Submitted by MrAcurite t3_zpbsat in MachineLearning
It seems like a lot of prominent ML researchers are pretty active on Twitter, and that it's a decent place to hear about new research and promote your own stuff. But, the inmates appear to have taken over the asylum over there. Will there be, for example, an ML Mastodon instance?
Before ML Twitter there was the ML Facebook, but that fell apart after Bengio’s comments under a LeCun’s post magically disappeared, given they could be seen as a criticism of Facebook’s ML.
Twitter ML lived by the trust into the Twitter moderation team to not do anything like that. Not that the old moderation team is gone and the new one showed itself to happily kick major personalities on a whim, this is not the case.
DAIR and the old Twitter ML are already over on Mastodon, along with some academics arriving there too. LeCun, Sam Altman and Bengio will likely have their isolated instances and a lot of de-federation drama will likely happen, but I am not seeing a neutral middle ground that would fit all of them right now, nor emerging in close future.
Given that Paul Graham is now on Mastodon (he would be the guy to throw into acceleration any startup credibly able to replace Twitter within 5 years), I say that’s where it is going to go down.
Yeah, maybe. I think people will find there is no better alternative - For now.
I'm sure that a bunch more people moved today or yesterday, but so far the only perceptible difference in my Twitter feed is that the people with a tendency to stir up Twitter drama have become less visible. There's still plenty of paper announcements/discussion on Twitter right now, so I don't see the need to move.
I also think that federation is a terrible way to run a social network, and that Mastodon is so obviously a poor replacement for Twitter that people will eventually realise this and go back. There is just no good Twitter alternative in existence right now.
>I also think that federation is a terrible way to run a social network
How come? I was a little put off by the federated nature, but it doesn't actually get in your way once you're in. I expected it to be more siloed but it's not. Discoverability actually seems better than twitter bc people sort themselves into nice buckets. It's a little like if "ML twitter" was an actual thing rather than just a collection of accounts.
I am also into the idea of opting in to mod/admin policies that suit me, and I've become pretty skeptical of centralizing after this whole fiasco
Yup, agree completely with your second point. The user experience, state and design of Mastodon is substantially less appealing.
On the drama matters, I personally do not care much for this, trying to avoid it like the plague.
It exists already: https://sigmoid.social/
Why are all the front page posts about musk and twitter? What's the point then? If I wanted to use twitter, I'd log on twitter
It looks exactly like those reddit alternatives like voat or whatever where people go there to rant about a platform they don't like and eventually move on when they realize they are still alone there. You can even scroll down like 3 posts deep to see talk about fascism because.. they were banned from twitter?
What you are seeing is the explore tab, which is all of Mastodon, not just sigmoid.social. Sigmoid Social content is over at the local timeline. There is some chatter about it on there too, but it's not really the main thing, here are some examples of recent posts:
>i was so sleepy i ended up falling asleep after extra time and I was so confused when I woke up and each side had an additional goal and France lost the world cup
>Fourier Sensitivity and Regularization of Computer Vision Models https://openreview.net/forum?id=VmTYgjYloM
>Some like to think that we're a trillion data points away from general artificial intelligence. Some like to think that we're some hundreds or thousands of algorithms away. I like to think that we're only several truly profound insights away. But these aren't mutually exclusive.
>The primary reason we don't yet see current AI as sentient is because there is no "goal" module. Once AI is infused with something that makes it "want", then it will appear very sentient to us.
Also, a TON of people migrated to Mastodon today due to Twitter drama, so it makes sense there is a lot of discussion about it.
Ahhh ok now that makes sense!! I'll stick to the local posts!
There is a tonne of garbage posts on the local section, as well as out of order threads. While I hate how twitter is going, Mastadon is garbage imo
If you search it with hashtags you'll get a lot more relevant/topical posts (e.g. https://sigmoid.social/tags/nlproc). The local timeline may be full of ML people, but not everything ML people post is about ML. If you want a curated feed you'll have to create that yourself just like on any other SNS.
The way Mastodon does threads is kind of annoying yeah. But Twitter is way buggier than Mastodon. And if you think ML/AI Twitter didn't post "garbage" on Twitter, I have some news for you... It's an inclusive server, anyone interested in AI can join and we don't force anyone to only post about AI.
Because it's basically a site where everyone who hates Elon Musk's Twitter has flocked to. I think it's only natural that the conversation there would be about hating Elon Musk's Twitter.
I'm sure the same was (and might still be) true of Gab or Truth or any of the other splinter sites that have gained popularity with a group of angry Twitter expats in the past.
It's not a "site" though. There are many different Mastodon servers, and you can join the one you like. They do carry message from other servers, but you don't have to look at them, you can just stay on the local server.
Look at the sidebar on the right, and click on "local" instead of "federated" or "explore". It's 90% about ML and AI.
Yeah yeah. I know. Wrong choice of words. Call it a network if you like, or a federation. Whatever. I'm pretty sure you knew what I meant.
My advice to you, take it or leave it: Don't be the "well, actually" guy. Nobody likes the "well, actually" guy.
Not just nitpicking about "site" vs "federation". Your whole statement wrongly characterizes what Sigmoid is.
If you go to the front page of Reddit, you'll also see a bunch of stuff about Musk and Twitter, plus Amber Heard, other pointless gossip, clickbait, and videos of people falling down. That tells you literally nothing about the ML community here.
The reason the person to whom you're responding saw the comments about Musk on Sigmoid is because they were looking at the wrong page (maybe Sigmoid should make "Local" the landing page), not because it's a group of angry Twitter expats.
Well, actually…
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Yeah and I get that, honestly it's totally fine that they can have their own platform. But it seems like it won't be very conductive to discussion about machine learning lol. Maybe in a few months, but by then I might as well stick to twitter where discussion is happening now.
Yeah I've had a similar problem with retro gamedev stuff. Half of it is on twitter and half on Mastodon. I suspect it'll go full Mastodon in the end.
Honestly I actually like Mastodon better myself so far, doubtful as I was at the outset. I just don't think it'll get mass adoption outside of techies.
Because that’s the front page of everything right now lol
They laughed when all of the conservatives talked about the chilling effects of the Big Tech monopoly on speech platforms and now its suddenly the most important thing in the world to them. lol.
I tried using it but the user interface is so much worse than Twitter. Any tips?
The official mobile app is not the best. I’m using Metatext instead, but there are many to choose from.
In terms of the UX I find it quite similar — you just have more control over what you see in your feed, as you can switch from “home”, “local” and “federated” timelines.
The main difference compared to Twitter, IMHO, is that there are fewer replies per thread. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
I hope that over time the community converges to one location instead of being split between Twitter and Mastodon.
Sigmoid social is awesome (and on Reddit I’m even allowed to say it :-)
It’s not good
Yeah, no thanks.
We need something better :/
Or Twitter turnaround, which is possible.
For those considering a move to sigmoid.social, some info:
Final note: I don't think it's a 1-1 replacement for Twitter. Twitter's Algorithmic feed is great for encouraging discovery of new stuff and seeing new memes. Mastodon's smaller scale and non algorithmic feed encourages a more community vibe with everyone's voice having equal weight. It's possible to use both (which I do - following the drama on Twitter is just too addictive).
> replacement for Machine Learning Drama Twitter
FTFY
Yeah honestly I follow all the big names and it’s just ranting with each other and complaining about stuff.
I must prefer following random PhD students, post-docs and researchers of work I am interested in
NormConf Slack
Which is currently a walled garden.
Slack and discord are terrible twitter replacements, cmv (no really change my view, lots of my former Twitter communities have forked to discord and I wanna participate)
Agree. But mastodon seems like the same group(s) but a worse UI?
> the same group(s)
What do you mean? I'm not turned off by the groups on discord/slack, I'm turned off by the whole experience. It's like ppl are trying to jam a social network into a chat app (bc they are).
I'm using tusky for mastodon on my phone and it's kinda rad. I will probably never use the native Mastodon web interface. I also never used the Twitter web interface, but I'm learning that's maybe weird
<3 NORMCONF
As someone who's actually enjoyed Twitter for its presence of paper authors in music ML/MIR with minimal social media drama, I'm happy to see that healthy part of the ML community steadily migrating to Mastodon.
Even though the UX is less polished, I think it's worth saving those cross-uni/corp discussions somehow, so I hope enough people will give the move a honest and patient try.
I honestly find this "moving to Mastodon" movement confusing.
They're upset that Twitter won't censor the people they want to censor, so they move to a platform where they can each, personally choose who gets censored? How is that not just Twitter with an autoblock feature?
What is the value proposition there? I sincerely do not see the point.
I'm not on Twitter or Mastodon, but I think the point is that it's federated. Twitter has a single owner who determines how the platform behaves. That includes content moderation, but also other things like which messages become visible, how many ads there are, etc. If the current owner, whomever that might be, changes the policies in a way you don't like you're out of luck: that's what the platform looks like for you now. If you'd invested a lot of time and energy into that platform you're either stuck with it or you lose that investment.
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On the other hand, a federated protocol is more like email. If I don't like how Google's spam filter works, or I don't like their UI changes I can move to another email provider who does things differently and I can still exchange emails with my friends and family. Similarly, if my current Mastodon server changes owners and they start moderating in a way I don't like I don't have to give up on Mastodon, I just change servers.
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To me it seems like these federated protocols are a smarter way to build a community as you're not beholden to the whims of one person who might decide to buy the platform - you simply can't buy all of Mastodon just as you can't buy all of email.
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It could be that some people just don't like Elon. Maybe even most of them. But I think maybe some of them realized that building a community on a platform like twitter is fragile and Mastodon seems less fragile.
I agree with all of your points, decentralization is a better method.
Edit: But why now, when a year ago all of the same things were happening, just with a different group of people in charge, and a different group of users being censored?
The thing that pushed me over the edge was banning of accounts that promoted other social media platforms.
This is a clear violation of what Musk has expressed his view of free speech absolutism is: maximum free speech within constraints of the law and safety.
There's no safety concern here, there's no law concern here. That policy was pure censorship. Of course he has the right to do that, it's his platform, but I found it wildly hypocritical.
The value proposition of Mastodon is that it's distributed and censorship can only exist at a federated level. If you don't like it, you can move servers.
If you really think moderation is cencorship, you can go to 4chan. Let me know how the experience is there.
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>If you really think (one who presides over a discussion) is (a person who supervises conduct and morals), you can go to 4chan. Let me know how the experience is there.
Replaced the terms with the December 2022 Miriam Webster dictionary definition of the terms, to help elaborate on your argument. I think everyone can see the quality of your argument better if the terms are directly referenced from a dictionary definition.
But regardless, I'm not here to be your strawman, where you put other people's arguments in my mouth. If you require someone like that, I think your bathtub rubber ducky would be most appropriate.
>They're upset that Twitter won't censor the people they want to censor
Yeah pretty rich of you to complain about bad faith arguments. But since you don't mind appeals to authority, here's the wiktionary definition of cencorship
>The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression or press, such as passing laws to prevent media from being published or propagated.
How exactly does that apply to a federated protocol, where people are completely free to move to other instances, or even host them?
If you're using Wiktionary, instead of a reputable dictionary like Miriam Webster, Cambridge, or Oxford, that tells me all I need to know about the quality of your argument.
Also the constant strawman arguments, shifting topics each reply, and resorting to personal attacks in a professional subreddit. But those are things you're doing to yourself, I'm merely pointing out why I don't want to engage in discussion with you.
>the action of preventing part or the whole of a book, film, work of art, document, or other kind of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because it is considered to be offensive or harmful, or because it contains information that someone wishes to keep secret, often for political reasons
>a system in which an authority limits the ideas that people are allowed to express and prevents books, films, works of art, documents, or other kinds of communication from being seen or made available to the public, because they include or support certain ideas:
These are from Cambridge. They don't really apply to a federated social media either: nothing is prevented to be seen, people can just choose not to see it if they want.
It’s not realistic, it’s just “Elon bad” so I must virtue signal and leave
Sure , go to mastodon and reach 0.01% of the audience.
The Machine Learning "Community" have lots of people earning hundred of thousand of dollars working for Zuckerberg, (and Musk too btw) any moral qualms they might have, have been buried a long time ago in favor of money.
I would bet 0.01% is an underestimate.
At least among the faculty, PhDs, grad students, and developers I follow in ML/neuroscience, about 15-20% are on Mastadon.
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They didn't say "15-20% of ML Twitter", they said "15-20% of the ML people I follow on Twitter". Migrations to different platforms have their own sort of network effects, so anyone active on Mastodon probably has an above average share of their Twitter circle also active on Mastodon.
In terms of the overall share of ML Twitter, the only claim was "greater than 0.01%".
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You cannot even spell correctly the name, that tells you everything about its popularity
😂 Yes, we all know that spelling has a huge bearing on an argument's validity.
.. You must not read many academic papers.
Spoiler alert: many science papers have typos
Something tells me you're not actually in the machine learning community if you think the small number of researchers at facebook and tesla are representative of the community at large lol.
Can you name an actually prominent researcher from either of those companies? There's yann at Facebook of course, who has definitely had impact in popularizing convnets and applications, but has effectively zero novel contributions of his own
FAIR is only behind Google/Microsoft and one of the bigger players in AI research
Simply not true, the gap between fair and msr, brain, and deepmind is massive. I'm sure fair has had some engineering success, but their research output is very weak compared to other labs
I based my answer on the 2020 and 2021 Neurips papers by institution. Couldn't find data of 2022. Anyways, Wav2vec was a huge paper for me and basically what I worked on for a large part of the past 2 years. And they were the maintainer of PyTorch and still carry the bulk of the work.
I really don't get how you can disregard FB as nearly zero influence on ML
lmao, fitting username.
¯\(ツ)/¯
how about Kaiming He?
Sounds like you can reach the right 0.01% of the audience then. The ones who still have their ethics in tact.
And for what it's worth, the applications for Zuck and Musk do have social good, even if it is a gray area. Remember, Facebook brought us torch as open source software.
> And for what it's worth, the applications for Zuck and Musk do have social good, even if it is a gray area. Remember, Facebook brought us torch as open source software.
It seems you wont be in Mastodon then, lol
I absolutely made a mastodon account. I think Musk is off his rocker right now. It's made the weaknesses of a centralized forum clear. Mastodon isn't perfect, lots of improvements to make, but it lies on a much more solid decentralized foundation. But I'm also hedging my bets. I still have my Twitter account. Life's too complex to be absolutist about anything. Life, like computer science, is all about finding the right trade-offs.
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Right, what China is doing is about a million times worse than Elon but I’m sure the virtue signaling won’t go there
Voicing that you're upset about virtue signaling is virtue signaling. Just want to make that hypocrisy clear.
But while I'm here, I'll acknowledge where you are correct. The authoritarian government in China is committing genocide. Not really sure what your point is.
Ah so there is no way to criticize virtue signaling without you yourself virtue signaling.
Thanks for the dumb comment of the day
Yeah basically, because criticizing virtue signaling IS dumb.
You can't criticize someone for expressing what they believe. That's ridiculous.
You criticize someone for the belief. You tell them why what they believe is wrong, not that the expression itself is wrong.
Note, I wasn't saying you were wrong to virtue signal. I was just telling you that criticizing it is literally self-contradictory. It doesn't leave any room open for discussion, you're basically just telling someone to shut up. While you can do that, don't trick yourself into thinking that you're saying anything of value.
Such an insane point of view, yeah you can’t criticize virtue signaling without virtue signaling….
Again the dumbest thing I’ve seen on Reddit today and that says a lot.
Try and use common sense rather than arguing yourself in a circle
Are you not signaling something that you value?
You think that it's bad character to express a believe that demonstrates one's own good character or moral superiority.
Someone expresses a belief that they believe demonstrates good character.
You expressed an opinion and deride them by calling what they did virtue signaling.
This serves to signal to other like-minded folks of your own good character or moral superiority.
Oh wait, does it only count if it's an opinion you disagree with? Oh ok... well you probably don't think of it like that... you wouldn't be able to feel superior and like you could call someone stupid if it was like that...
Let me sum it up for you with an example:
Say what you mean: don't hide behind that "virtue signaling is wrong" crap. If you are doing something that is morally correct, then you should be promoting it. Say why you think whatever they are "virtue signaling" is wrong.
I see we're playing this game.
I minimize my fossil fuel usage where possible. For the rest, I estimate my yearly footprint and buy carbon offsets to put myself at net zero. I currently need to only offset 10 more years to put my entire life at net zero.
I do limit my support of unethically produced products. Unfortunately to have access to the field of computing, some concessions need to be made. It's not ideal, but the trade-off is that AI research can help reduce future need for slave labor.
And for what's worth I haven't left Twitter. I've just also joined Mastodon. The vulnerabilities of the centralized nature of Twitter have been made clear recently. I think it's worth shifting to a distributed system.
So here's a question for you: just because life is full of unavoidable gray areas, does that mean you make no effort to be ethical in any area where you have significant degrees of agency?
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"moral qualms" is a pretty rude thing to say considering that neither Zuckerberg or musk has ever done anything immoral. It's not like they eat babies. They just run their businesses. I should add that any drama related to data, hate speech, or freedom of speech is inevitable considering the business they are in. Show me a popular social media website that didn't have to deal with those kinds of things. I'm pretty certain even myspace caused a ton of drama.
Both have.
Zuckerberg runs Facebook which is one of the big big American ads-and-political-manipulation companies. Companies like Facebook, Reddit etc. actively shape conversations using diverse tools.
Musk is less obviously terrible-- he has a firm which makes electric cars, which is obviously excellent, but he also hypes things in a way that goes a little bit further than is quite reasonable-- whether he's treated Eberhard etc. correctly, that can be debated, but he does seem to have a bit of an anti-worker streak and seems to favour a very productive work culture which unfortunately, if it were made common, would be completely unacceptable-- you'd turn into Japan, and if it continues to be successful and grows, then it will destroy the US workers whose existence currently make it possible-- they'd be like the Dodo.
People can't allowed to choose to work 80 hours a week and spend minimal time with their children, partners or parents, or to be tired during the time they spend with those people.
I think he might also oppose unionization?
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Many of these things have the potential to in themselves be societal crises, so how it does not it sound particularly bad, I do not understand.
You are being down voted but you are absolutely correct.
I’ve been surprised how unaffected ML Twitter has been by Elon’s takeover. That said, yesterday may have put that resolve to the test as Elon finally made his first major error (banning social media links).
Ive never made a twitter account, and I usually just use google scholar to stay up to date with the research. A lot of times there are a few notable researchers/organizations I keep track of to see what is the up to date applied ML research in my field. Another way to stay rly up to date is scan through the background of the new preprints from famous researchers in the ML field for your specific field of ML and track through what papers they are citing. And please for the love of god, try not to cite the preprint
What’s wrong with citing preprints?
"What's wrong with flying in a plane before it's passed inspection?"
Depends on how much you trust the inspection... >.>
Obviously very different situations, since plane inspections are actually reliable. These days I don't view a preprint as any different to a NeurIPS paper, since if I read the preprint and think it's good then essentially the only difference is that one has passed the NeurIPS reviewer lottery. I advise all ML researchers to just trust themselves, read the preprint, and if they think it's valuable then feel free to cite it.
Im just knocking on ML researchers for citing preprints all the time lol. This is very much frowned upon in mechanical engineering (I apply ML to mechE problems), so Im just giving you guys a hard time for doing things differently. In most of the cases, I don’t think it’s a big issue.
Preprints may not have passed peer review yet, meaning there's potential for their findings to be invalid
At that point you're just citing a blog post with the aesthetics of a research article. No peer review, no editor to push back. Mind you, these things don't necessarily make the paper good, but they are useful sanity checks.
Sure but I have never had any problem separating the wheat from the chaff. I can read them myself and decide whether the work is done well. Often the authors can be vetted as well.
If a reader of my own paper has a problem with me citing preprints they can read the paper themselves and decide if it’s appropriate. But the fact that it’s a preprint itself doesn’t really matter.
Uhh I don't think anyone is gonna read through all your citations just to check if they're legit or not...
EDIT: so why not just bite the bullet and move to blog posts instead of preprints?
Maybe things might be different in the future but what exactly has Elon done so far thats gotten you so upset thats also relevant to people who just use the site to read about stuff like ML?
Its still the same terrible for meaningful indepth conversation platform its always been. Theres been no major disruptions as far as I can tell. In fact if it was possible to avoid the constant media drama headlines online, one might not even know anythings changed at all.
Elon has demonstrated that you can't please everybody when it comes to Twitter moderation. Which is why we should switch to a federated system instead of a centralized one.
You have a very over opionated opinion that relates to your opinion.
😃 Hahaha! I don't think it's wise to use Twitter as a training data set.
I am just surprised no one is mentioning LinkedIn. I follow all my favorite researchers and like 75% of my LinkedIn feed is just new AI papers (mostly computer Vision and graphics as that is what I am mostly into)
Been interested in learning more about machine learning. Any specific researcher(s) follow recommendations?
Check out the local timeline of https://sigmoid.social on the Fediverse. It essentially is a ML Mastodon instance. Max Planck and Helmholz institutes also run their own instances.
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sigmoid.social was started ages ago by The Gradient, all the cool people are there already
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I think ML Twitter is fine. Nothing has changed. People are getting way too offended at Twitter. The previous owners did a lot of crooked and corrupt things.
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Agree, this is just political virtue signaling. Want to use mastodon? Have fun with its horrible ux
I haven't heard any non-activist researcher have a problem with the new Twitter leadership. Good riddance.
Wow, why do people downvote this?
Is it a must every researcher should be an activist?
What if you just want to be left in peace, doing the research you enjoy?
probably downvoted by people who don't consider themselves to be activists but have an issue with Musks handling of twitter.
And in doing this, everyone who wasn't an activist became one by definition.
The comment I made, especially the way you explained the reactions to it, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I would hope the sub is just raided by anti-Elon bots, rather than the conclusion being there are more than a handful of hypocritical activist ML researchers.
Watch yourself get downvoted with no response just for going against the narrative in a thread :) You're already at least -2.
tripple13 t1_j0tim25 wrote
Honestly, and this might be a completely wrong bet here.
Nothing will change, ML Twitter will stay ML Twitter.