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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: February 9th, 2022

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  • You’re not wrong, but your aggressive wording will surely alienate anyone who otherwise would’ve had a chance of learning something new or changing their mind. People don’t generally respond well to snark nor a condescending tone.

    And this is a real issue, because companies and fascists are good at telling relatable stories to win people to their side. If we want to have any chance at fighting back, we must utilize the same tools they’re using, instead of calling people stupid and thus driving them away.







  • That’s because ChatGPT and LLM’s are not oracles. They don’t take into account whether the text they generate is factually correct, because that’s not the task they’re trained for. They’re only trained to generate the next statistically most likely word, then the next word, and then the next one…

    You can take a parrot to a math class, have it listen to lessons for a few months and then you can “have a conversation” about math with it. The parrot won’t have a deep (or any) understanding of math, but it will gladly replicate phrases it has heard. Many of those phrases could be mathematical facts, but just because the parrot can recite the phrases, doesn’t mean it understands their meaning, or that it could even count 3+3.

    LLMs are the same. They’re excellent at reciting known phrases, even combining popular phrases into novel ones, but even then the model lacks any understanding behind the words and sentences it produces.

    If you give an LLM a task in which your objective is to receive factually correct information, you might as well be asking a parrot - the answer may well be factually correct, but it just as well might be a hallucination. In both cases the responsibility of fact checking falls 100% on your shoulders.

    So even though LLMs aren’t good for information retreival, they’re exceptionally good at text generation. The ideal use-cases for LLMs thus lie in the domain of text generation, not information retreival or facts. If you recognize and understand this, you’re all set to use ChatGPT effectively, because you know what kind of questions it’s good for, and with what kind of questions they’re absolutely useless.


  • IMO Steam Deck is the best overall option, as it’s beefy enough to run PS3 or even Switch games.

    If it’s too heavy, the Retroid Pocket 3+ is a decent emulation competitor with a lighter, smaller form factor.

    I find myself constantly switching between them all and can’t settle down to actually play a game.

    This sounds like one of those problems where buying more hardware doesn’t help. Ruminating about the “best” handheld choice is an easy way to forget about playing the games themselves. I’ve been there. The solution is to just pick a device at random, and go outside to play it. There will be pros and cons, but if you’re not even getting to the point where you can actually play the game, then the pros and cons don’t matter either.



  • [can] we as users can destroy their value […]?

    I’d want to say yes, but I think it depends on how you were using reddit in the first place.

    90-9-1-rule states that in a collaborative website, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.

    If the content creators and participants act together, with at least a semi-unified front, I believe there’s potential for lots of damage. Creators have their audiences as leverage. Mods can stop doing unpaid work for reddit and open the spam floodgates. Participants can participate on other platforms, which in turn drives lurker traffic further from reddit. If we could get a larger movement going on, reddit would eventually wither away.

    Digg lost half of it’s userbase in three months due to redesigns and venture capital meddling. I’m not sure if reddit’s API changes are a similarily powerful motivator for the masses by themselves. In reddit’s case, I think it would require the majority of content creators and participators to move the OC elsewhere.


  • It’s ironic, because the WWW always was decentralized by nature. Websites were people’s social media profiles and decentralized platforms. Email was the decentralized instant messenger. But then business realized that it would be more profitable to sell ads if they can target them, and targeting only works well when the users stay on your site, and not someone else’s.

    I can’t blame the people for flocking into these walled gardens. They made a lot of sense in the beginning. Instead of having to learn how to code (or use MS FrontPage, and figure out wtf is an FTP), you could just click a button to insert your photo on “your” profile page, change the texts, add some links… Ease-of-use is a major driving force when it comes to mass-adoption of technology. Companies do this well, because they recognize this issue, but the FOSS community tends to be too homogenous and tech-minded to execute it as well as commercial players do, because they operate largely on a volunteer-basis, and aren’t exactly easily approachable by folks who aren’t tech-minded.

    But now we’re getting to a point where all this has gone a full circle. The overwhelming majority of websites have evolved to have horrendous UX, because money and the marketing dept. speaks louder than users’ needs. And now the users are slowly beginning to realize that these companies don’t serve their interest like they did 10-20 years ago.

    With some luck, the open, decentralized models will gain more traction again, as long as the people making the software manage to attract UX-people and designers.


  • Might as well delete your account now. Reddit Inc. won’t learn, they only care about their IPO, and making it profitable in the short term. The likelyhood of them going “Ok, we hear you and from now on we’ll focus on our users’ needs instead of quick profits” at this point is close to zero.

    The way I see it, the function of this protest is to make a warning example of Reddit, so that other companies can see what happens when you bite the hand that feeds you.