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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I can kind of see where he’s coming from, but only if you’re weighing it against an assumed future where we’re going to die out tomorrow. That’s a low bar for hopeful, and certainly not “100% positive”.

    I have a hard time seeing I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream or even worse, All Tomorrows, as “hopeful”. I’d honestly rather just die.

    Plus, not all sci-fi involves humans, and not all sci-fi is in the future. There’s scifi with no humans in it, there’s scifi set in the past or in an alternate present, and none of those qualify as “hopeful by default” in the way he defines it any more than any other fiction does.


  • But how will you get a “universal” view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.

    You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don’t understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don’t care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.

    Lemmy’s strength is its decentralization and federation. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a feature that’s attractive in its own right. It doesn’t need mass appeal, it’s a niche project and probably always will be. I don’t think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.




  • The “make a fork” thing is part of the issue, I think. In general there’s this culture in the open source community that if you want a feature, you should implement it yourself and not expect the maintainers to implement it for you. And that’s good advice to some extent, it’s great to encourage more people to volunteer and it’s great to discourage entitlement.

    But on the other hand, this is toxic because not everyone can contribute. Telling non-technical users to “make it yourself” is essentially telling them to fuck off. To use the house metaphor, people don’t usually need to design and renovate their houses on their own, because that’s not their skillset, and it’s unreasonable to expect that anyone who wants a house should become an architect.

    Even among technical users, there are reasons they can’t contribute. Not everyone has time to contribute to FOSS, and that’s especially notable for non-programmers who would have to get comfortable with writing code and contributing in the first place.


  • Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.

    You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.

    I don’t really care about the “human element” or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It’s still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can’t trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don’t.





  • I just don’t understand why you want to copy-paste ChatGPT. Surely the parent commenter could access ChatGPT if they wanted, so you’re not bringing a new perspective. If “content” is all that matters, you could generate a thousand different ChatGPT responses and reply to their comment with each one, but that’s not acceptable. Why not?

    People come here for a conversation with other people, and copy-paste ChatGPT responses don’t actually contribute to that. If all they want is information/content, there are better places to find it. They could use ChatGPT, sure, but they could also use Wikipedia or even an economics textbook. It’s up to them. Even if they use ChatGPT, they’d probably prompt it a few times in a few different ways to get the best info for them.

    If you really want to use ChatGPT in your responses, why not add your own voice? When I suggested commentary I don’t mean that you should just prompt ChatGPT into pretending to be a human, I mean that you should add your own perspective. Editorialize. Pull out the good bits.






  • A tiefling divine soul sorcerer with the Criminal background. He was born to two pious tiefling clerics of Lathander who saw their fiendish blood as a curse, and prayed to cleanse their unborn child of devilish influence. When he was born a Divine Soul, his parents tried to raise him as their perfect priestess. He had to be a model tiefling, a representative of his entire race as well as Lathander himself. He chafed under the obligation and ran away from home, living on the streets and stealing to get by, all while trying to hide his divine soul powers out of a combination of rejecting them and just trying not to draw attention.

    Slinking around in the shadows eventually led to him wandering into the Mists of Ravenloft, and he found himself in Barovia. He found his way into a party and essentially just acted like the party rogue for a bit until combat came and he got backed into a corner and he suddenly started throwing around guiding bolts.

    I was really looking forward to doing a whole arc with him reclaiming his powers and figuring out what it meant to be himself, but OOC stuff led to me leaving that group before he had a chance to leave his edgy rogue phase :c



  • Melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoLinux@lemmy.mlHow do you say SUSE?
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    7 months ago

    Except GNU is a great example of an acronym that is pronounceable. It’s even in the dictionary. The GNU mascot is a gnu, in fact.

    LGBTQIA+ is essentially unpronounceable, thus we treat it as an initialism. Not that that’s a requirement, there are examples like VIP where even though we could pronounce it we pronounce each letter individually.


  • That’s I guess why CSEM is used, because if the images are being shared around exploitation has clearly occurred. I can see where you’re coming from though.

    What I will say is that there are some weird laws around it, and there have even been cases where kids have been convicted of producing child pornography… of themselves. It’s a bizarre situation. If anything, seems like abuse of the court system at that point.

    Luckily a lot of places have been patching the holes in their laws.


  • But hey, instead of killing everyone, eugenics could lead us to a beautiful stratified future, like depicted in the aspirational sci-fi utopia of Brave New World!

    I agree with you, ultimately. My point is just that “good for humanity vs bad for humanity” isn’t a debate, there’s no “We want to ruin humanity” party. Most people see their own viewpoint as being best for humanity, unless they’re a psychopath or a nihilist.

    There are fundamental differences in political views as well as ethical beliefs, and any attempt to boil them down to “good for humanity” vs “bad for humanity” is going to be inherently political. I think “what’s best for humanity” is a good guiding metric to determine what one finds ethical, but using it to categorize others’ political beliefs is going to be divisive at best.

    In other words, it’s not comparable to the left/right axis, which may be insufficient and one-dimensional, but at least it describes something that can be somewhat objective (if controversial and ill-defined). Someone can be happy with their position on the axis. Whereas if it were good/bad, everyone would place themselves at Maximum Good, therefore it’s not really useful or comparable to the left/right paradigm.