Andy

Yes, 100%. That’s more than a red flag. A red flag is a warning sign of a problem. That’s just a problem.

Thank fucking God that they’re finally waking up. This is long overdue.

I think that if we want new folks, it would make a big difference is we organized the equivalent of a new member drive.

Currently, look at a default front page for your home instance and ask how enticing it is to a total newbie. There might be some good stuff, but it’s foreign and overwhelming. You feel out of place.

Now imagine if the first Friday of January had been “new subscriber day”. People on Reddit and Bluesky are taking about the fediverse and if it’s any good. And on Lemmy there’s a bunch of posts about finding the best instances and memes about being new on Lemmy. That’s a much more inviting beginner experience, and it makes it more likely for folks to come back the next day.

I really think planning for bursts of new folks is the way to welcome people.

I appreciate the distinction, but open source is always a spectrum, so I think the description is a reasonable application here.

First, the most honest answer is that it’s a shitty question. This ‘Sophie’s Choice’ promise is inherently designed to disrespect someone. In real life, you just react and try to save both, most likely based on who is a better swimmer, is closer, etc.

But the question between who you prioritize is valid. The answer is subjective, of course, but my advice would be that you prioritize your mother over a casual girlfriend/bf, but you prioritize a finance or spouse over your mother. And this isn’t hard to explain to Mom. I did. I said, “Hey Mom: remember how Dad always put Grandma in front of you because he was such a wimp, and it made you feel absolutely terrible? Well good news: you raised a better man than she did.”

She didn’t love it, but she got it. And she respected it.

It’s pretty wild, because this is genuinely great politics and great policy. It’s weird that folks haven’t realized this and acted on it yet. Fingers crossed.

That’s what I said! Fifteen minutes isn’t far. But it’s no longer close.

About twelve.

This is really deep.

I also gotta say: I reserve more respect for anyone who changed their attitudes to something I admire than someone who always held them. Me? I’m pretty progressive. But it’s not like I can take credit. I share similar views to most people with my upbringing. Holding these beliefs is about impressive as a ball rolling down a hill.

Questioning your beliefs and going somewhere else? That’s an achievement.

Get ready, because this is kind of cheesy stuff, but these two pieces of sports advice, taken together, have guided me for years.

First: a mentor of mine who was a pool shark taught me that when you’re playing pool, there is always a best shot to take. Sometimes, when you’ve got no good options in front of you you want to just do nothing or quit. But no matter what, billiards offers a finite set of options of where to try and aim the cue, and if you rank them from best to worst, there is always a best. When you’re in a bad situation, you find it and you take the best option. Often, that’s either a harm reduction strategy, a long-shot that feels impossible, or a combo of both. But if you always do this you’ll usually suffer far less harm in the aggregate, and if you take enough long shots you’ll occasionally achieve a few incredibly improbable wins.

Second: A kayaking instructor taught me – and this I’m told is true in many similar sports – you go where your focus is, so to evade a problem, focus on the way past. If you see a rock, don’t stare it it, you’ll hit it. It doesn’t matter if your brain is thinking “I gotta go anywhere except that rock!” If you’re looking at, you’re heading into it. If you don’t want to hit the rock, instead you have to look at wherever it is you DO want to go. It takes a bit of practice, because your brain sees “rock!” more easily than “smooth water flowing between two rocks”. But that’s how you get down a river, and it’s also how you work through almost any other problems in life that are rushing at you: don’t focus ON them, focus on whatever is the preferred alternative. This is especially useful if the alternative is sort of a non-thing, like an empty gap between two problems. And it often is.

Taken together, you get the basic approach that has steered my problem solving throughout adulthood. And it really works.

Holy shit, really?

That is Sony levels of stupid.

View from the Top.

I saw it when I was in my twenties with a friend because we (two mostly straight guys) thought we were going to see the latest silly Mike Myers movie. And then it turned out that he was barely in it! They just took all his scenes and put them in the trailer! The actual movie was a very dull romcom staring Gwyneth Paltrow and some guy who I don’t remember being in the trailer at all.

When it ended, we walked out of the theater and just said to each other ‘What the hell was that?’.

Also, I think Shallow Hal kind of falls in this too. I don’t recall the trailer being great, but it had to be good enough that it got me to see that terrible movie.

Also, I don’t know if this qualifies, but I remember that The Cable Guy staring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick was the first time I saw a movie and realized that a trailer can be misleading. They deliberately promoted it like The Mask and Ace Ventura. I think I was like 12 when I saw it, and it creeped me way the fuck out.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s actually a better movie than people remember, but the misleading promotion was a great way to ensure the movie didn’t find its audience.

Ulgh.

Blocked

It would explain a lot

Whew.

The thing about these incidents that I find most interesting is that they basically reveal a widely held suspicion among many people that these government contractors are over-crexentialed bullshit artists.

This just shows what we’ve all suspected: they’ve been cutting corners, claiming underserved authority, and making up shit for years. But now some folks are checking and reporting on it.

The up/down vote system directs the ranking algorithm on how to order posts and comments, and it visually signals to the user the relative popularity of a comment.

This, imo, is a wildly underappreciated mechanic for combating a lot of the harmful issues people associate with social media.

Most people recognize that discourse on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. is designed to divide and inflame people. the reddit-style downvote is remarkably effective at addressing this:

It does two key things in particular:

1. Downvoted comments are down ranked and hidden, so people are exposed to less toxic content.

2. If people do engage with unpopular comments, the negative score influences how people engage with them. On Facebook, commenting to defend Biden’s Israel policy will get elevated and create viscous fights. On Lemmy, it will get flagged with a virtual dunce cap. You can dunk on it, but there’s no point in arguing with it: we can all see that the argument is already over. Laugh and ignore.

Taken together, these discourage people from feeding trolls, and in doing so reduce the incentive to post something uncivil or stupid. It’s a remarkably powerful tool to address a huge problem, and I wish more people understood this.

Yeah, agree. Tables can be used standing or while sitting in the floor. Chairs are nice, but without tables a lot of stuff would happen at floor level anyway.

Definitely easier to get by without chairs.

I think this is the main story. I don’t think it’s new info, but it confirms the issue persists: this LLM is so heavily trained to fawn over Musk that it doesn’t exercise any application of context or attempt to find truth.

Which is sad.

The other issue I have is that this is an example of a recurring issue in which the tech obsessed ultra wealthy declare their plan to solve a problem for which a very straightforward policy solution already exists.

We don’t need tech to extend lives or feed the hungry. We just need to remove the paywalls to existing resources.

This is what I was going to say.

Also, long form narrative. Right now LLMs seem to work best for short conversations, but get increasingly unhinged over very long conversations. And if they generate a novel, it’s not consistent or structured, from what I understand.