So this sent me down a rabbit hole and it turns out they're basically not available in the UK full stop as a fresh fruit, even via the European importer I found thanks to Brexit. I can import it dried, or otherwise I have to make a long weekend of it in France to try it!
It was more that the owners had a very different idea of the site to what most people wanted to use it for, they wanted to create something akin to Wikipedia of code while most people wanted their programming questions answered. I definitely think a lot of the community had an attitude problem, but the wider problem is more that the users and owners were talking about totally different sites for the most part.
I don’t think their ideal was ever realistic to be honest, the main problem I had with SO was less the reflexive rudeness and power-tripping and more that the community seemed a bit delusional about the basic passage of time and the evolution of industry practice. You’d often see a comically obsolete answer as the canonically accepted one, and if you had a question about something even tangentially related to that canonical answer some smarmy little goblin would come along to close it as a duplicate. It wasn’t very good at what it purported to be, much less what most users thought it was for.
Yeah age of sail lookouts had incredible eyesight, they had to since every minute you lost determining friend or foe was a minute you’d delay beating to quarters and running out your guns.
Anneka refused to accept this “community resolution disposal”, which would have remained on her police record, and, after she engaged a lawyer, the case has now been dropped.
I really don’t like the practice of ‘let’s bully someone beyond the bounds of the law, and only back off if they call our bluff and get a lawyer involved’. They’re more or less relying on the fact most people don’t know their rights and are loathe to involve solicitors even when engaging one is completely called for.
Remember that the fossil fuel industry knew what was going to happen in the 1970s and lied to governments around the world to ensure our future of maximal fossil fuel burning and damn the consequences came to pass.
We have words for people who betray their country, we have words for people who betray their family, we even have words for people who betray the firm they work for every day, but we have no words for people who betray their entire species.
Not played those games but to be fair in a nuclear wasteland you would expect fresh meat and vegetables to be more radioactive than the general environment. Animals and plants can accumulate radioactive fallout, if it’s diffuse in the soil it can be more concentrated in whatever lives off that soil. Radioactive contamination often consists of caesium-137 which behaves like potassium, and strontium-90 which behaves like calcium, so you’re getting screwed by conventional biochemistry as much as nuclear physics.
This is a concern in the Chernobyl exclusion zone even now, there’s mushrooms and other forage that must be avoided for this reason.
I don’t know, I could see them bleeding Tory defectors for every Restore voter they gain. I think Reform’s electoral triangulation is a harder problem than it looks for them, especially as Badenoch’s profile has risen somewhat lately (albeit from a position not much higher up than Malebolge).
I don’t think this would be a good move for Farage, he’s always made hay from being the furthest right ‘respectable’ voters will go for. I don’t like the man at all but one of his talents as a political operator is toeing that line uncommonly well, you can see this historically with UKIP; as soon as Farage was gone the party shifted to the football hooligan and ethnic cleansing (ah sorry, remigration it’s called now) crowd and were punished severely for it at the ballot box.
Farage is on a lee shore but getting into bed with Rupert Lowe’s party will only drive him onto the rocks faster in my view. There’s a hard ceiling in the UK of people who’ll support the kind of policies Lowe advocates and its lower than numbers Farage needs for a majority of the Commons. If Burnham has a brain he’ll push hard for electoral reform, I’m cynical enough to believe parties who benefit from the unfairness of FPTP will have a change of heart when it’s no longer a structural benefit to the old duopoly. His only route to power now I think is a corruption scandal coming out which dwarfs his own, I reckon he might be a busted flush in general whether he forms an alliance or not. Then again he has had a habit of coming back from things usually considered terminal to political careers.
To be honest it was only ever a proof of concept, I ran it for a week or so and left it a sqlite database on my laptop. If you wanted to make a statistical case for manipulation you’d want to gather a more substantial dataset together, and you’d also want to label the data using NLP techniques.
Yeah I fully expect not to receive a state pension in the UK, the Ponzi-like economics of it just don’t work for an aging population with a falling birth rate.
The problem is that the government which brings in sustainability measures around this will be electorally annihilated for a generation at least, so the can keeps getting kicked down the road and the likelihood of events forcing a change rather than an orderly change in plenty of time increases.
LLM slop might be cheap to produce at scale, but why would you bother doing that to influence the 13.3k active users per month on this instance (which is one of the larger ones) when reddit, insta, facebook etc exist? Also Lemmy’s recommendation algorithm doesn’t amplify the spam to potentially millions even if they were here, so it’s not a particularly productive place to be spamming.
Also reddit probably isn’t deliberately keeping Lemmy down, we’re a small decentralised community of people motivated for whatever reason to go down a route other than the default approach. That kind of temperament is necessary for some portion of society to have, but it’s also prone to creating splitting and drama. Lemmy’s problems I feel are largely of its own making, but it’s way better than it was and personally I think there’s quite a high ceiling on slow, sustainable growth. Reddit are even kind enough to drip-feed a stream of new users to us through their clown show approach to running the place.
I remember the personal hate Ellen Pao got back in the day, in hindsight a classic Silicon Valley example of a scapegoat for unpopular decisions senior management were already committed to making. The gendered nature of this was particularly egregious with reddit being well… reddit. Reddit was an ‘old internet’ site trying to pivot into ‘social media’ without massively alienating the older group, they had to make it advertiser-friendly so Pao was set up to make those changes with Spez taking over to put things ‘back on track’ later on, when in reality he was as keen to make reddit into what it is now as any. Why people are still surprised by this I don’t know since reddit was a Y Combinator darling: it’s a business not a commons, and in my view there’s an element of responsibility on the users for not recognising this despite the company’s rhetoric.
Something like reddit is structurally incapable of being the marketplace of ideas it was ostensibly claimed to be. As always the purpose of a system is what it does, any venture capital backed firm ideally goes bust quickly or makes astonishing returns for its investors. Consider the material reality: we already had a marketplace of ideas in the form of decentralised forums, Usenet, IRC, and other protocol-based systems which act much more like a public commons than an enclosed, private estate. Reddit (and things like Discord) are in many ways the modern version of enclosing the commons, and in my opinion so is much recent development of IP legislation.
I’d flatter Lemmy and the fediverse by saying it represents the opposite instinct, to defend the commons rather than enclose it.
Lemmy was a ghost town last time I visited, it’s actually viable to leave reddit now because discussions are reasonably active. Also you’re way less likely to be talking to an LLM which is nice.
So this sent me down a rabbit hole and it turns out they're basically not available in the UK full stop as a fresh fruit, even via the European importer I found thanks to Brexit. I can import it dried, or otherwise I have to make a long weekend of it in France to try it!
Fortunately for the North, the persistent cloud cover ought to keep the thousand suns at bay.
Reddit is a cesspool but unfortunately so is the wider media ecosystem for the most part.
Fulfilling the rule that all English sayings are either Shakespeare or the KJV.
It was more that the owners had a very different idea of the site to what most people wanted to use it for, they wanted to create something akin to Wikipedia of code while most people wanted their programming questions answered. I definitely think a lot of the community had an attitude problem, but the wider problem is more that the users and owners were talking about totally different sites for the most part.
I don’t think their ideal was ever realistic to be honest, the main problem I had with SO was less the reflexive rudeness and power-tripping and more that the community seemed a bit delusional about the basic passage of time and the evolution of industry practice. You’d often see a comically obsolete answer as the canonically accepted one, and if you had a question about something even tangentially related to that canonical answer some smarmy little goblin would come along to close it as a duplicate. It wasn’t very good at what it purported to be, much less what most users thought it was for.
Yeah age of sail lookouts had incredible eyesight, they had to since every minute you lost determining friend or foe was a minute you’d delay beating to quarters and running out your guns.
I really don’t like the practice of ‘let’s bully someone beyond the bounds of the law, and only back off if they call our bluff and get a lawyer involved’. They’re more or less relying on the fact most people don’t know their rights and are loathe to involve solicitors even when engaging one is completely called for.
Remember that the fossil fuel industry knew what was going to happen in the 1970s and lied to governments around the world to ensure our future of maximal fossil fuel burning and damn the consequences came to pass.
We have words for people who betray their country, we have words for people who betray their family, we even have words for people who betray the firm they work for every day, but we have no words for people who betray their entire species.
Not played those games but to be fair in a nuclear wasteland you would expect fresh meat and vegetables to be more radioactive than the general environment. Animals and plants can accumulate radioactive fallout, if it’s diffuse in the soil it can be more concentrated in whatever lives off that soil. Radioactive contamination often consists of caesium-137 which behaves like potassium, and strontium-90 which behaves like calcium, so you’re getting screwed by conventional biochemistry as much as nuclear physics.
This is a concern in the Chernobyl exclusion zone even now, there’s mushrooms and other forage that must be avoided for this reason.
Dylan has more good advice here, when it comes to bubbles you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!
I’m usually a rationalist but nothing can convince me that Sod’s Law isn’t somehow baked into the structure of the universe.
I don’t know, I could see them bleeding Tory defectors for every Restore voter they gain. I think Reform’s electoral triangulation is a harder problem than it looks for them, especially as Badenoch’s profile has risen somewhat lately (albeit from a position not much higher up than Malebolge).
I don’t think this would be a good move for Farage, he’s always made hay from being the furthest right ‘respectable’ voters will go for. I don’t like the man at all but one of his talents as a political operator is toeing that line uncommonly well, you can see this historically with UKIP; as soon as Farage was gone the party shifted to the football hooligan and ethnic cleansing (ah sorry, remigration it’s called now) crowd and were punished severely for it at the ballot box.
Farage is on a lee shore but getting into bed with Rupert Lowe’s party will only drive him onto the rocks faster in my view. There’s a hard ceiling in the UK of people who’ll support the kind of policies Lowe advocates and its lower than numbers Farage needs for a majority of the Commons. If Burnham has a brain he’ll push hard for electoral reform, I’m cynical enough to believe parties who benefit from the unfairness of FPTP will have a change of heart when it’s no longer a structural benefit to the old duopoly. His only route to power now I think is a corruption scandal coming out which dwarfs his own, I reckon he might be a busted flush in general whether he forms an alliance or not. Then again he has had a habit of coming back from things usually considered terminal to political careers.
To be honest it was only ever a proof of concept, I ran it for a week or so and left it a sqlite database on my laptop. If you wanted to make a statistical case for manipulation you’d want to gather a more substantial dataset together, and you’d also want to label the data using NLP techniques.
Yeah I fully expect not to receive a state pension in the UK, the Ponzi-like economics of it just don’t work for an aging population with a falling birth rate.
The problem is that the government which brings in sustainability measures around this will be electorally annihilated for a generation at least, so the can keeps getting kicked down the road and the likelihood of events forcing a change rather than an orderly change in plenty of time increases.
LLM slop might be cheap to produce at scale, but why would you bother doing that to influence the 13.3k active users per month on this instance (which is one of the larger ones) when reddit, insta, facebook etc exist? Also Lemmy’s recommendation algorithm doesn’t amplify the spam to potentially millions even if they were here, so it’s not a particularly productive place to be spamming.
Also reddit probably isn’t deliberately keeping Lemmy down, we’re a small decentralised community of people motivated for whatever reason to go down a route other than the default approach. That kind of temperament is necessary for some portion of society to have, but it’s also prone to creating splitting and drama. Lemmy’s problems I feel are largely of its own making, but it’s way better than it was and personally I think there’s quite a high ceiling on slow, sustainable growth. Reddit are even kind enough to drip-feed a stream of new users to us through their clown show approach to running the place.
That’s interesting, Wales was fairly prolific around the world on that front. Donetsk in Ukraine was founded by a Welshman for example.
I remember the personal hate Ellen Pao got back in the day, in hindsight a classic Silicon Valley example of a scapegoat for unpopular decisions senior management were already committed to making. The gendered nature of this was particularly egregious with reddit being well… reddit. Reddit was an ‘old internet’ site trying to pivot into ‘social media’ without massively alienating the older group, they had to make it advertiser-friendly so Pao was set up to make those changes with Spez taking over to put things ‘back on track’ later on, when in reality he was as keen to make reddit into what it is now as any. Why people are still surprised by this I don’t know since reddit was a Y Combinator darling: it’s a business not a commons, and in my view there’s an element of responsibility on the users for not recognising this despite the company’s rhetoric.
Something like reddit is structurally incapable of being the marketplace of ideas it was ostensibly claimed to be. As always the purpose of a system is what it does, any venture capital backed firm ideally goes bust quickly or makes astonishing returns for its investors. Consider the material reality: we already had a marketplace of ideas in the form of decentralised forums, Usenet, IRC, and other protocol-based systems which act much more like a public commons than an enclosed, private estate. Reddit (and things like Discord) are in many ways the modern version of enclosing the commons, and in my opinion so is much recent development of IP legislation.
I’d flatter Lemmy and the fediverse by saying it represents the opposite instinct, to defend the commons rather than enclose it.
Lemmy was a ghost town last time I visited, it’s actually viable to leave reddit now because discussions are reasonably active. Also you’re way less likely to be talking to an LLM which is nice.