A bubble means that investors are putting in more money into a particular field than the field is really worth. How does that happen? Well, investors make money by investing money into small companies and hoping that they get bigger over time. And they need to make guesses in which company they think will actually get big. While investors generally try to make these guesses logically, there’s inherently a bit of “trust me bro” involved in making these decisions.

A bubble happens when investors increasingly rely on “trust me bro” to make their investment decisions. And so they put in more and more money into a field that might not really need or deserve that much money. Not to say that the field is intrinsically useless - just that the hype has overtaken the actual usefulness of that field. So when you see something that’s being hyped up, you should generally view it with caution.

AI as a field is currently very hyped up right now, and so there’s concern that AI might be a bubble.

How does a bubble pop? Randomly and without warning. The problem with bubbles is that they’re driven primarily by hype and “trust me bro,” and so if anything blows the hype, it will cause all the investors to snap back to reality and pull all their money. That’s a lot of money being pulled from a single field at the same time, and that’ll absolutely crash the field. A company going under might trigger a pop, or it could be a random news article that went viral saying that AI is a fraud, or it could be a lackluster product launch. Hype is inherently unstable, and so it can be difficult to predict when and why a bubble pops.

The implosion that happens during a pop isn’t referring to any particular company, it’s referring to the entire field as a whole. It could very well happen (though unlikely) that not a single company goes bankrupt during a pop. It’s merely that those companies would lose a lot of the investor funding that they have previously been relying on. As investors lose hype in AI, companies will no longer feel as strong of a push to include AI in their products. At the same time, AI companies will slow down their product development due to lower funding and so they won’t be able to make as big of a splash in the news when they launch a new product.

The observed effect is that one day everything is AI, and the next day, nothing is AI. Think about NFT’s and cryptocurrency - most companies that dealt with NFT’s and crypto survived, but we no longer hear about NFT’s because they lost their hype and so lost their funding

I think that’s a fun concept. I love dealing with the mechanism of realistic hypotheticals.

If I were to answer, I think it’s straight impossible for all of social media to not be funded through advertisements. There must be, to some degree, some site that clings on. But we can modify the prompt to say “the majority of social media will not be funded by advertisements.” In this case, I feel like there are a couple potential mechanisms, of varying likeliness:

• people collectively become more aware of their browsing habits and start using non-advertised sites (highly unlikely)
• the government steps in and collectivizes major social media sites (highly unlikely)
• the Fediverse, or some other alternative, becomes so popular that it becomes the primary social media site (not likely, but not impossible)
• social media sites shift their business structure so that users have to pay for social media usage, but in return they get no ads (actually possible with a not-insignificant chance of this actually occurring)
• social media sites find some other way of exploiting users that is currently considered either implausible (not likely, but I wouldn’t put this one out of the realm of possibility)

That’s when the malicious compliance kicks in. Start a new ticket with a picture of your monitor, with the entire screen taped off. Ask why you can’t find your mouse

Because Threads didn’t federate. It turns out when they said that they’ll federate, they actually meant “some time in the undisclosed future.” And then Threads lost a lot of that initial marketing hype so everyone forgot about it.

Apparently Meta is currently testing federation for Threads, though? The problem about Threads federating isn’t resolved, to be entirely clear. It was merely that everyone, Meta included, just decided to kick the can down the road and think about the issue later.

Definitely not. The same reason back then as it is now. Namely: I don’t trust Meta to not try to destroy the fediverse

How in the world did Gollum get a 4?

Part of it also is that Panera didn’t clearly market it as caffeinated. The only indication that it was caffeinated was that it was marketed as “charged lemonade.” You could go to their website, and the website says it’s caffeinated, but the website only says that it contains the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee (which is markedly untrue).

It was only after the media started reporting on the deaths that Panera started saying that it was an energy drink. In other words, Panera is entirely at fault for those deaths.

I think you’re misunderstanding the purpose of decentralization. We don’t decentralize in order to keep communities small. We decentralize so that normal people, the non-billionaires, can host Lemmy.

Let me explain. It starts with a simple premise: social media owned by companies can and will enshittify. If not right now, then they will in the future.

From this premise, we conclude that the only way to produce a healthy, self-sustaining social media is by having the people own it rather than a company. But this leads to a challenge: only companies and billionaires have the money to be able to host large social media sites. A large site requires a large server, and that requires a lot of money.

The Fediverse sidesteps this issue by only requiring people to have small servers, to keep costs low. But then that introduces a new problem, which is that small servers can’t host the sheer number of people required to promote discussions and communities. So, the Fediverse makes a second innovation: have the small servers communicate with each other and share information, so that as a collective, the sum of the small servers becomes large enough to host a healthy community of users.

We federate across multiple sites because if we were to all pile into a single site, it would overload that site, and the poor chap who’s running the server would have a terrible day trying to keep the site running.

The issue you’re noticing (having multiple communities of the same topic) isn’t really the intention of federation. That issue is just because a bunch of people from Reddit tried to make the same communities all at the same time without checking if the community already exists. The expectation is that, over time, communities with the same topic will consolidate, exactly as you predicted.

I appreciate your thoughts. From a purely ideological perspective, I do agree with you. I believe that educating as many people as possible is ultimately beneficial to society. I see that someone else has already brought up the logistical nightmare that is academia in the US, so I won’t discuss that.

As someone who is in academia, I’m granted a perspective that I think few other people are able to see. And while it is true that logistics is a valid reason for discouraging academia in the US, I’m more intrigued by the fact that so many students seem not to put any thought into their life after college. That is why I bring up in my original comment that college is a means to an end. I’m not necessarily even implying that going to college needs to be for a job. But so many of the students I meet have never even thought about what it is they’re getting from college and how it benefits their life. These students don’t seem to know why it is that they’re going to college, other than maybe the vague promise that it gets them money or that it’s merely expected of them. In my perspective, these students are here merely for the grade, not for the actual learning.

If you believe that having a particular skill (hard or soft) is beneficial for your life, and you believe that college is a reasonable way to gain that skill, then I think that’s a valid reason to get higher education. I just don’t want students who drift aimlessly through college and later realize that they wasted 4 years of their time and money and gained nothing for it.

My belief is that college is a means to an end. That is, you go in with an explicit goal of achieving so-and-so, and achieving it will directly help you achieve so-and-so after college. For instance, say you want to be a doctor, and to be a doctor you need a degree. Or you want to become an engineer, and to be an engineer you need a degree. These are valid reasons to go to college.

I find that a lot of students go to college because they think they need to go to college. Or because they think it gets them a higher paying job, but they don’t know which job it is that they want, just that it’ll be a high paying job. Or because they want the degree for the bragging rights. Or to satisfy their parents. I interpret these goals as stemming from the belief that finishing college is the ultimate goal, and that as long as you finish college, you’re guaranteed a satisfying life.

Having these kinds of goals, I think, aren’t going to get you to make the most of college, and frankly, I believe that having these sorts of goals are fundamentally misaligned with what the college experience offers students.

I don’t know what your situation is like, but I believe that the solution to your question lies in answering this more fundamental question: why are you going to college? And is your reason because you plan to use college as a stepping stone for a more ultimate goal?

No hearing loss here, but I’m semi-alright at reading lips. It’s somewhat of a guesswork, but you can make out a decent amount of info, depending on how clearly the other person enunciates their words.

I suspect most or all people already do lip reading to some extent, but you can definitely “train” yourself to read lips better.

I mainly look for consonants since those are the easiest to identify (the shape you make when you make an m sound looks super different from when you make a t sound, for instance). There’s a slight bit of guessing involved, since several consonants have the same mouth shape (m and b, for instance). Sometimes, vowels can throw you a bone and be really easy to read (the a in apple, for instance, has you open your mouth very wide), but I generally struggle to read most vowels. The rest is just piecing together what was said based on context clues.

My understanding is that fish are relatively high in omega-3 fatty acids. I believe they’re important in neuronal function and cardiovascular function. Regardless, the media took the 2 facts and conflated the two to say that eating fish = lots of omega-3 fatty acids = good neuronal health = become smart

You’ll find that the media does this quite a lot - they take reputable scientific research and extrapolate it so far outside its intended use case that the resulting news report is complete garbage

Hmm, that’s difficult. Some electronic hardware stores take in batteries (Microcenter comes to mind, but I bet others do something similar). I think some libraries take in batteries too, but I don’t recall where I heard that, or if i just misremembered - could be worth checking your local library if they do.

If nothing else, universities basically always have a battery disposal, but the bins themselves can be frustratingly difficult to find sometimes

I misread the sign in the back as “GIRAFFE,” and that makes the entire image funnier

Ah yes. In addition, it’s only polite to refer to yourself as “ore,” and a true gentleman will also refer to everyone with the -chan suffix.

It’s an antimeme. The original meme is meant to show 2 separate, unrelated objects, with the implication that the first thing was destroyed in the process of creating the second object. In this case, the first object (wheat) really is used to create the second object (bread), hence the antimeme

You sound like a social liberal, economic conservative.

To be clear - being socially liberal doesn’t mean that you want to be LGBTQ. It doesn’t mean that you want to be atheist. It just means that you believe other people should be allowed to be that. So you can still be Muslim and have a traditional family and still be considered socially liberal.

As for your question, that’s quite tough. American Democrats are, politically speaking, probably the closest group of people I can think of. But somehow, people think that Democrats are socialist, so your mileage may vary

More active niche communities popping up here and there! The strength and number of niche communities still don’t match those of niche communities on Reddit, but I take it as a good sign of healthy growth.

It’s just slightly annoying to have to check in every once in a while for niche communities that sprung up since the last time I checked

I won’t say whether it’s better or worse to ban phones during break, but I do think it is worthwhile to point out something that you might not know, given that you’re still in school.

School is most likely the last time in your life to have actual, true friends. In college, and especially in work, your friends will almost certainly be fair weather friends, friends made out of convenience rather than anything substantial.

I get that school sucks. I still think so. But there’s some benefits to how schools are run that you won’t recognize until you’re already out of school. Your social life will absolutely get tougher and you’ll be more isolated. So, my advice is to take the bad with the good. Have some fun with your friends in-person, because that’s really never going to happen again. Please don’t waste your school life on your phone.

Yes, that’s something that’s constantly emphasized in scientific research. You might have the most infallible algorithm, but… garbage in, garbage out. You’ll still get garbage data if what you enter into the algorithm is garbage