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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I agree with you. Something I noticed and wanted to add: When I mention UBI to people, a lot of them are hearing it like a guarantee that everyone gets enough income to be happy or be comfortable.

    I have found that people who interpret basic income in this way tend to become strongly opposed to UBI on the grounds that it could never be funded and would lead to social collapse due to limited resources.

    Idk what you picture, but I imagine a person on UBI affording to eat rice and beans in a studio apartment somewhere in a low cost-of-living and low property value geography (though perhaps among pleasant neighbors and like minded folks).

    So I kind of think the name “Universal Basic Income” needs to be reworked so it sounds more harsh, almost like a necessary evil. Something like “Rock Bottom Income”, idk.

    I don’t have the perfect answer, but do you think conservatives would get on board if it was like “The poors can’t complain, they can take their complaints straight to Bean Town if they don’t like the wages” or do you think they’d still find it unpalatable?


  • I think this kind of research and discourse about it is important from an ethical and social reckoning standpoint, but I don’t think it is economically worthwhile to engage in a neverending arms race between AI censorship and the boundless determination of trolls.

    So my hypothesis is that we are going to see governments roll out legislation that just recognizes defeat and fully deregulates AI generated content online rather than spending the time/money/energy trying to hold corporations or individuals accountable for what LLMs say.

    Perhaps we will see regulations around what AI agents do insofar as executing code or submitting transactional requests, but I really doubt there are going to be many enforced limitations on what LLMs say in the near future.

    It will probably be the same policies that finally put the copyright concerns over their enormously controversial training data to rest, ultimately killing any prospect of copyright holders to sue for damages over stolen art/code/etc.


  • I don’t understand why protestors would even show up in Washington DC during the fascist parade like is being implied in the article.

    The union protests and social unrest currently underway are not really related to Trump’s authoritarian birthday bash except for how the media paints them as a “warm up”.

    Protesters would be better served popping up all over the country except in Washington DC during their synchronized goose stepping contest.


  • During one of the mass exodus events from Reddit to Lemmy, a lot of people started using these tools they would install to automatically scrub and obfuscate their Reddit comments and posts history. Often these tools would replace posts with random letters and even nonsense links because there was suspicion that outright deleted posts could be detected and then programmatically restored if Reddit really wanted to get that user content back.

    I suspect these tools probably exist for Lemmy as well and you are seeing users with long comment histories use them because those also happen to be the users who have a lot of previous content to cover up/obfuscate to maintain/ensure their own privacy.



  • No, but you have access to the protocol so you write your own algorithm.

    Then it is your algorithm, using the common protocol, that goes out and retrieves search results for your feed.

    Likewise, 3rd party corporations can write their own algorithms on the protocol and everyone can choose which algorithms fill their personal feed with search results - turning them on or off on a whim, at a personalized level.


  • I recently listened to Paul Frazee talk about Bluesky on the Software Engineering Radio podcast and it struck me that one thing they got right was looking at social media like a search engine looks at the web, instead of like a centralized platform(Facebook) and instead of like a federated network of platforms(fediverse).

    If your feed is understood to be just the search results you see, then users can understand that their algorithm is something they need to work on in the same vein that they change their search parameters on Google or Bing or other search engines.


  • This is a story that’s been rotating through the media since ChatGPT first released.

    I have an unpopular opinion about this headline after seeing the media cycle repeatedly downplay/ignore what Alphabet has been doing in response to OpenAI: Google the search engine is not in direct competition with ChatGPT, but Gemini is, and Alphabet is smart to keep simpler/time-tested search functionality central to Google rather than react strongly and scrap the keyword-based search bar that users understand are comfortable using - especially older users, but I think most people are starting to discover they have a use for both search and LLM chats.

    I think there are two product categories here, which first looked like they were going to converge in 2022-2024, but which are now slowly changing course as customers start to comprehend how both are necessary for different purposes.

    When I make chats in ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude etc, I am starting to plan them longitudinally so that I can use them over and over for a specific project or query type.

    When I turn to a search bar, it’s because I really want a proxy for a specific website or between me and whatever weird site has the answer to my specific question. It’s not that I want discussion and a chat about it, I just want Google’s card-like results with a website index I can read instead of that website’s stylized, animated web design on top or popups or malware.

    Every time I get sucked into a chat with Bing CoPilot(ChatGPT) when I really only had a web search query, I regret wasting my time talking to the LLM. Almost as a reflex, I’ve started avoiding it for most things now.


  • Iran’s government sucks, but this story really shows how the Iranian people are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

    Regular Iranians have more in common with western social values than those of the Iranian government or Russia - it’s been that way before, during, and after the Iranian revolution.

    Not sure what the answer is, but they keep trying to protest and resist their government every few years and they get violently forced back into submission.

    Of all the countries with screwed up regimes, Iran is one where I think it’s more appropriate to encourage more fluid immigration into western countries - a lot of their working age population is relatively better educated than many other countries too.








  • This seems shitty for consumers, but I think it’s not new shit - it’s just a window into the reality of exploitation we have all been living with our entire lives and it’s uncomfortable to confront that giant turd we don’t like to think about.

    Retailers like maximum profit and they are going to point to supply/demand to justify it. With these digital price tags, they’re just equipped to do it more quickly and more often.

    At first, I was thinking: What if I grab an item from the shelf and then it’s 20% more expensive by the time I get to checkout. Then, I realized they’re just going to claim I saw the final price on the checkout summary and should have denied the purchase at that time.

    If we legislate anything, it should be the clarity around checkout/returns imo.