In the late 1980s, I went on an expedition along Kazakhstan's eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. One of our stops was supposed to be a fishing village, but when we got there, it was completely empty. Hundreds of mud huts sat abandoned as everyone had just disappeared. In one of the yards, a camel was still there. It felt haunting, like walking through a ghost town. The strangest part? There was no sea anywhere nearby! The Caspian had dried up so quickly that people had to leave their homes behind because they couldn’t live there anymore.
The Volga Hydroelectric Station, located on the Volga River, directly impacts the Caspian Sea. The Volga River, Europe’s longest, flows into the Caspian Sea and contributes about 80% of its freshwater inflow. The construction of the Volga Hydroelectric Station and other dams along the river has altered its natural flow, reducing the volume of water reaching the Caspian Sea. This reduction has contributed to the sea’s declining water levels.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150452/the-caspian-...
I wonder how Caspian Sea levels looks on a graph over a longer time span (haven't found one quickly).
In 1970s there was a project to connect rivers Pechora and Kama [1] to redirect water flow and increase levels of the Caspian Sea which were declining at that time. The project was abandoned but the Caspian sea levels started to increase in late 70s and 80s even without geoengineering.
Would make sense considering a previous level is called «The Volga», and the level with the dam[0] supposedly was to be called that. The oil rigs in the later level is decidedly the Caspian[1] though!
The paper "RAG vs Fine-tuning: Pipelines, Tradeoffs, and a Case Study on Agriculture" compares Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning techniques in Large Language Models (LLMs). It proposes pipelines and evaluates their trade-offs using popular LLMs like GPT-4. The paper includes a detailed case study in agriculture to provide location-specific insights to farmers. Results show that fine-tuning improves model accuracy significantly, and when combined with RAG, it enhances accuracy even further. The paper demonstrates how LLMs can be adapted for industry-specific knowledge, potentially transforming various industrial domains.
The issue is not really that the government is bad, the problem is it has become a proxy for ultra rich to push their agenda. You can probably make it more efficient by limiting corporate sponsorship and making it more transparent. Millennials don't have many options or tools at their disposal to influence the direction we are heading.
I am surprised no one mentioned Digg here. It was the original Reddit. Arguably its demise is attributed by inflow of VCs capital following by pivoting direction. Which resulted in community leaving for Reddit.
I'm still amazed by how ill-conceived everything having to do with that redesign was, including the new design itself, the rollout plan, apparent lack of load testing, and no ability to roll back. Contrast with reddit's redesign, which was rolled out slowly and incrementally.
More recently Snap had a redesign that was received almost as poorly, but at least they executed it competently.
I liked digg. A lot. Then v2.0 came, and I left to Reddit. A few months ago, I had a script write over all my comments, and deleted the account. Reddit is the new digg v3.0.
Hacker News? Twitter? Nothing? I don't know really, it seems like the best communities are also small ones. All of these sites are victims of their own success. I really enjoyed reddit when I joined many years ago, but its become a hot mess. My feed is curated to only small-ish sub-reddits and it still feels like something is missing. The whimsy of those earlier days is pretty much gone.
This reads as passive-aggressive and incredibly self-centered. People don’t owe you their content, and it should be understandable that someone might want to remove their posts from a site that they no longer support. If it’s the rewritten text that bothers you, that’s just the unfortunate consequence of sites that scrape reddit live.
To be fair it is, it was written in the heat of the moment.
> and incredibly self-centered
I don't agree. The commenter or anyone else who participated in the comments isn't an island. Threads now have holes and they read like puzzles with every 10th piece thrown out because the user decided to be self-centered.
You are completely correct, they don't owe me or reddit anything, but that doesn't mean that their act of disobedience, protest or grudge didn't leave collateral victims.
Imagine people re-writing or deleting their comments or answers on Stack Exchange. Sure, we aren't owed anything but it hurts thousands of people who click on it, and the website owner very little.
It is pretty annoying when you find that thread with the exact knowledge to solve that exact question you've been struggling with only to find that everything has been wiped from the record. It harkens back to "BANDWIDTH EXCEEDED" messages that crippled the usefulness of old forum threads. It doesn't even benefit whoever deleted the comment, it isn't all that difficult to find a cached version of the site with the comment. If we value internet discussion as something beyond just spouting into the void, and as something useful to other people, then we wouldn't be erasing public facing comments after the fact like an anti-intellectual despot.
It's not their fault Reddit UI leaves [deleted] tombstones. Reddit even makes the WTF-level UX decision to show threads and threads and threads of [deleted] comments because a mod deleted top-level comments.
I've used scripts like it a few times. What I thought was clever was that some of them edit the comment before deleting it. It's trivial to have a is_deleted=true flag, but far less likely to store comment revisions.
If there's ever been a dispute about what a comment ever said prior to an edit, that anyone who worked at reddit cared about, there's a good chance they store all comment revisions even if they didn't at first. I would be very surprised if they do not store all comment revisions.
You're happy with thousands of people wanting to find something, read it and then find gaps in it? You're not screwing Tencent and Conde Nast, you're screwing the average person who now has half a picture of what happened in the comment section.
