PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

Emphasis mine. Incompetence on Microsoft’s part is not an adequate explanation for this latest action matching a pattern of other actions designed to antagonize FOSS users.

Honest question: Why does it matter if he’s a transphobe when choosing which Fediverse software to use?

1. Because some people have actually financially supported him. I’m not trans, but I would be devastated to know that my money went to feed someone who wants to destroy me.
2. I already have trouble convincing transgender people in my social circle that Lemmy as a software is safe for them to use even with the variety of trans-inclusive servers like yours, and will be safe and inclusive in the future.

A great example of (2) is the fate of PolyMC. Thankfully, the other developers forked it into Prism, but transphobia put that whole project in jeopardy for a bit.

The software is FOSS and anyone can make their own instance.

IMO that’s why I’m not immediately dropping my account and running for the hills, but it’s still not good. Most people don’t have the technical skills or the interest in learning them to run their own instance.

I really want to understand what I might be missing.

IMO it’s that even though he does not personally control how Lemmy instances are run, and even though we do have a good degree of robustness to transphobia because the software is FOSS, it is still both morally and technically ill-advised to have a transphobe at the helm of an open-source software project.

o7

To those on the other side, they think we mean “Get rid of all police, zero funding, go away”

It was literally “abolish the police”, but the shitlibs watered it down to nothing as usual.

It can use ChatGPT I believe, or you could use a local GPT or several other LLM architectures.

GPTs are trained by “trying to fill in the next word”, or more simply could be described as a “spicy autocomplete”, whereas BERTs try to “fill in the blanks”. So it might be worth looking into other LLM architectures if you’re not in the market for an autocomplete.

Personally, I’m going to look into this. Also it would furnish a good excuse to learn about Docker and how SearXNG works.

LLMs are not necessarily evil. This project seems to be free and open source, and it allows you to run everything locally. Obviously this doesn’t solve everything (e.g., the environmental impact of training, systemic bias learned from datasets, usually the weights themselves are derived from questionably collected datasets), but it seems like it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Google using ai, everyone hates it

Because Google has a long history of doing the worst shit imaginable with technology immediately. Google (and other corporations) must be viewed with extra suspicion compared to any other group or individual because they are known to be the worst and most likely people to abuse technology.

Literally if Google does literally anything, it sucks by default and it’s going to take a lot more proof to convince me otherwise for a given Google product. Same goes for Meta, Apple, and any other corporations.

If that happens then I swear to fucking God I’m done with YouTube forever.

Edit: i.e. if it breaks FreeTube, Invidious, Sponsorblock, etc. (because I’m already done with the main site forever) then I’m out. If the choice is between content vs no ads, I’ll take no ads even if it means no content.

If Justin/anyone at Cockos is reading this: please open-source REAPER. You really would be doing the audio community a huge service.

Would be great for me and others who have trouble with body language. I could deepfake a version of myself with neurotypical body language and offload the effort of “acting normal” to the AI for interviews and video calls. Genuinely I’m super pumped for this.

Yeah my position is really to recommend any FOSS OS in the large over proprietary ones. However, since my experience is primarily with Linux distributions, and I do think that Linux makes sense for a lot of use cases, I usually start by talking about “Linux” first.

But, from my experience, if a “solution” to a problem “forces” the user to make a choice, then they’ll stick with what “currently works” over having to make a choice. So when I talk to people about Linux IRL, I typically direct them to Linux Mint directly, even though other distros exist and it actually doesn’t fit my use cases. Once they’re comfortable in the Linux ecosystem, they can switch to a different distro or OS family if they feel the need to do so.

Theoretically this exists: https://github.com/Nikilites/nuzu

Also, I managed to install the Flatpak of Yuzu off FlatHub about a half hour ago.

69 followed by 108 zeros

Nice

I want to help but I’m making zero money. Zero times any percentage is zero.

I like this, but I think that upvotes correspond to things people enjoy, which may or may not be of high quality. I.e., shitposting subs would probably be rated “high quality” when, like… it’s literally the point to post shitty content.

Also, as stated, that means we have to sum over the entire time history of the community. We would probably want to limit the time history of what is summed over, subject to a maximum for subs with high post counts (like the shitposting subs.

IMO it’s a great suggestion, but I think it needs to be part of a weighted combination of factors.

I absolutely think we can approximate it, and MAU furnishes a flawed example of such an approximation.

Okay but how do we quantitatively and unambiguously devise a metric for quality? More importantly, how do we come up with a satisfactory approximation to that metric? I’m open to ideas.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Threads, like Mastodon and the social media website formerly known as Twitter, are microblogging sites. While Mastodon users do show up here once in a while, I don’t get their posts unless they actively post in a Lemmy community.

So if your instance decides not to defederate from Threads, and you choose not to block Threads using Lemmy’s upcoming individual instance blocks, you might see their users occasionally comment on stuff. If I recall correctly, it’s pretty difficult for Mastodon users to post on Lemmy for technical reasons that will also apply to Threads.

I do think that quality of life in the wider Fediverse could dip once Threads users are allowed to participate and Threads content is allowed to spread. However, I think that the impact on Lemmy will be small. If it isn’t, we have defederation and soon individual instance blocking to help us filter out the crap.

Because the code for Fediverse sites is free and open source, I think that the Fediverse will exist for the foreseeable future. However, Meta could make it worse. If their past behavior is any indication, i.e. basically all of it, then that’s probably what they’re going to do eventually. At the end of the day, if Threads is too irritating, someone will start an instance of something that is defederated from them.

Personally, I’m not exactly thrilled by the prospect of Meta (or any corporation) joining the Fediverse (or any other aspect of public life), but I think we’ll be okay. I am concerned for people in marginalized groups who will have to deal with the toxic community that Threads has allowed to fester. However, there was a big stink about this a couple months ago where some big instances pre-emptively defederated from Threads. Now might be a good time to make an account on one of those instances.

Regardless of what happens, you will not be literally forced to go to Facebook or Threads. In the absolute worst case scenario, i.e. Meta takes over the Fediverse, you join or host an instance that doesn’t federate with anyone.

I’m an anxious person myself so I know this is hard to internalize: you’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.

I mean “ruined” is a bit strong, right? I’m no fan of Jimmy Wales but Wikipedia is still pretty good IMO for non-political stuff. It’s my first choice to look up math stuff so on that basis alone it gets my vote.

I use FreeTube as my “TV”. A++ app. Hope they get bookmarked playlists working soon.

Sounds like you picked the wrong distro!

I’ve put Linux on a few computers over summer. Actually, I put Debian on a few computers, but I tried a few different desktop environments. Debian internally works fine for my needs, and IMO it’s kinda a “low drama” OS. So on my 4-year-old laptop and 7-year-old gaming PC, I used KDE Plasma, and on my 15-year-old PC I used LXQT, which is considered lightweight, after trying a number of options. The laptop has NVidia graphics and the 15-year-old PC has some janky GeForce integrated graphics, so I have gotten stuff to work with NVidia. Debian in particular has a really straightforward guide on the wiki on how to install graphics drivers.

I use Librewolf (Firefox derivative) on most of my Linux PCs, but Firefox ESR (extended support release, bundled with Debian by default) performed fine on the two newer computers. It’s a bit sluggish on the older one, but fit for purpose.

I really think you should give it another try. Debian has live installs preconfigured with all the different desktop environments. That’s how I picked Debian with KDE Plasma: I tried it out for three days and I decided i needed to have it.

There are probably compelling reasons to go with a distro other than Debian, but IMO Debian works great for me almost 100% of the time for a few different use cases. It’s probably not the best OS for everyone, but I do think it’s “pretty good” for most people. It’ll get the job done.

But more importantly, there’s a Linux distro for every niche. There are lots of lightweight distros with old PCs in mind that are much faster than even old versions of Windows. If your computer somehow can’t deal with a desktop environment, a window manager like Fluxbox will work great.