• 4 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • As a federated learning researcher, I love to see articles introducing the public to the idea. But this article is really drawing a comparison between the fediverse and federated learning that doesn’t make sense (to me).

    Beyond the fact that data and compute are stored on separate servers, they really aren’t similar. Federated learning avoids sharing data by sharing gradients or model updates with a central aggregator; raw data does not leave your device. The fediverse enables easy sharing of data between servers and avoids a central server.

    Additionally, this article makes it seem like medical researchers were inspired by the fediverse, but the FedAvg paper was released in 2016—two years before ActivityPub was introduced in 2018.













  • I’ve tried Connect, Liftoff, Thunder, Voyager, and Infinity. It’s just bugs galore. The back button will take you to the wrong activity, comments won’t post (due to the app not the instance), some instances or accounts won’t load, and a laundry list of UI or functionality bugs. Liftoff gave me the fewest issues of all of them, apart from using Lemmy in the browser.

    But Sync really is polished, and the experience is night and day. I’m a big FOSS proponent, but I don’t think it’s wrong for a developer to want to make money when their income source suddenly disappears and they need to pay bills (and region-specific pricing is coming soon). The level of customizability, spit and polish in the other apps doesn’t even come close. I’m sure they’ll get there eventually, but I think it’s a mistake to drive away passionate developers who want to help Lemmy succeed.

    I’ve given pretty much every app or browser front-end a fair shake at this point, and I’m gladly choosing Sync for now.