About as much as I trust the yanks.

Yeah, the more people say something, the less true it becomes. Good facts die inside an individual mind without ever being shared.

It’s not just that. If it was, I’d have been convinced by the new-era freedom fighters using fucking ai horde, or whatever sloppers call their latest open-source [citation needed] model instance.

The biggest issue is the shameless, continuous abuse of creative workers by sucking up all their works without consent.

Turning it against itself my ass. This is promoting it. Legitimizing it. Normalizing its presence everywhere. Doing exactly what they want.

They’re on a niche forum sharing convoluted AI slop, harming that which they claim to stand for. These aren’t freedom fighters subverting the system, they’re clowns.

That’s too far, though I understand the feeling.

I think we should save the Hitler comparisons for individuals that actually deserve it. AI bros and genAI promoters are frequently assholes, but not unapologetically fascist genocidal ones.

Another isolated case for the endlessly growing list of positive impacts of the GenAI with no accountability trend. A big shout-out to people promoting and fueling it, excited to see into what pit you lead us next.

This experiment is also nearly worthless because, as proved by the researchers, there’s no guarantee the accounts you interact with on Reddit are actual humans. Upvotes are even easier for machines to use, and can be bought for cheap.

The articles mentions that scroll and the arrow keys no longer adjust volume. Nothing could be earth shattering because it’s video streaming software, but it does seem to come with some functionality loss at this stage.

It’s still nice! A bit of recognition, legitimacy, and although it’s not funding, it might be a small step towards it. I see many great works, that stand tall on their own. More eyes will only make them shine even brighter.

Thanks, Fr*nce.

I’ve seen jokes(?) that they’re aiming high, as in, aiming for high global temperatures to handle the ice. Stupidity wouldn’t describe it, it’d be insanity… But isn’t that what this administration is all about?

It’s not perfect, sure, but we as a society should be capable of deciding that some things aren’t okay without giving the state carte blanche to censor as they see fit. If the system can be abused, then we ought to fix it, not forgo it entirely.

Plus, governments and companies already suppress or ban a bunch of speech, often in favor of the ruling class. I doubt outlawing harmful speech like parent comment suggests would be the straw that breaks democracy’s back.

Most people know this in some capacity, but it’s not talked about enough: the shape of the platform massively shapes its culture. Every mechanism, intentional feature or not, is a factor in resulting user behavior and should be accounted for.

Reddit Karma was (shitty) reputation from the start, but Slashdot user IDs became one despite being mere sequential identifiers; negative user feedback such as downvotes can be harmful to communities (yet, users without an outlet may lash out in other ways e.g. reports); even how the platform communicates with users influences them; and so on.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t be nice and incentivize others to do the same, but unless the system naturally leads to the desired behavior, you’ll have a bad time in the long term because building culture by interactions doesn’t scale. By the time you realize there’s a shift, it’s too late; interactions will compound and affect how the average user acts faster than you can try to course-correct.

I wish lemmy was more experimental, because by building a clone of reddit, we’ve copied too many of its faults. We’ve already got gatherings to complain about mods, and the one time devs considered changing a core component, discussion was killed by an onslaught of users. Problems with the current setup that were brought up then will likely never see that amount of people thinking about how to solve them.

Contrast with Mastodon, which gets crap for not being a faithful copy of twitter, but their reasoning for not including quote-reblogs is understandable. They’re now putting a lot of thought into how to add them safely. Not ignoring functionality users want, but also not ignoring how it will affect culture, that’s compromise.

I’d like it if we could talk more about how our platforms work and, particularly, how they affect us, because that’s a big way we can build better platforms, right up there with being nice.

Apparently the dump doesn’t include media, though there’s ongoing discussion within wikimedia about changing that. It also seems likely to me that AI scrapers don’t care about externalizing costs onto others if it might mean a competitive advantage (e.g. most recent data, not having to spend time and resources developing dedicated ingestion systems for specific sites).

I want to stress this: it’s not that “tech bros” are just stupid—even though a lot of them are revoltingly unappreciative of the giants whose sholders they stand on—it’s that they don’t care.

No one who uses Mozilla software wants more cloud shit or online services from Mozilla.

I don’t think that’s unanimous. I’d like to use Firefox Relay, myself, and I’m willing to give thundermail a chance.

Used to think I’d go full Proton eventually, but leaning more towards a diverse set of service providers, nowadays. It’s also my hope that these services allow Mozilla to depend less on companies like Google, and more on the users they ought to serve, which would be healthier for the org and better for users.

I should donate again. As someone who still depends on gmail, I keep forgetting how annoying it was to get ads every time I refreshed my inbox, before I switched to their app. Glad things seem to be working out.

If they’re user funded, their incentives are fundamentally different from Google’s. Even thinking as a business, it makes no sense to enshittify the way Google does. It’s a different choice, even if it’s not the choice you wanted.

They said it will be opt-in and are trying to make it local-first. Their provider(?) apparently allows fallback to nvidia cloud compute when the hardware can’t handle it.

I’m not using AI to write my fucking emails, regardless. Just wanted to let people know.

p.s. Sorry, I’m dumb, skipped over quote in parent comment. Point is, there’s more to the service than optional AI bullshit, and you shouldn’t have to disable it.

I think there was a similar idea in the USA with the COPIED Act, but I haven’t heard about it since.

I wonder how true that is. Maybe they were considered left in their time, but something we see differently today, then. I really should hit the books on this one.

It’s a bit of a tangent(!), but Parrish gave a talk I think is relevant here. In Programming is Forgetting (transcript, watching optional), she analyzes a book about hackers from the eighties and dissects the ethics of hacker culture—a very loose definition, mind you.

This is all beside the point, because while interesting throughout what I’d really like to point to is the section on the rewiring of the PDP-1. Agree or disagree with any other, that part made me rethink how I saw older generations of programmers. I consider the dignity of all people an important tenet of my leftist values today, and women then were second-class, even in computing. Even when excelling.

So I feel like things have actually improved overall, but it’s difficult to say how much. That really is a shame, it ought to be a lot clearer.

On certain topics, complete indifference also bothers me. I’ve seen this called a “purity test,” and I don’t get it.

Why shouldn’t I be bothered when someone “doesn’t have a side” on taking away people’s rights? I very much prefer that they care, at least enough to not support aggressors with careless neutrality.

They don’t mind folks being erased or even killed, but I’m the radical for not being ok with that?

's what happens when one tires of getting surprise racism in hobby-talk.