davehtaylor

That’s a joke, right? Sorry if I’m missing sarcasm here

I would disagree. Bluesky has no algorithm and it’s growing quite rapidly. And I think that a large part of that is just having the people there that one might want to follow, and fosters community and conversation. A place like Threads absolutely does not do that. Mastodon is just an impenetrable mess from a UX perspective. The average user doesn’t care about federation and needs a solid and understandable entry point. Bluesky is federated but 90% of the people there have no idea what that means.

but trying to sidestep it completely like Mastodon is is just going to result in a network that never hits the critical mass necessary to start exponential growth

If keeping algo-gaming engagement bait off the platform is a price a platform has to pay, then I’m happily willing to accept that.

Its the absolute lack of algorithm

“It’s the absolute lack of a way to game the system with engagement bait and reward rage-posting”

Fixed that for you.

It’s not a matter for average users, it’s a matter for the people who farm engagement and post 300 times per day. Having a space that isn’t dominated by accounts like that is a good thing. It’s why Threads is such a miserable place. The algo there is aggressive and heavily rewards this kind of shit. Accounts like that provide no value and create toxic spaces full of rage and misinformation just to keep the waters churning and keep a constant flow of vapid “content”. It’s gross, and we are so much the better if we lose a ton of them.

Why should we have to?

There is literally no reason for sex segregation in sports

There’s nothing that I can point to definitively, but watching videos performances after Chester’s death, and seeing Shinoda speak about it all, I honestly got the vibe that he’s resentful that everyone focuses so much on Chester in a “this is actually my band, why can’t you just let him go” type of thing.

It seems ostensibly like it would be as easy as having an understanding enough of e.g. distilling, so that if you try to distill your own spirits, you know to discard the head and tail to avoid methanol poisoning. But this is so much more complex than that.

I think what it feels like is something akin to being trans and not having access to HRT, so you get hormones on the black market vs. trying to synthesize the hormones yourself from raw materials. I would support the former (though with a lot of research and making sure you’re getting reputable supplies), but think the latter incredibly fraught for a layperson.

I think the real answer isn’t DIY pharmaceuticals, but rather universal healthcare, informed consent, and a medical system (both physicians and pharmaceutical manufacturers) that puts patient care above any kind of profit motive

All the people here saying “well of course because they weren’t trained on AAVE”:

THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT

It’s the same reason facial recognition and voice recognition software have a difficult time with anyone who isn’t white or a speaker of perfect, uninflected standard english. The bias is created by the developers, conscious or not, because they only train it on what’s in their own bubble. If you don’t have diverse teams behind the development and training, you will create this bias, whether you want to or not. This is well known.

This is just post-hoc justification, coupled with “PC culture is censorship” type of bullshit.

although the word “gimp” can be used offensively in some cultures, that is not our intent

Intent is irrelevant. In this case, if you didn’t mean to offend, then you apologize and then change the fucking name. You don’t get to say “sorry you were offended, but I don’t care” and still expect people to take you seriously. Change “gimp” in that sentence to any other slur and try to make that same kind of justification.

I does not matter if the name was

• based on a Pulp Fiction character because the devs thought it was funny
• was a genuine reference to kink culture
• an abelist slur

Who tf thinks a piece of software should be named after any of that? It’s 1) offensive 2) wildly unprofessional and 3) a massive barrier to adoption.

The devs have the mentality of “edgy” 14 yo teen boys, have refused to ever grow the fuck up, and just throw tantrums whenever anyone tries to have a rational conversation with them about it

letthemfight.jpg

Even if their UI/UX weren’t an atrocity that belongs at The Hague, the cruelty of their devs actively pushes me away from having any desire to give them another shot

It’s price gouging, pure and simple. There’s no positive to it whatsoever

Yeah, it seems like wrt media outlets, “populism” just means whatever they want it to mean

NYT, hotdog costume: We’re all trying to find out who did this!

NYT has been pouring gasoline on this fire for years. Yeah, it’s great that someone there was able to publish something exposing the horrors of the Cass Report. But the NYT has no business pretending like they haven’t been a party to this. They have blood on their hands, and are a large part of why trans kids have been targeted by these fucking soulless ghouls

Anyone who holds up Kim Dotcom and/or Julian Assange as political prisoners or targets of wrongful prosecution and persecution is absolutely not someone who should be trusted for any kind of opinion

This also reminds me of something that people often do that I cannot stand, and that they don’t seem to understand why they shouldn’t: adding scanline effects to pixel art videos/animations that are going to be shown on a CRT

SA is just 4chan in a tuxedo. Both are cesspits.

The writing here is so strange.

“Canadian children nowadays have fewer cousins than previous generations,” said Rania Tfaily, an associate professor in sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa who studies social demography and contemporary changes in marriage and family formation.

Well yeah, because we already established that people are having fewer children in general. Fewer children = fewer relatives those children might have.

“However, what is striking nowadays is not just that the number of cousins is declining but also that an increasing number of children are growing up with no or very few cousins.”

This sentence is so ridiculously circular. “There’s fewer cousins, so more children have fewer cousins.” Yeah, no shit.

I stg the whole thing is so redundant and circular it feels like it’s AI generated.

But just to touch on the ostensible meat of this article: it sounds like an echo of panics about population decline overall. No, the world isn’t ending because people are having fewer children and smaller families.

Issues of socialization are not due to family size, they’re due to an extremely Individualistic and isolated society that has destroyed any sense of community, has destroyed nearly all third spaces, and made getting to know neighbors and being part of a community nearly impossible.

If you were a good parent that your child could trust, and you loved your child unconditionally and they knew that you accepted them for who they were no matter what, this wouldn’t be an issue

You seem to not understand the scale at which these things operate. We’re not talking about niche tools that only incels and creeps will use to jerk off to CP, we’re talking about tools that can be used to manipulate, spread mis- and disinformation, and imitate actual people doing things they wouldn’t normally do, and can do so at a scale that is exponentially greater than anything we’ve ever seen.

Go take a look at Facebook. Log out of YouTube and look at the front page. Try to do a Google search. Look at the absolute flood of AI generated shit. I know a lot of authors of short fiction, and the publications that they submit to that normally see a couple hundred to a couple thousands of submission per month have been flooded with hundreds of thousands of submissions per month, all AI garbage.

Now imagine it becomes so good that it’s indistinguishable from the real. Pics, vids, articles. The scale and speed at which people can create society-level harm and destroy lives is incomprehensible. This is not a “think of the children” thing. This is an inflection point where you will never know if the video you just saw of a political candidate calling for the extermination of X group is real or not. But the harms and consequences will be real. You will see revenge porn not just of nudes, but of videos of people seemingly doing horrific acts, and having their lives ruined because of it. And it will happen so fast and in such a flood that nothing will be able to stop it or counter it, because no one will see the truth buried in the inundation.

Again, we could do some of this now, but not at the unimaginable scale or speed that AI generation allows for.

This is not a good thing. And if this is the world you want, then there is no reasoning with you. You are truly lost.

Hang on. Are you actually saying that making fake porn of teenagers without their consent is a good thing because it teaches valuable skills?!