Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The thought behind the post is worthwhile to ponder and discuss.

    Personally, I don’t think it’s as dire as the text makes it seem. The speculation that a steadfast refusal of showing text only on PF might lead the AP protocol guardians to include a dummy pic in every post seems to me to be in the “possible but outlandish” category.

    If the premise of AP was that every user should be able to see everything everywhere then defederating from certain instances shouldn’t be possible. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

    The tree of the fediverse is big and nobody needs to saw off any branches. A picture only branch can sit next to a hypothetical text only one. I can see an argument that newbies to those particular branches could be more explicitly made aware of the filtering they will experience. While I was reading the text about the users who thought they saw everything from Mastodon on PF, my first thought was: this strains credulity. But then again, users are dumb. I hadn’t realized for a while that shared posts don’t show up in my PF feed on the app either.

    I don’t think anybody could become too big for their breeches on the fediverse because the fediverse is in no position to challenge the incumbent corporate platforms. Don’t get me wrong, I love it here and on Mastodon (and on PF). But if you come from those polished centrally organized platforms and you’re not willing to invest at least a little bit of time into learning how federating works (also refer to users are dumb above), you’ll already be disappointed and put off before you realize you now need to also become your own algorithm. The threat scenario that PF could become so big that it can dictate protocol also presupposes that AP is the protocol that will endure forever. And with AT it already has a competitor waiting in the wings. As I said up top, the thought about how one dominating branch could damage the whole tree is worthwhile. But in a dramatic shift from this metaphor: we are in no position to have to cross this bridge any time soon.

    Another reason why PF won’t be getting out the chainsaw is its usability. It’s only great for looking at pictures. It’s terrible for having discussions about them unless you only use the website. I’m using the Android app and it’s not great. Features came and went. The UI leaves a lot to be desired for me. It currently feels a bit abandoned because Dansup is more preoccupied with challenging TikTok. I still like PF because I go there just to look at pictures. I go to Mastodon for memes and dry remarks. And I don’t feel like I’m breaking the protocol.

    This image may be a bit wonky but convenience stores don’t go out of business just because 24h supercenters exist. They both exchange ice cream for money but one of them has a bigger selection of flavors. PF is 7/11, Mastodon is Walmart.






  • It’s not that clear really. His official titles would’ve been president and chancellor and he only got one of those in a manner the Weimar constitution legally envisioned. So the system, by which we would decide what an official title is today, was abused and then suspended all together. The title “der Führer” was basically a google translate from “il duce” in Italy and is not entirely honorific because he was leader of the Nazi party first. And he continues to be referred to by this semi-unofficial, semi-honorific title even in history books today and they don’t always bother to disambiguate or add that they mean it sarcastically. So while Grok should be shot into space. And Nazi saluting Melon Usk deserves to be under this much scrutiny and more and can otherwise go eff himself as far as I’m concerned. The Ockham’s razor for this gaff tells me the LLM just regurgitated book knowledge and nobody bothered to filter this with 2025 sensibilities. Not great but also more of a storm in a teacup. This won’t make the top ten of atrocious things coming from the Melon.

    I was also looking for a word other than ‘honorific.’ I find it has a positive connotation and should not apply to the titles of such infamous individuals as Hitler or Mussolini. But I could not come up with anything snappy.






  • My preference is simple:

    Minimalist Lemmy - ordered by new, chronological (used to be the same on reddit before I stopped) Mastodon - chronological

    If I look at how the algorithms on YouTube or Instagram (don’t know which category they fall in) treat me, they always surface 80% irrelevant stuff and 20% that is okay but only in the rarest cases mindblowingly good. And that’s why on YouTube I tend to ignore the Home tab.

    Especially in the short video algorithms, I fucking hate that if you didn’t respond within a microsecond you’ll now get fed sloth videos or car crashes until you die. I’m all algorithm’ed out.


  • It remains to be seen if reading about all the emotions and morals is the same as feeling them, acting according to them, or just being able to identify them in us meatbags. So even with the sum total of human knowledge at their disposal, this may not matter. We already don’t know how these models actually organize their “knowledge.” We can feed them and we can correct bad outcomes. Beyond that it is a black box, at least right now. So if the spark from statistical spellchecker (current so-called AI) to actual AI (or AGI) happens, we’ll probably not even notice until it writes us a literary classic of Shakespearean proportions or until it turns us into fuel for its paperclip factory. That’s my assessment anyway.








  • At different points in the past, we thought novels, newspapers, radio, television, and the internet would be the end of truth. Truth is still around. We develop systems to sieve through the bullshit. In terms of slop, I don’t think anyone can say for sure how we will deal with it. But if past experience is anything to go by, it will rely on reputation. You trust a certain news source because they have been reliable, so they have a reputation they don’t want to lose. And that keeps them honest or you move on. We will find a way to deal with slop as well that will be based on reputation. In addition to laws and regulations that are yet to be written.

    Whether it’s news rooms or TikTubers or something completely new that will gain this reputation, eff knows. But we will get there.