Linux users can’t even agree […] so how am I supposed to pick one with any confidence?

Easy. You make a post like the OP, count the positive mentions of distros in the comments, and bam, you have your distro of choice. It’s called the Linux newbie roulette and works kind of like the magic hat in Harry Potter that sorts you into your house.

So WINE was just imagined into existence? Or maybe it was a wizard with a magic spell?

GP is simply wrong on this one. While it is an open source project with a lot of volunteer involvement, there are companies like CodeWeavers and Valve which directly or indirectly contribute to development. You can get support from CodeWeavers AFAIK, but that means paying them.

Why do people get so uppity when I simply ask questions? I never claimed that anyone owed me anything. I never asked for anything.

Well you did ask for something, which is replies to your questions. And your reaction to those replies, whether intended or not, comes off as “uppity” as well. Hence the downvotes and hostility (not to say that I support that from either side of the conversation).

I am unwilling to learn.

Then why are you wasting peoples time with asking questions?

I’ve wasted hundreds of hours trying to learn to use Linux for basic tasks after everyone assured me it was “so easy” and not gotten anywhere. I’m done trying to learn.

Running software on an OS it wasn’t made for is anything but a basic task. Try running various Linux software on Windows and you will see. If you want to run software made for Windows easily the way to do that is using the version of Windows it was created for.

What people mean by “basic tasks” is usually browsing and office, and there is Linux-native software for that.

Someone posted Zorin OS elsewhere, which appears to be exactly that.

Not really. It has deeper integration of Wine into the system by default, but it is still a Linux OS running a compatibility layer for Windows software. This will not save you if you are unwilling to learn, there will still be various problems. Some software will simply not work, or only partially work, or require additional configuration to work.

In summary, if your definition of “basic tasks” is running arbitrary Windows software then doing it on Windows is the way to go.

pandoc.org is probably what you are looking for, but you might have to create a custom reader/writer or find one on the internet.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss

TL;DR: Somebody made a really weird episode of a web comic and the configuration of the figures in the panel has become a meme named “Loss” after the name of that episode. Pic related:

The joke here is that evolution gave you pattern recognition to avoid predators, but now you are using it for useless things like recognising this comic is spatially organised in the same way the Loss comic is.

a neural network with a series of layers (W in this case would be a single layer)

I understood this differently. W is a whole model, not a single layer of a model. W is a layer of the Transformer architecture, not of a model. So it is a single feed forward or attention model, which is a layer in the Transformer. As the paper says, a LoRA:

injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture

It basically learns shifting the output of each Transformer layer. But the original Transformer stays intact, which is the whole point, as it lets you quickly train a LoRA when you need this extra bias, and you can switch to another for a different task easily, without re-training your Transformer. So if the source of the bias you want to get rid off is already in these original models in the Transformer, you are just fighting fire with fire.

Which is a good approach for specific situations, but not for general ones. In the context of OP you would need one LoRA for fighting it sexualising Asian women, then you would need another one for the next bias you find, and before you know it you have hundreds and your output quality has degraded irrecoverably.

Depressingly, the message that GHG emissions are heating up the planet has been passed down for over a hundred years now. People just aren’t very good with passed down messages in general.

Yeah but that’s my point, right?

That

1. you do not “replace data until your desired objective”.
2. the original model stays intact (the W in the picture you embedded).

Meaning that when you change or remove the LoRA (A and B), the same types of biases will just resurface from the original model (W). Hence “less biased” W being the preferable solution, where possible.

Don’t get me wrong, LoRAs seem quite interesting, they just don’t seem like a good general approach to fighting model bias.

First, there is no thing as a “de-biased” training set, only sets with whatever target series of biases you define for them to reflect.

Yes, I obviously meant “de-biased” by definition of whoever makes the set. Didn’t think it worth mentioning, as it seems self evident. But again, in concrete terms regarding the OP this just means not having your dataset skewed towards sexualised depictions of certain groups.

1. either you replace data until your desired objective, which will reduce the model’s quality for any of the alternatives

[…]
For reference, LoRAs are a sledgehammer approach to apply the first way.

The paper introducing LoRA seems to disagree (emphasis mine):

We propose Low-Rank Adaptation, or LoRA, which freezes the pre-trained model weights and injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture, greatly reducing the number of trainable parameters for downstream tasks.

There is no data replaced, the model is not changed at all. In fact if I’m not misunderstanding it adds an additional neural network on top of the pre-trained one, i.e. it’s adding data instead of replacing any. Fighting bias with bias if you will.

And I think this is relevant to a discussion of all models, as reproduction of training set biases is something common to all neural networks.

“Inclusive models” would need to be larger.

[citation needed]

To my understanding the problem is that the models reproduce biases in the training material, not model size. Alignment is currently a manual process after the initial unsupervised learning phase, often done by click-workers (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, RLHF), and aimed at coaxing the model towards more “politically correct” outputs; But ultimately at that time the damage is already done since the bias is encoded in the model weights and will resurface in the outputs just randomly or if you “jailbreak” enough.

In the context of the OP, if your training material has a high volume of sexualised depictions of Asian women the model will reproduce that in its outputs. Which is also the argument the article makes. So what you need for more inclusive models is essentially a de-biased training set designed with that specific purpose in mind.

I’m glad to be corrected here, especially if you have any sources to look at.

Nah, this one was a direct link on purpose. But the edit box swallowed the @lemmy.ca part at the end due to trying user name auto-completion, so thanks for making me re-read the post. Good bot!

Ah with that link it’s easy to track down what happened.

First you go to the community on the server in question: https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]

Then you click on Modlog in the sidebar: https://lemmy.world/modlog/3835

And since there is pretty much nothing in it we immediately see the entry for your post saying:

reason: Deceptive content. Calling to abuse government system.

Note that when you compare your servers Modlog that entry is missing there, so yes, only removed for people connecting through lemmy.world.

Not sure how appeals work there, you can probably reply to the account that notified you, or go to the [email protected] community.

Do you mean not initially designed to support? Because at least for displays and networking (in the sense of being able to send X events over the network) that seems wrong, a network capable display server is basically X’s entire purpose? And for keyboards and mice there are extensions now, so x.org as a standard now very much supports those by design. Actually to my knowledge Wayland basically just forked their keyboard standard, the X Keyboard Extension.

All true, and maybe I have been understating my negative estimation of the whole ordeal a bit, but we are like five levels of escalation deep at this point, and all I’m saying is it’s getting harder and harder to gain a nuanced understanding of the situation. Which is important.

Anyway, given the totality of what I have seen so far LTT has either always been or just devolved into an entirely toxic work environment. Their reaction so far doesn’t inspire any confidence in the slightest. On the contrary, it reinforces all of the accusations.

This isn’t “something”. This is a “we’re sorry (not really)” video. If you watch it in the context of “I have no favorites in this game” and look it it pretty objectively, it feels like just a bait to try to stop the bleeding.

Yeah that’s what I meant with “Southpark-y ‘I’m sorry’ vibes”. For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

P.S.: And that’s… “something”.

A week? To refine all the processes in that size of a company?

No, a week without videos to get started with reviewing processes. I agree with you in general though, if it stops there it’s nothing more than PR. Remains to be seen what will come of it, but the allegations by that former employee are certainly a dampener on an optimistic view of the situation.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cTpTMl8kFY

There are some steps mentioned that they will take, like not making any videos for a week and reviewing internal processes. Getting some Southpark-y “I’m sorry” vibes there, at least it’s something though.

But the video (at least its creation if not its release) seems to predate the Twitter/X thread of a former LTT employee alleging sexual harassment and other toxic workplace behaviour: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691693740254228741

So not very surprisingly most Youtube comments I’ve seen refer to that bomb dropping.