That means that the harm done by these systems compound the more widely they are used as errors pile up at every stage of work, in every sector of the economy. It builds up an ambient radiation of system variability and errors that magnifies every other systemic issue with the modern state and economy.

Wanted to shout these two sentences out in particular. Best summary of my biggest current fears regarding use of “ai”/llm/transformer(?)-based systems.

I swear these dudes really need to supplement their Ayn Rand with some Terry Pratchett…

“All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.”

– Hogfather

The most naked attempt yet at allowing billionaires to live on without the rest of us.

What infuriates me the most, for some reason, is how nobody seems to care that the robots leave the fridge door open for so long. I guess it’s some form of solace that, even with the resources and tech to live on without us the billionaires still don’t understand ecosystems or ecology. Waste energy training a machine to do the same thing a human can do but slower and more wastefully, just so you can order the machine around without worrying about it’s feelings… I call this some form of solace as it means, even if they do away with us plebs, climate change will get’em as well - and whatever remaining life on Earth will be able to take a breather for the first time in centuries.

Now that Trump’s plan to seize 50% of Ukraine’s mineral deposits has leaked, Putin might be more worried about the USA/NATO/“the west” getting “all” of Ukraine and Russia getting nothing. So if he backs off from wanting to seize Ukrainian territory, he can push for “Ukrainian sovereignty” to prevent the USA from turning Ukraine into a vassal state.

To extend your metaphor: be the squirrel in the digital forest. Compulsively bury acorns for others to find in time of need. Forget about most of the burial locations so that new trees are always sprouting and spreading. Do not get attached to a single trunk ; you are made to dance across the canopy.

To suggest some things not directly related to the workplace:

• look into things like community pantries and community gardens, https://www.detroitagriculture.net/ is a good example of what can be achieved over several years
• try to match up within your neighborhood unemployed adults and low-income parents who need babysitters on weekends or outside of school hours
• try to convince the (relatively) more wealthy members of your community to help organize free breakfast for the neighborhood kids
• organize study/homework sessions for the neighborhood kids and/or adult learners

These are all ways to increase the resilience of your community and reduce their dependency on their paychecks. These will also increase trust and reflexive solidarity between community members. This in turn starts making unions and strikes feasible.

I wish I could ask trump if that means I can assassinate him to save America. And do so live on television, unprompted.

Maybe it’s already too late for that to stem the tide.

funny, this seems similar to how Gordon Ramsey demonstrates “perfect scrambled eggs” in a youtube video I once saw. He basically just pulls the eggs off of the fire every 15 seconds or so.

“possibilité de finaliser votre accès au portail sécurisé” alors que les places sont limitées ?! Doit bien avoir un contexte qui rend ça pas étonnant, mais non ça me terrifie quand même de lire ça et imaginer le service d’administration cantonale des impôts être géré de fond en comble de la sorte…

Bernhardt tweeted in January 2025: “The dead internet theory is coming to fruition.” And he’s doing his part.

… we live in a farce

A second good read is her follow-up/response post: Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization

I think you are referring to https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

Yeah, federation really is the killer feature for this compared to all of these centralized private services.

Sadly, I expect federation won’t be foolproof/enough on its own. The fascists control more and more of the USA government. If/when they come after the fediverse it will be through whichever mechanism suffices to neuter it, including:

• A “great American firewall” to cut off instances hosted outside the country
• mandatory registration for any citizen leasing a domain name or a static IP address
• forced rootkits on all citizen devices

and all they’ll have to say is “China/Russia/Europe/Iran/etc is infiltrating our glorious social media and making it unpatriotic” to justify it.

They don’t really need to truly “kill” the fediverse, they just need to make using it enough of a pain in the ass and/or dangerous that not enough people use it for it to matter.

Anyways, the point of my comment is to encourage everyone who cares about this to try spending a little thought towards fail-safes for when federation won’t be enough, and/or things we could be doing now to further protect our capacity to form these independent online communities.

If they do crack down on Reddit, it’ll be one of the few opportunities we will have to “get ahead” on public sentiment and help people get accustomed to federated social media. Each additional person that is participating in the fediverse raises its resilience - from instance operating to moderation to sharing and cross posting.

Ideally we would see x new instances crop up for every y new participants. With a more reactive approach of spinning up instances as existing ones get taken down, I fear we would set ourselves up for a slow fragmentation into obscurity.

You might be thinking of https://geminiprotocol.net/

The last thing I want to do is to make some flippant remark, but holy hell. I saw his release picture before fully parsing the title, and thought he was a Holocaust / concentration camp survivor.

Artificial Intelligence Image

For some reason it’s hilarious to me that the person who made this flyer felt the need to specify that the ClipArt-level illustration, placed next to 3-4 pictures of the kid the flyer is complaining about, is not, in fact, an actual image of the kid.

Thank you both (@NinjaFox@lemmy.blahaj.zone, @ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org) for taking the time to make this post not just more accessible but somewhat more bit-/link-rot-resilient by duplicating the image’s info as a text comment.

We don’t talk about it as much as authoritarian censorship, ip & copyright related takedowns, and their ilk, but image macros/memes often have regrettably small lifetimes as publicly accessible data in my experience. It might be for any number of reasons, including:

• because many of them are created on free generator websites that can’t afford to store every generated image forever,
• because people often share screenshots of things instead of a link to it,
• because for-profit social media websites are increasingly requiring account creation to view previously accessible content,

or (more probably) a combination of all three and more.

In any case as silly as image memes are, they’re also an important vector for keeping culture and communities alive (at least here on the fediverse). In 5-10 years, this transcription has a much higher chance of still hanging around in some instance’s backups than the image it is transcribing.

P.S.: sure, knowyourmeme is a thing, but they’re still only 1 website and I’m not sure if there’s not much recent fediverse stuff there yet. The mastodon page last updated in 2017 and conflates the software project with the mastodon.social instance (likely through a poor reading of it’s first source, a The Verge article that’s decent but was written in 2017).

P.P.S.: ideally, OP (@cantankerous_cashew@lemmy.world) could add this transcription directly to the post’s alt text, but I don’t know if they use a client that makes that easy for them…

It’s a bit sad, but not that surprising, that if this is true then Microsoft is clearly not tasking their most experienced engineers on the control panel (you know, that part of the OS who’s function is to allow you to tweak all the rest of the OS?).

I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I’m misunderstanding, what you’re proposing amounts to “if you want to downvote in a community you’ll need to make an account on it’s instance”. This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.

In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that’s potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren’t the community host. The current anonymity of these downvotes flattens these nuances into the same “-40”, which I agree isn’t great when it can lead to deletion - but I’d argue that’s also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle. I find that disabling downvotes from other instances entirely flattens things just as much if not more, just not in the same manner. Instead of wondering how representative a big upvote or downvote count is, I’m now wondering how representative a big upvote count is, period. That might seem like 50% less wondering but with no downvotes at all it might also only be about 50% less votes.

I’m not convinced silencing negative outside contributions won’t just shift the echo-chamber-forming to one that’s more based around a form of toxic positivity and/or reddit-style reposts and joke comments, either.

Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn’t prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.

From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it’s implementation and what federation needs to function properly. At the very least, each instance knows how many votes they’re getting from the other instances. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing them away entirely.

So much thought has been put into “how do we convey the different instances’ character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn’t a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way” in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already present on the instance servers.

I’ll acknowledge up-front that the “just” in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I’m suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They’re written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they’re called votes: there’s a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).

On top of this, I don’t know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I’m currently unaware of). I wouldn’t expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I’m ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they’re run for lemmy, for example).

I can’t foretell if this would “solve” opinion downvotes on it’s own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of “subscribed”/“local”/“all” + the different vote rankings.

From what I understand its origin in street racing was because japanese drivers (specifically? might have been Asian more generally) were souping up cars to look pretty but still not run great. I’m hazy on the details and my google-fu is failing me - I wish I had a more precise answer but overall I recall being bummed out at how even the origins of the term weren’t as clean as I had hoped.