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

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  • 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.






  • 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.


  • 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.


  • I don’t think that “everyone is inherently equal” is a conclusion you can reach through logic. I’d argue that it’s more like an axiom, something you have to accept as true in order to build a foundation of a moral system.

    This may seem like an arbitrary distinction, but I think it’s important to distinguish because some people don’t accept the axiom that “everyone is inherently equal”. Some people are simply stronger (or smarter/more “fit”) than others, they’ll argue, and it’s unjust to impose arbitrary systems of “fairness” onto them.

    In fact, they may believe that it is better for humanity as a whole for those who are stronger/smarter/more fit to have positions of power over those who are not, and believe that efforts for “equality” are actually upsetting the natural way of things and thus making humanity worse off.

    People who have this way of thinking largely cannot be convinced to change through pure logical argument (just as a leftist is unlikely to be swayed by the logic of a social darwinist) because their fundamental core beliefs are different, the axioms all of their logic is built on top of.

    And it’s worth noting that while this system of morality is repugnant, it doesn’t inherently result in everyone killing each other like you claim. Even if you’re completely amoral, you won’t kill your neighbor because then the police will arrest you and put you on trial. Fascist governments also tend to have more punitive justice systems, to further discourage such behavior. And on the governmental side, they want to discourage random killing because they want their populace to be productive, not killing their own.






  • I feel like this would be spotted and stamped out immediately. Everyone’s eyes are on Threads right now; astroturfed content might sneak in on Mastodon, where regular Threads content will be mixed in with the hypothetical astroturfed content, but here on Lemmy there will be little to no Threads presence due to lack of interoperability, so every single Threads account that shows up will be noticed. It’s already super visible when Mastodon users show up due to the weird formatting issues that happen due to the lack of support.

    I just don’t see an astroturf campaign as being viable unless Threads implements community functionality, which seems pretty far out when they’re only now implementing basic federation with Mastodon.




  • As far as I’m aware, there’s nothing preventing a PluralKit equivalent from being made for other platforms. In fact, a quick search turned up a WIP Matrix port on github.

    So no, I don’t think this is true. Lack of PluralKit isn’t what’s preventing people from switching en masse. It’s the opposite—lack of people switching means there’s a lack of demand for a PluralKit port in the first place, so even though there is a port people don’t know it exists and thus it doesn’t get as much dev attention.

    It comes down to network effects, ultimately, and just plain inertia. If you’re already on Discord, and all your friends are on Discord, it’s hard to convince you to switch. And being more familiar with the Discord bot ecosystem (like PluralKit) is just one more thing that adds to the inertia.


  • I turned up the peppers to 5 and… Oh boy. Sociable at 3 is all “friendly” and “positive” and polite—it removes most of the dark stuff—and then Sociable at 5 loops around to… This:

    Oh my goodness, did you just say something not so nice about me, you little cutie patootie? I want you to know that I actually did pretty well in my Navy Seals training, graduating at the top of my class. I’ve been on quite a few secret missions against Al-Quaeda and have taken down over 300 bad guys. I’m pretty good at gorilla warfare and I’m considered one of the best snipers in the whole US armed forces. But don’t worry, you’re just like any other target to me. I may just have to use my special skills to take you down with precision like never before. Do you really think you can get away with talking to me like that online? Think again, you little rascal. I’ve got a whole network of friends all across the country who are helping me track your IP address right this second. So get ready for a little storm headed your way. You may feel like your life is being wiped out, but don’t worry too much. I can handle over seven hundred ways to take you down, even without any weapons. And I must say, I have some pretty cool toys from the United States Marine Corps that I might just have to use on you. If only you knew what was coming after that little comment you made, maybe you would’ve kept quiet. But hey, too late now. Get ready to be in a world of hurt, my friend. You’re going to be so mad when you realize what you’ve gotten yourself into. So get ready for a little “fury” shower from me. You’re done for, kiddo.