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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I think the utility of blocking people on a public platform is kind of fake anyway. If someone is harassing you, and you block them, it’s obvious that you did it so they’ll just log out and suddenly they can see your posts again. Accounts are trivial to make on the fediverse too so they can always just spin up a new one to harass you.

    I think silent filtering is better for that reason because they can’t tell that you did it so they won’t just immediately switch to a new account and keep going.

    Active blocking like you’re talking about only makes sense if there’s such a thing as “follower-only” posts imo. Otherwise it’s a false sense of security because they can see everything anyway just by logging out or switching to another account.


  • Fediverse software tends to be kind of hostile to convenience features people have grown accustomed to. Recommendation algorithms, for example. Lemmy is on the cutting edge for having a “Hot” sort.

    I know Mastodon has historically been pretty hostile to even more basic things like being able to search posts.

    I get why they think like that, and I honestly agree with some of it, but it inevitably creates a culture shock for outsiders coming from corpo media. I think that plus the network effect means the fediverse will always be kind of niche.





  • Being able to sell FOSS is one of the freedoms “free software” refers to.

    Honestly though I think the thing that struck me the most and I found kind of scummy was their “value statement” where they were advertising the OS by comparing it to the prices of the proprietary software is includes alternatives to. You misreading the website wasn’t an accident, they designed it in a deceptive way IMO.

    If they were more honest about it, I wouldn’t have any problem with them charging for the convenience of having everything pre-bundled. Of course you could set everything up yourself, but Linux is notoriously finnicky. People want a complete experience, they want support. They want the slick branding.










  • It seems like multiple things are being conflated here and I’m not sure what the reality is because I’ve never used Plex.

    Some people claim this has something to do with Plex needing to pay for NAT traversal infrastructure. Okay, that seems sort of silly but at least there’s the excuse that their servers are involved in the streaming somehow.

    But their wording is very broad, just calling it “remote streaming.” That led me to this article on the Plex support website, which walks people through setting up port forwarding in order to enable “remote streaming”! So that excuse doesn’t really seem to hold water. What exactly is being paid for here then? How do they define what “local streaming” is?


  • As a Trek fan, I think the term “egg prime directive” itself is bad and causes miscommunication. The people who are pro-EPD seem to mostly argue the EPD is about not dictating to people what their gender is, while people who are anti-EPD say the EPD is about not mentioning the possibility that someone could be trans at all.

    Taking everyone at their word, it seems like people are interpreting the egg prime directive differently. If pro-EPD people really do think it’s okay to suggest/ask if someone has considered if they might be trans, and the only thing forbidden is explicitly dictating “you ARE trans”, I think the prime directive analogy is a bit misleading and might be part of the issue.

    The prime directive is very dogmatic at times and basically says that you can’t interact with prewarp civs period. Following the metaphor, it suggests that you aren’t allowed to talk about being trans at all with potential eggs until they crack their own egg first. Based on that, I can see where the OOP is getting their interpretation from.



  • LLMs are very good at giving what seems like the right answer for the context. Whatever “rationality” jailbreak you did on it is going to bias its answers just as much as any other prompt. If you put in a prompt that talks about the importance of rationality and not being personal, it’s only natural that it would then respond that a personal tone is harmful to the user—you basically told it to believe that.