disattention (u/disattention)

disattention commented on Shenzhou-20 astronauts complete second spacewalk to enhance Tiangong station spacenews.com/chinas-shen... · Posted by u/rbanffy

rbanffy · 2 months ago

It's an excellent idea to be suspicious of a country that starves 13% of their population because "capitalism".

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

disattention · 2 months ago

In what way is food insecurity comparable to death by starvation?

disattention commented on Brad Lander detained by masked federal agents inside immigration court thecity.nyc/2025/06/17/br... · Posted by u/sjsdaiuasgdia

anon291 · 2 months ago

And a few days ago, some guy crossed a border with a young girl he passed off as his daughter when in reality he was a sex trafficker and going to sell the girl into sex slavery.

Since we're all clutching our pearls, we might as well clutch all of them.

disattention · 2 months ago

There seems to be a clear difference between criminals doing shady things and the government doing shady things. It seems like a false equivalency to compare an incident where a random guy does something terrible to one where law enforcement is rapturing people into the night while wearing masks.

disattention commented on Brad Lander detained by masked federal agents inside immigration court thecity.nyc/2025/06/17/br... · Posted by u/sjsdaiuasgdia

ensignavenger · 2 months ago

They were wearing uniforms, I watched the video. Badges were not clearly visible in the video, but they certainly had uniforms.

disattention · 2 months ago

Anyone can literally just buy/make a uniform. Especially concerning if badges aren't visible. This argument doesn't hold much water imo.

disattention commented on Ask HN: Who is using C? · Posted by u/00taffe

smt88 · 3 months ago

You're not looking for C. You want to try Go, Java, C#, or Kotlin.

disattention · 3 months ago

This is a silly comment, and missing content that would make it helpful. At least say why you think these things are better than C. They want a language that allows them to explore the depths of systems, so they may very well want C or similar.

Please try to be more helpful and less presumptive, especially when someone is asking to learn.

disattention commented on The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available discuss.systems/@dev/1141... · Posted by u/luu

robertlagrant · 5 months ago

> This is a kind of stoic virtue signal that may make people feel more mature for agreeing, but fails to fix issues while mocking people who try to make a difference.

None of these comments are fixing issues or trying to make a difference. Sending the product back is a really good idea, especially if this change in terms means you can get a refund even if you've had it a long time.

disattention · 5 months ago

The reason I replied to the parent comment was because of their dismissive tone. Of course returning the product is a good idea, but telling reasonable people to "chill out", and dismissing their concerns by suggesting they "just XYZ" is truly unproductive. It ends the conversation rather than engaging with it.

disattention commented on The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available discuss.systems/@dev/1141... · Posted by u/luu

TZubiri · 5 months ago

Chill man. Just send back the product and ask for a refund.

disattention · 5 months ago

This is a kind of stoic virtue signal that may make people feel more mature for agreeing, but fails to fix issues while mocking people who try to make a difference. It's ok for people to feel things, and it's ok for people to want laws addressing anti-consumer behavior.

disattention commented on Abuse of power at Germany's elite research institution [video] dw.com/en/max-planck-inst... · Posted by u/Koaisu

tg180 · 5 months ago

This isn’t just a problem specific to German academia, it extends across the entire European academic landscape.

I've always wondered why professors and supervisors, after experiencing these abuses themselves, continue to perpetuate them.

The only explanation I've come up with is that the system naturally weeds out those who resist or speak up by stalling their careers. As a result, it selects for individuals who don’t make trouble, those who passively obey and endure even the worst forms of dysfunction.

In the end, this leads to the normalization of abuse, with people rationalizing it as "if I went through it, others should too", a way to protect their own ego.

The only thing even worse is when the abuse turns passive-aggressive: denying opportunities without ever saying it outright, hostility disguised as kindness, ambiguous and demoralizing feedback, delaying responses, making people miss crucial deadlines, assigning pointless or overwhelming tasks. They excel at this too.

If I ever had children, I would never let them attend a European university.

disattention · 5 months ago

This exists in the US as well. I've personally experienced and witnessed it happen within labs at an R1 University. The accountability structures are woefully insufficient to protect students and junior researchers, and the incentives are perverse as to actually reinforce the practice.

I've seen frequently that talented technical contributors are academically handicapped because they bring too much value to the lab for them to graduate quickly. I've personally had my own funding threatened if I didn't work "at least 60 hours each week" on my ex-advisors work (which was in no way related to my degree or research interests). I was fortunate to find another advisor and funding source quickly, but most advisors are absolutely profiting in their career off the backs of their students; leveraging both carrot and stick to fuel their ambition. It's a problem of modern academia and I'm not sure how to fix it.

disattention commented on A Gentle Introduction to Graph Neural Networks (2021) distill.pub/2021/gnn-intr... · Posted by u/misonic

magicalhippo · 8 months ago

Naive question:

Words in sentences kinda forms graphs, referencing other words or are leafs being referenced, both inside sentences and between sentences.

Given the success of the attention mechanism in modern LLMs, how well would they do if you trained a LLM to process an actual graph?

I guess you'd need some alternate tokenizer for optimal performance.

disattention · 8 months ago

This is actually a good insight. It turns out that transformers are indeed a form of graph network, precisely because of the attention mechanism. Graph attention networks are actually a very popular GNN architecture. Generally, the issue with using an LLM style architecture for generic graphs is modeling the sparsity, but is possible by using the graph adjacency matrix to mask the attention matrix. There are a number of papers and articles which address this connection, and plenty of research into mechanisms for sparsifying attention in transformers.

There are also graph tokenizers for using more standard transformers on graphs for doing things like classification, generation, and community detection.

disattention commented on TikTok divestment law upheld by federal appeals court cnbc.com/2024/12/06/tikto... · Posted by u/belter

yyuugg · 9 months ago

So... nationalism? We like our surveillance state and demonize their surveillance state?

disattention · 9 months ago

Yes? And it's not so much about the surveillance in the first place as opposed to the algorithmic manipulation of content to shift narratives and spread propaganda. Whether or not one believes the US based companies do similarly is beside the point, precisely because they're US based, whereas TikTok is the product of the US's primary economic and ideological adversary

disattention commented on Tip pressure might work in the moment, but customers are less likely to return theconversation.com/tip-p... · Posted by u/gnabgib

hattmall · 9 months ago

Geeze, $100 more? So like your $400 dinner was $500 instead?

disattention · 9 months ago

It isn't unrealistic unfortunately. It's not unusual for a few people to rack up $300, especially with drinks involved. Many states (e.g. Texas) have sales tax, so already +8.25%. Add on an 18% automatic gratuity, then tip another 15% unknowingly and you're paying $440 for your $300 worth of food...