The study talks to 16 Mastodon admins who got to say what they thought Mastodon did. It’s not really a study, it’s just a survey. Being posted here is just confirmation bias. For Mastodon to increase citizen empowerment, there has to be something measured and a control group that isn’t on Mastodon.

From the abstract

In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities

You really have to read beyond the headline. This isn’t Reddit.

You started with a straw man tho?

Since we’ve turned this into a gish gallop

1. (original comment) this has nothing to do with Hieronymus Bosch: never countered ergo conceded; whole premise is pointless
2. (original comment) genAI slop is bad: you say capitalism is bad not genAI, I say tech isn’t there and wasting energy is bad; you’ve yet to prove that capitalism being bad (your core argument) means genAI can actually work or that since capitalism is bad burning energy is okay
3. burning any energy for the current model is bad: you say capitalism is bad; this addresses nothing
4. NFTs are bad: we agree
5. making fun of people that swallow genAI proganda is always correct: you conceded the original point and also dropped when I pointed out that making fun of NFTs made things better
6. there is a fundamental misunderstanding about how capable the tech is, proganda aside, and a basic review of genAI art slop highlights this: you do not provide any analysis here; general tech consensus is that AI is very far from doing anything useful
7. your blog contradicts your online persona: you’re trying very hard to be mean here so either you’re writing your blog understanding you’re the asshole in the room that no one disagrees with or you’re incapable of self reflection.

We both agree that capitalism is bad, you provide no evidence aside from ad hominem to contradict the most superficial analysis of your midjourney, and you have swallowed way too much genAI propaganda (coincidentally called out many times and left unanswered) without applying any of your development critical thinking skills. You want to burn energy on dumb shit to support billionaires while saying billionaires are bad, I think that’s stupid and enjoy poking fun at any engineer stupid enough to miss the forest for the trees.

Oh my goodness simpler words would be nice since we’re struggling with “non sequitur” and “strawman” and “basic connections to underlying language.”

I appreciate your summary! Here’s mine:

• (original comment) this has nothing to do with Hieronymus Bosch
• (original comment) genAI slop is bad
• burning any energy for the current model is bad
• NFTs are bad
• making fun of people that swallow genAI proganda is always correct
• there is a fundamental misunderstanding about how capable the tech is, proganda aside, and a basic review of genAI art slop highlights this
• your blog contradicts your online persona

Why is this hell? This doesn’t look at all like any of the representations of hell that Bosch has done so we’ve got a different hell maybe? Maybe the issue was that the midjourney prompt had nothing to do with your joke?

It is crucial to recognize that disagreements generally arise from individuals approaching the problem from different perspectives. I presented my perspective and you went after some straw men. Are there personal insecurities that hinder the expression of contrary opinions here?

The path to comprehending the complete picture involves engaging in dialogue to grasp the trade-offs considered by each person. This only works if everyone is actually engaging in dialogue, though.

What’s the joke? What’s the story? Why am I exhaling through my nose?

Thanks! Your 4D chess was my inspiration. Either you have no understanding of the tools you use, the content they generate, and the billionaire propaganda you’ve swallowed while ignoring every single piece of technical knowledge you have in theory or this whole this was a masterclass we all can learn from. Immediately responding to criticism with strawmen, linking the current tech con to the last tech con, losing track of your personas, all fantastic work!

Should I quote your comments about the same? I love this discussion because the original non sequitur you made seems to apply to these responses! It’s great feedback. I also liked the “tilting at windmills” joke; how clever to ironically misuse a quote from around the same time as the ironic mislabeling of the artist!

Thanks! It’s always better to try to make the world a better place than it is to peddle billionaire vaporware while mislabeling the most basic concepts of art. I’m so glad we agree this prompt engineer is a witless dishcloth.

Zero energy wasted calling out dumb shit. It’s never a bad idea to rip into AI slip, especially in the context of things we can spend less energy on. Browbeating was incredibly influential in the dismantling of NFTs, which you correctly pointed out is just as bad a citizen as genAI turds.

Absolutely! Hyped-up vaporware like genAI and blockchain speculation should be nuked from orbit. Glad we agree this all garbage.

Shit, why not start with all the wasted energy generating the slop first? You’re solving the wrong problem.

I don’t normally get mad at genAI art. This one makes me mad. A huge part of Bosch is the tiny detail. There’s scholarly debate about how we interpret the detail; it’s incredibly wrong to say something is in the style of Hieronymus Bosch without clever little details. This AI garbage just has a bunch of repeated lens flares, age marks, and blobs. Also in the style of Bosch implies something we can interpret, be it a dark take on office work or capitalists teaching us lessons. I don’t know what the fuck we can take away from this.

This is more “someone with the title ‘prompt engineer’ spent three minutes hunt-and-pecking the name ‘Hieronymus Bosch’ into midjourney and grabbed the first image that was sort of muted earth tones” than “remotely in the vicinity of the style of Hieronymus Bosch.”

Thank you! I was pretty fucking sure there was stupidity related to Liam but could not for the life of me find anything in search.

This is pretty far from a proof of any variety. I think the spirit is there and the ideas are great. Spend a little more time on the execution, maybe tie in some Quine, and I think you’d have something.

I catch a lot of shit for my distaste of GPL. I don’t think I should be able to tell you what you can and can’t do with my source code. I’ve released it into the wild. If I put caveats on it it’s not really free.

This is really dependent on whether or not you want to interact with mounted volumes. In a production setting, containers are ephemeral and should essentially never be touched. Data is abstracted into stores like a database or object storage. If you’re interacting with mounted volumes, it’s usually through a different layer of abstraction like Kibana reading Elastic indices. In a self-hosted setting, you might be sidestepping dependency hell on a local system by containerizing. Data is often tightly coupled to the local filesystem. It is much easier to match the container user to the desired local user to avoid constant sudo calls.

I had to check the community before responding. Since we’re talking self-hosted, your advice is largely overkill.

What evidence did you find to support Substack’s claims? They didn’t share any.

You can quickly and easily find good evidence for things like Reddit quarantining and the banning of folks like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos.

Which claims are empirical again?