prototype

2

Lemmy is, in general, very welcoming of newcomers. We are always happy to see one more person escape the hell hole that is reddit. We all hope you have an amazing time here! Though a lot of it depends on what home instance you are on, but feel free to hop around from instance to instance to find one that suits you, or maybe you already feel nice and cozy just where you are.

Completely random, unorganized and improvised tips and tricks and other miscellaneous information

Reminder to use the subscribe button to curate a nice Subscribed feed!

Subreddits here are called "communities".

Use ! to link to a community. Like so !linux@lemmy.ml.

Need help? Ask something on the adequate support communities, like !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml.

The All feed only shows posts from communities that at least one person from your own instance is subscribed to, so might make sense to look on other instances Local community lists to find a community you might not find on Lemmy's horrible search function.

You might know on Lemmy, multiple instances share content. This content sharing happens through a proccess called "federation". When two instances are sharing content, we say they are federated, when they stop sharing content, we say they are defederated (like lemmy.world and lemmygrad.ml).

You might be confused with all the @ everywhere in community names and user names. Let me explain:

Username are structured like so: Username @ instance link.

username@host.instance

And communities much the same way:

communityname@host.instance

If you do not see a @ in a community or username, it means they are on the same instance you are on right now!

There might be duplicate communities of the same topic on different instances, so if you like one, you might want to subscribe to all of them. (There are like... 3 meme communities for example: !memes@lemmy.ml, !memes@lemmy.world, !memes@sopuli.xyz )

Before posting in a community, make sure to read the rules of both the community and the instance it is hosted in.

It is worth noting, though, that due to recent political... events... politically related skirmishes have gotten somewhat more common. Also, as more people join Lemmy, some of them are bound to be morons so... reminder the block button exists if you are not interested in that. Most of the skirmishes are between liberals and Marxist-Leninist.

I hope my unorganized guide might of of some use to you! ( ^ ω ^ )

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 10mo ago

I've been quietly observing hexbear for a while now and I can tell you with relative certainty that people love to straw man them.

Here is an example:

People say they outright deny the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which is not true. They do believe 300 or so people died in that tragic day. What they do deny, though, is that Tank Man himself was run over by a tank and that people where indiscriminately shot and run over by tanks in the square. They believe the shootout occurred not because China is evil, but because some of the protestors decided it was a good idea to start killing unarmed soldiers.

I'm not going to describe in detail hexbear's timeline of events and evidence for it, because I myself do not fully understand it yet. But it seems this video somewhat explains it well.

People insist time and time again that hexbear users believe the massacre never happened to the point where they can't bother explaining themselves anymore because "what's the point if we are just going to get straw manned?"

People also like to call the massacre a "genocide", which is a massive overstatement. In comparison with the kill count of the holocaust, the death toll of the massacre is a rounding error. I would like to kindly ask people to stop calling it a genocide, as it detracts from the meaning and intensity of the word "genocide" when it is miss used like that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory

Any who, can't wait for people telling how wrong I am for supporting hexbear despite never once saying they were right.

People say they brigade other instances, but that's just because they are very active. In fact, there are one of the most active instances on Lemmy.

This is not to say hexbear users are angels, far from it. They are known to not mix well with other communities, and their site culture can put people off quite a bit, and understandably so. They all also known for their custom emojis, which is a really neat feature their instance has, but they do like to use an emoji depicting a pig defecating as a way of saying "you take is shit", which is rather unpleasant and quite rude of them.

These are just my thoughts on hexbear anyways. I must say I don't really hyper analyze any instance, so I could be somewhat wrong, but I don't really care too much.

NOTE: right now hexbear is using chapo.chat as their temporary fall back domain.

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

For those who downvoted without reading the link... This whole thing is satire.

The aim of this satirical campaign is to use humour to connect your personal needs for Earth’s resources with the evidence of just how much of these resources are now being claimed for the data centres running generative AI. And to make you smile.

https://savethe.ai/about/

3

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

And how did you contaminate someone else's feed? Genuinely curious.

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

It is a useful distraction from the surplus value extraction from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie.

The Bourgeoisie hire workers and pay them for their work. But with what money? The money made by selling a product or service. But who did the work to create said product or service? The workers did. So workers do work, which makes money for the company. But do the workers receive all of it? After all, they did all the work. But no, no they don't. If the Bourgeoisie gave all the money the workers to back to the workers, them how could the Bourgeoisie make a profit? It thereby must follow that the Bourgeoisie pay their workers less than the value they produce, thereby stealing that money from the workers.

You might say "but the bourgeoisie own the company! And they also do some work themselves! Some people's work just contributes more than others." Yeah, yeah, but who gets to decide how much of the pie each person gets? How much should be reinvested and what not? Who gets to decide what is done with the money made? The Bourgeoisie! But why them? Why do the workers not have a say in how the money they made is used? Because the Bourgeoisie had enough money to buy the means necessary to make money (the factories, infrastructure or whatever) and the workers did not. How did the Bourgeoisie get all that money you ask? By stealing worker's wages.

What does this have to do with trans people?

All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.

This whole anti-trans thing is a useful distraction. Bad people will believe it's those dam trans people's fault their country is shit and not investigate any further. Good people will be distracted arguing against the bad people on why being trans isn't evil, all the while the real culprits laugh as we fight each other.

Remember: Desperate people make great workers and distracted citizens. Keep people busy with basic necessities and they won't have time or energy to realize who is really exploiting them.

It makes trans folk more exploitable

Racism a misogyny is useful for the Bourgeoisie as it allows them to pay lower wages. The bourgeoisie want to pay their workers a little as possible. Desperate jobless people are more willing to take a bad deal because any job is better than homelessness. That means the more desperate people there are, the lower the wages they can pay, as they can replace workers who demand a higher wage with workers from this reserve.

Racism keeps people of color in poverty allowing them to be more easily exploited. Misogyny justifies paying women half the wage of a man, which is exactly what the Bourgeoisie want.

Likewise, if trans folk are illegalized that will make it hard for them to find a job, adding even more people to the reverse army of labour.

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

True... I suppose. Fortunately there are instances that have downvotes disabled. In the settings of your account you can also hide downvotes.

1

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

I prefer Slashdot style mod points to upvotes/downvotes as there is an opportunity cost to voting. I find it fosters more interesting and less echo-chambery discussions.

I got no clue what "Slashdot" is. Wikipedia says:

Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /.) is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments.

It doesn't really explain how the voting system works there. Mind to explain it?

1

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

No that's a horrible idea. It should be up to the Admins and Mods to decide what speech is allowed in their instances and communities. Making downvotes have a negative effect would only encourage bad actors to create accounts solely to downvote people, which will in turn create a black market of buying downvotes, to censor post you don't like, and upvotes, to up censor votes you like.

This agricultural industry around farming accounts to downvote would overwhelm the Admins with account applications. People could also create instances for se sole purpose of making downvoting bot accounts. You might say those instances could be blocked. True, they would. But this could go from bad to worse considering that this could open the door to instance Admins themselves doing downvote based censorship, since they can create has many accounts as they want.

Also, I fell like this is relevant:

The whole point of the Fediverse is since we all want different things from our social media and people will always disagree on something, it is better to have different independent instances, which federate and defederate to create a nice environment for all. People who disagree on something (like whether nsfw content or curse words should be allowed) so much to the point of ruining their experience, they can just go to instances where that content is blocked, instead of spending an eternity arguing over it. This allows for diversity of thought and opinion over the whole system.

I had no idea u/UniversalMonk@lemm.ee even existed lol. Congratulations u/SelfProgrammed@lemmy.today, you just advertised this guy's account to who knows how many people.

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

Well, it was only a matter of time till the bot got to me!

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

Funny you put quotes on the word liberal. You know words have meanings and definitions right? I know many people don't bother to check a term's meaning and end up miss using it, but that does not detract from the fact that the word still has meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Note that liberalism defends the right to private property (AKA Capitalism). (Also, private property and personal property are two different things.)

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

On authority, by Frederick Engels 1872

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

2

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

Interested in astronomy you say? Well mander.xyz describe themselves as a "An instance dedicated to nature and science.". They have a astronomy community with, some activity - !astronomy@mander.xyz. I'm not on mander so I don't know how things are there, but I pretty much don't ever see anyone complaining about it.

feddit.uk is a UK instance. So there might be some interesting things there for you.

lemmy.ee is known for not defederating unless absolutely necessary.

On the topic of defederating, lemmy.world is somewhat disliked due to their defederation happy tendencies. For the most part, though, this whole instance wars thing is mostly due to disagreements on what kind of political discourse should be allowed. Instances like lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net and lemmy.ml are a bit too left-wing for many people from the center-right to handle: the world views are just too different.

I could rant about the dam instance wars, but it is not what you came were for.

3

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

wtf did I just read?

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

AIs don't summarize, they just shorten text.

1

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

AI art being inherently “plagiarising”

Yes it is, simply due to the nature of the "training"/"learning" process, which is learning in name alone. If you know how this mathematical process works you know the machine's definition of success is how well it's output matches the data it was trained with. The machine is effectively trying to encrypt it's data base on it's nodes. I would recommend you inform yourself on how the "training" process actually works, down to the mathematical level.

AI using as much energy’s crypto , the AI = crypto mindset in general

AI is often push by the same people who pushed NFTs and whatnot, so this is somewhat understandable. And yes, AI consumes a lot of energy and water. Maybe not as much as crypto, but still, not something we can afford to use for mindless entertainment in our current climate catastrophe.

AI art “having no soul”

Yup. AI "art" works by finding pixel patterns that repeat with a given token. Due to it's nature, it can only repeat patterns which it identified in it's training data. Now, we have all heard of the saying "An image in worth a thousand words". This saying is quite the understatement. For one to describe an image down to the last detail, such detail that someone who never saw the image could perfectly replicate it, one how need more than a thousand words, as evidenced by computer image files, since these are basically what was just described. The training data never has enough detail to describe the whole image in such detail and therefore it is incapable of doing anything too specific.

Art is very personal, the more of yourself you put into a piece, the more unique and "soulful" it will be. The more of the work you delegate to the machine, the less of yourself you can put into the piece, and if 100% of the image generation was made by the machine, which is in turn simply calculating an average image that matches the prompt, then nothing of you is in the piece. It is nothing more than the maths that created it.

Simple text descriptions do not give the human meaningful control over the final piece, and that is why pretty much any artist worth their tittle is not using it.

Also, the irony that we are automating the arts, something which people enjoy doing, instead of the soul degrading jobs nobody wants to do, should not be lost on us.

“Peops use AI to do «BAD THING» , therefour AI ISZ THE DEVILLLL ‼‼‼”

It is true that AI is being used in horrible was that will take sometime to adapt, it is simply that the negative usages of AI have more visibility than the positive usages. As a matter of fact, this node network technology was already in use in many fields before the Chat-GPT induced AI hype train.

can’t trust anti AI peops to actually criticise the tech

Correct. It is well known that those who stem to financially benefit from the success of AI are more than willing to lie about it's true capabilities.

1

prototype_g2 @lemmy.ml 11mo ago

veeeeery powerful tool for self-education

You know these are pattern recognition machines, right? And not an actually reliable source of information, right? These are hallucination machine which sometimes gets right simply by virtue of such truthful statements being repeated often enough in the data for the machine to pick it up. It can give contradicting answers depending on what keywords you use. As such it is of little education value.

If anything, it makes self-education harder, as search results will be filled with perfectly SEOed LLM article with no quality standards and complete disregard for the truthfulness of the text written, poisoning the well of knowledge the internet was supposed to be. And as a bit of irony, these poor quality pattern-based texts will later be used in future machine learning databases, thus lowering the quality of said data, causing the machine's own decay.