We absolutely have this problem on Lemmy too. Even on Beehaw. Hell, there’s a particularly high profile user here who posted constantly and focused squarely on spoiling potential Democrat votes who utterly disappeared the moment he was told by staff to knock it off. All other engagement dropped off and I still haven’t seen him post-election.

How many others were less prolific and didn’t shut down their activity? How many other accounts are literally just the same person?

I imagine that Twitter being blocked in Europe might actually lead to some of those sources moving elsewhere to continue to reach their audience. I’m not a big fan of blocking websites either in a general sense, but a I can see why countries would want to avoid having what’s happening to the US be repeated within their own borders, and that seems to be a distinct danger with Twitter. There’s a pretty good argument to be made that that’s literally its purpose at this point.

Dismantling legitimate governments with disinformation seems like a pretty viable power grab strategy for billionaires trying to create a megacorp hellscape where they get to do whatever they want until the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans some time after their own deaths.

A few weeks back I got a parking ticket because I believed a google search result. Parking is free on Sundays and holidays, but the city’s website doesn’t specify which holidays. Google insisted that Halloween is a holiday and thus parking is free, but it isn’t actually federally recognized, which I found out the hard way.

I was watching a talk debate on consciousness yesterday where they briefly touched on this topic. One of the speakers was contending that attempting to create AI that is even convincing to humans is a terrible idea ethically.

On the one hand, if we do eventually accidentally create something with awareness, we have no idea what degree of suffering we’d be causing it; we could end up regularly creating and snuffing out terrified sentient beings just to monitor our toasters or perform web searches. On the other hand, though, and this was the concern he seemed to find more realistic, we may end up training ourselves to be less empathetic by learning to ignore the potential suffering of convincingly feeling ‘beings’ that aren’t actually aware of anything at all.

That second bit seems rather likely. We already personify completely inanimate objects all the time as a normal matter of course, without really trying to. What will happen to our empathy and consideration when we routinely interact with self-proclaimed sentient systems while callously using them to our own ends and then simply turning them off or erasing their memories?

Amazon Graveyard sounds like a subscription service for apps that have been discontinued. Not like, a service that lets you keep using them, but you just get to have defunct apps that don’t work and pay Amazon for the pleasure.

Only $14.99 per month! One IP per subscription!

The modern internet is weird. It’s a space where you can link up a Skinner machine feeding you pure hate and vitriol directly to your brain, but it’s also a space where you can teach yourself literally anything.

I feel like the trick is using it more for the latter and less for the former. Even using Beehaw too much, it quickly becomes obvious that I need to shift my focus. Endless streams of news and opinion aren’t, like, great.

What if it is stinking inside?

Because who’s going to bother?

I got false DMCAed on a mod a while back by someone I literally hired to do development and server hosting for me who then violated our contract and ran off with a month’s fees after shutting down the server. The code he tried to DMCA me over (which was made to my specifications at my request and adjusted by me) was written under a paid contract. So not only could I have gone after him for the false DMCA, I probably could have gotten a year of server fees out of him.

But like, why? He’s that kind of petty, certainly, but I can’t be bothered with that shit. It was a blip. We recoded his tiny little half-assed mod that was already 90% a pre-existing mechanic, reuploaded, and waited the couple of weeks to be able to get our original back up. Whatever.

I think most people who are targeted by false DMCAs just don’t feel like wasting their time in the court system over some petty (if malicious) inconvenience.

That or someone owns a legitimate patent that they don’t feel like handing to Apple. Money doesn’t automatically buy you the rights to the intellectual property of others.

I mean, they do have to put in the notice that it’s accurate under penalty of perjury. Presumably if you received the notice and can be bothered, you can not only contest it but bring charges against them if it’s false.

I mean, you can find tutorials for pretty much anything. You could teach yourself an instrument more easily than ever.

It is so weird that people are still regularly linking to this Nazi’s website like it’s a totally fine thing to do.

It was a subreddit for trolls to share their trolling with one another and see who could score the highest. You’d get points for things like people having a meltdown, rapid-responding, posting responses of certain lengths, all sorts of stuff. The more believable or rage-inducing the troll thread, the higher the score. It got shut down fairly quickly.

One meaning of the verb ‘troll’ is to misrepresent reality to provoke some sort of reaction. Usually the desired reaction is related to frustration or confusion, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.

Like, there were certainly things that were worth a bunch of points on Game of Trolls that were less connected to making people angry than to getting them to believe you.

I’d imagine it’s probably closer to 30% on Reddit. Hell, it’s probably 15% on lemmy.

That depends on what you want out of them. If you want to minimize the amount of stuff you’re carrying around as your top priority, sure, phones are great. But if you want ease of use for a specific task without unwanted interference? They’re not always the best.

Like, if I were doing any sort of meaningful photography, I’d want my actual camera. It’s easier to shoot with, it allows for more control, and no notifications or phone calls are going to suddenly interrupt a shot.

When it comes to a music player, it’s mostly good, but what if I want to keep listening to music while doing other stuff on my phone, or while talking to someone? Phones are pretty bad at that sort of multitasking. There are certain websites I can’t read while listening to spotify, because something completely inaudible takes over the sound channel as soon as I load the page.

As to making phone calls? The number of dropped calls or calls with one-way audio is absolutely absurd, and not something I ever ran into on older dumb phones.

Convenience ultimately depends on use case. It is nice to always have some kind of camera on me, even if it’s kind of a half assed one. Ditto to a computer, a music player, and a phone. But they’re definitely not more convenient to use.

There’s a reason dials, macropads, tablets, midi devices, and things like that are popular. It’s usually a lot easier to control physical stuff sitting in front of you than it is to interface with some abstracted UI. Like, typing is so bad on phones that it spurred the creation of contemporary AI.

I don’t think so, but maybe you could set up remote access with a desktop and use OpenShot?

I definitely get that. I do think it’s a little different, though, because every single human being has been a child, while no human has been a car. We tend to have opinions on education because the prevailing wisdom often failed us during our own school years.

I don’t think that it’s totally unreasonable to expect some amount of input by other people who’ve been through the education system.

I haven’t had much luck with it writing stuff from scratch, but it does a great job of helping with debugging and figuring out why complex equations are doing what they’re doing.

I put together a pretty complex shader recently, and gpt 3.5 did a great job of helping me figure out why it wasn’t doing quite what I wanted.

I wouldn’t trust it to code anything without my input, but it’s great for advice and explanations and certain kinds of problem solving. Just don’t assume it has the right answer, you still have to do the work

I find the irregular aspects of it make it easier to read without getting lost or transposing things, while looking a lot more stylish than comic sans or the like.