thegradient - Network

Hello Sigmoid Social users!Wow, Sigmoid Social has been around for over 2.5 years now, how time flies... Just want mention we are very much...

Hello Sigmoid Social users!

Wow, Sigmoid Social has been around for over 2.5 years now, how time flies...

Just want mention we are very much still around as administrators and moderators of this Mastodon instance behind the scenes.

We appear to have reached a steady-state of a decent number of users, and we love that some of you still benefit from this instance.

Please do message or email us if you want to suggest improvements or changes!

PSA: We've been seeing an uptick of spam coming from various Mastodon instances over the last several weeks. To address this, we are...

PSA: We've been seeing an uptick of spam coming from various Mastodon instances over the last several weeks. To address this, we are suspending federation with the instances that appear to be the source of spam; these are generally small instances that don't presently have interactions with users on here. Our instance still has approval-gated registration, so no spam accounts are expected to be created on here.

FYI: we currently have no plans to in any way limit interaction with Threads on this instance. Some major AI voices (eg Karpathy, LeCun) are...

FYI: we currently have no plans to in any way limit interaction with Threads on this instance. Some major AI voices (eg Karpathy, LeCun) are active on there, so we believe this in the best interest of the community. However, if Sigmoid Social users urge us to act otherwise, we'd be happy to put it to a vote.

(context: https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon )

Oops, we haven't posted anything in quite a while... Hi! Though we've been silent, be assured that behind the scenes we at The...

Oops, we haven't posted anything in quite a while... Hi! Though we've been silent, be assured that behind the scenes we at The Gradient are continuing to actively admin and moderate Sigmoid Social. Our stats show steady user activity for a while now, so we are happy many of you decided to stick around and keep posting here 😊

Happy almost holidays 🎄

Fun fact for long-time Sigmoiders - we've seen more users joining lately, and the active users has generally stabilized at 2k+ users for...

Fun fact for long-time Sigmoiders - we've seen more users joining lately, and the active users has generally stabilized at 2k+ users for a while now.

Thank you all for being part of this lovely place :)

We have seen an uptick in crypto spam in the last couple of days. As this is coming from other Mastodon instances there is not much we can...

We have seen an uptick in crypto spam in the last couple of days. As this is coming from other Mastodon instances there is not much we can do except suspend the account as they are reported, as we do not want to block federation entirely with these instances. Hopefully this willl get resolved soon!

An update: we've seen persistent almost-daily spam keep popping up, so given that + the poll result, we have changed Sigmoid to be...

An update: we've seen persistent almost-daily spam keep popping up, so given that + the poll result, we have changed Sigmoid to be approval-gated for sign ups.

The criteria are very simple: we require a reasonable sounding answer to "why do you want to sign up", and nothing else.

Hopefully Mastodon adds better spam detection tools this year!

We published a little celebratory note on substack! https://thegradientpub.substack.com/p/sigmoid-social-is-6-months-old/comments

We published a little celebratory note on substack! https://thegradientpub.substack.com/p/sigmoid-social-is-6-months-old/comments

Sigmoid Social is 6 months old! 🎂🎂🎂Thank you to all of you for making this a lovely community 😊

Sigmoid Social is 6 months old! 🎂🎂🎂

Thank you to all of you for making this a lovely community 😊

The vote on whether to make registration approve-only was very close! For now we will try to just keep a close eye on reports and shut down...

The vote on whether to make registration approve-only was very close! For now we will try to just keep a close eye on reports and shut down any SPAM asap. If the volume of spam increases to the point that there are multiple new spam accounts per day, we will then lock things down more.

We've been seeing an uptick in new accounts spamming ads over the past week or so :(We've opted to keep this instance free for...

We've been seeing an uptick in new accounts spamming ads over the past week or so :(

We've opted to keep this instance free for anyone to register without approval, but this may merit a change to that policy.

What do you think?

If we opt for approval, we will just let anyone join who expresses interest in AI.

If we do keep registration open, we rely on all of you to report any spam you see!

Make registration to Sigmoid approve-only
Keep registration open to anybody

How's everyone enjoying their time on Sigmoid Social these days?We've been in slow decline in active users, but it's still at...

How's everyone enjoying their time on Sigmoid Social these days?

We've been in slow decline in active users, but it's still at 3.1k so this place is certainly still alive :)

Let us know if we can do anything to improve your experience in here!

(except for latex/markdown support, that's sadly not really doable)

It has now been one year since Russia began it's war against Ukraine.

It has now been one year since Russia began it's war against Ukraine.

🎙️ How did Neural Machine Translation evolve over time, how did attention impact NLP, and what does it mean to do good science? @db7894...

🎙️ How did Neural Machine Translation evolve over time, how did attention impact NLP, and what does it mean to do good science? @db7894 speaks with Professor Kyunghyun Cho @kchonyc in our latest: https://thegradientpub.substack.com/p/kyunghyun-cho-neural-machine-translation#details

Quick poll: would you be interested in us setting up a Sigmoid Social forum or subreddit for longer-form persistent...

Quick poll: would you be interested in us setting up a Sigmoid Social forum or subreddit for longer-form persistent discussions?

Forum
Subreddit
Either
Neither

Last, but not least, was an entry that received a lot of votes, but wasn't computer generated!Thanks to @Bebischof for this piece!

Last, but not least, was an entry that received a lot of votes, but wasn't computer generated!

Thanks to @Bebischof for this piece!

The runners-up were from @andrey (using DALLE-2) and @morg (using MidJourney v4). Truly majestic elephants!

The runners-up were from @andrey (using DALLE-2) and @morg (using MidJourney v4). Truly majestic elephants!

Next is the logo, made by @farenga with DALLE-2 (plus some human intervention)!

Next is the logo, made by @farenga with DALLE-2 (plus some human intervention)!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the mascot contest!We have selected the top two to use for our instance --- one as a mascot and...

Thank you to everyone who participated in the mascot contest!

We have selected the top two to use for our instance --- one as a mascot and one as a logo!

The winning mascot was generated by @Jridge with Parti + Imagen. Awesome!

Today is the last day to vote in the Sigmoid Social mascot contest! Check out the entries here and help us find a mascot for our instance!...

Today is the last day to vote in the Sigmoid Social mascot contest! Check out the entries here and help us find a mascot for our instance! 🤖🎨

https://forms.gle/Y14qdMuNLCJPJYuU8