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diff --git a/content/entry/rejecting-discord-and-google-colab.md b/content/entry/rejecting-discord-and-google-colab.md index d793672..622f8a0 100644 --- a/content/entry/rejecting-discord-and-google-colab.md +++ b/content/entry/rejecting-discord-and-google-colab.md @@ -5,10 +5,10 @@ tags: ['computing', 'siue'] draft: false --- # Background -This semester I took Deep Learning at [SIUe](https://siue.edu). Deep learning is a senior level CS elective course. I'll call the professor, "Professor X" to preserve anonymity. +This semester I took Deep Learning at [SIUe](https://www.siue.edu/). Deep learning is a senior level CS elective course. I'll call the professor, "Professor X" to preserve anonymity. # Story -In Deep Learning class, after the lectures, we had to get into groups for our class project. The class project consisted of designing and implementing our own neural network which would do some novel task. It didn't take me long to get into a group. The issue as always was finding a communication platform that we could all use that was free software. Since most students opt for proprietary walled gardens instead such as [Discord](https://discordapp.com/), I had a lot of difficulty because I wasn't willing to use Discord. Our whole group of four agreed on using Discord except for me. Email wouldn't be viable. It's not great for real time communication and file sharing. Even after I explained that I don't use proprietary software, the group still did not want to budge as I expected. So the admin of the Discord "channel" and I got together and set up a [Matrix bridge](https://matrix.org/bridges/). I was surprised at how easy this was. Because Matrix has a [Matrix-Discord bridge](https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord) available and there is a public bot called [t2bot](https://t2bot.io/), I was able to use Riot.im client instead of Discord. Riot.im is free software and Matrix is an open protocol which is more acceptable than the proprietary walled garden of Discord. The bot allowed me to create a Matrix room which bridged Discord and the Matrix network. It took less than ten minutes to set up. Now that I got the hang of using it, I'm able to get it working in less than five minutes. There are a few quirks but overall it works fantastically and it's completely free. I recommend [donating](https://t2bot.io/donations/) if you use the bot since there is no charge for using it. It's a great tool for avoiding proprietary Discord and Slack. +In Deep Learning class, after the lectures, we had to get into groups for our class project. The class project consisted of designing and implementing our own neural network which would do some novel task. It didn't take me long to get into a group. The issue as always was finding a communication platform that we could all use that was free software. Since most students opt for proprietary walled gardens instead such as [Discord](https://discord.com/), I had a lot of difficulty because I wasn't willing to use Discord. Our whole group of four agreed on using Discord except for me. Email wouldn't be viable. It's not great for real time communication and file sharing. Even after I explained that I don't use proprietary software, the group still did not want to budge as I expected. So the admin of the Discord "channel" and I got together and set up a [Matrix bridge](https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/). I was surprised at how easy this was. Because Matrix has a [Matrix-Discord bridge](https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord) available and there is a public bot called [t2bot](https://t2bot.io/), I was able to use Riot.im client instead of Discord. Riot.im is free software and Matrix is an open protocol which is more acceptable than the proprietary walled garden of Discord. The bot allowed me to create a Matrix room which bridged Discord and the Matrix network. It took less than ten minutes to set up. Now that I got the hang of using it, I'm able to get it working in less than five minutes. There are a few quirks but overall it works fantastically and it's completely free. I recommend [donating](https://t2bot.io/donations/) if you use the bot since there is no charge for using it. It's a great tool for avoiding proprietary Discord and Slack. [Google Colab](https://colab.research.google.com) is a service Google offers that gives researchers and students a free GPU. It can be used for things like training neural networks in Python. It wasn't required for this course per se, but if you didn't have one you had better have a GPU or be in a group with a member that had a GPU. I have a computer with a GPU, but it is AMD, not Nvidia so it wouldn't work with the Python libraries like Keras and Tensorflow we were using to train the neural networks. I discovered this after I had already set up the machine for class unfortunately. I really took issue with Google Colab being basically required. If students didn't agree to the Google terms of service, how would it be possible to do the project? You could have relied on a group member to have an account and train the networks, but that just pushes the problem back a step to your team member agreeing to the terms of service. Worse, Colab requires proprietary JavaScript in the browser so you would have to run proprietary code to use it. And you know Google is collecting your experiment data in case you find something of interest because that's their whole evil business model. |