.

    I get where you’re coming from with needing an official diagnosis for work accommodations, but none of your friends are really going to demand to see a doctor’s note, so why would personal relationships depend on an official diagnosis?