Unfortunately someone just tried to use my bank account the other day, so I'm waiting for a new card to come in, but I got this bookmarked for when I do. I think it's worth the cost of a cup of coffee every now and then.
Honestly dude start a Patreon or something even if you only do it for temporary. I would chip in $5/month for a while to pay for server costs if it means getting a stable site and a viable alternative to Reddit.
It's also useful because it allows monthly flow, which is way more useful for planning than just a lump sum and ??? on what you'll get in a few months.
Agreed, brah. I just donated, and would gladly donate via recurring methods if implemented. Also, what Kaldo said earlier...don't develop this by yourself, you're gonna burn out faster than you think.
Arrival presents some good philosophical questions, and does so in an interesting setting. The top questions are:
How does language affect our perception?
If you knew your fate, would you still do things the same way?
As such it's qualitatively a good Sci-Fi film. Should it be ranked as one of the best? I don't know, and honestly I don't care, because such rankings are always subjective.
Philip K. Dick is famous for saying 'reality is that in which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.' Languages, perceptions, are still materially beliefs and changing beliefs doesn't change reality. I wanted to see HOW the language allowed you to perceive time and it never got there.
I wanted to see HOW the language allowed you to perceive time and it never got there.
Interestingly enough the short story on which Arrival is based on, Story of Your Life, goes a bit into this. I'm not going to spoil it because it's super cool.
I don't think some pseudo science jargon about tachyons in her delta waves would have enhanced the story. The how isn't important, what matters is the way it changes her life and how she deals with it. It's an exploration of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis but given more of an emotional tinge. I also loved the design of the aliens and the way they living outside linear time affected their culture and personalities.
I don't think some pseudo science jargon about tachyons in her delta waves would have enhanced the story.
Its not. It doesnt try to give a hard science explanation, it gives an explanation of perspective that offers actual insight. Ted Chiang doesn't write hard science fiction, but it's very well thought out science fiction, imo.
It's not about perception changing reality it's the other way around. The movie is a meditation on the Sapir Worf hypothesis, that the structure of language literary changes how you perceive the world.
So, I think if there's an issue with Arrival, it's the whiplash of using a hard[ish] sci-fi structure to address the first question, then zoom straight into the second. We're given a pretty solid, small story about how we might plausibly handle first contact, and specifically the linguistic aspect of it, but the truth that comes out of it is that it was language itself which is the key to transcending space and time, and all so we can ruminate on the philosophical equivalent of "Should we love our pets when we know they live shorter, smaller lives than us?"
It's quite the flex for the movie we were watching, and feels a little unearned. There was definitely a little bit of "I'm stoned and this is deep". As a dog owner, I at least appreciate that the answer was "yes," LOL.
I do still think it's good and it was very well done. Many movies wouldn't even be worth this discussion.
Newzasa is not a news site. It is (probably illegally) reposting content from a two-bit conservative blog called Conservative Brief. Nothing it publishes should be viewed by anyone.
My unpopular opinion is that I don't like space operas. I'd rather read pages of explanation of technology and world building. I don't care that the star princess in exile has to assemble a rag tag bunch of fringe worlders to take back the throne from the cruel council of the galactic core. How dat engine work tho?
Seriously most of these stories might as well be written by AI for how original they are. I am trying to read scifi and fantasy for the originality that just doesn't exist. Authors will even accidentally add great ideas to the books on background characters or in random world details and do absolutely nothing with them. They instead will repeat the most generic trope driven story every. They might aswell be plagiarizing for how little their stories add to the genre at least then I could just throw their book away without trying to read it.
Yeah, I initially thought it was a kinda silly premise of a guy being hit by a bus and turned into an ai to explore the universe, but Dennis Taylor really hit it out of the park.
Popular-unpopular opinion - Space opera hits a lot of tropes that have been constanly re-told since ancient Babylonia and Greece, and people like when a story hits familiar beats.
Unpopular-unpopular opinion - Worldbuilding is important for the story to be grounded and coherent, but if there is no story to be told atop of it you end up with a catalogue of author's personal anthropological and technological obsessions.
Left-leaning justices have long argued that the criminal justice system should primarily try to determine whether a criminal defendant has actually committed a crime — and that there should be adequate safeguards to ensure that someone who is wrongfully convicted can challenge that conviction.
Meanwhile, justices on the Court’s rightward fringe have long argued that the primary purpose of the criminal justice system is to reach final judgments concerning an individual’s guilt. Under this view, this need for finality can even overcome a claim that a prisoner is innocent.
I really can't emphasize this enough: fuck the right.
I think this might be a truly unpopular opinion, but I could not get into the expanse at all. Just never got invested in the characters enough to stick with it. I've retried watching it 4 times due to everyone recommending it, kind of given up now!
Also the latest star wars films killed any interest I had in star wars.
The books are great. Show does a good job moving the intrigue and conflicts to a screen but man if Avasarala and Amos aren’t the absolute best portrayal of those characters.
Avasarala has a heart of gold and a fist of iron in equal measures.
This means she’ll do horrible things (even at her own expense) for what she believes is right and she doesn’t put up with any kind of nonsense.
And yet she plays the political game so well all while pretending she’s above it.
And the Shohreh Aghdashloo knocks the character out of the park. Every move and word both foul and sweet personifies the character in the book that it’s impossible to convey how absolutely masterful the performance is.
And Wes Chatham as Amos is a close second. A man whose moral code is simple because he’s broken, knows it, and so he defaults to “who is the most likely good person I can use as a guide.” Chatham portrays the violence is necessary like doing the laundry.
Turns it on, does the job, goes back as if nothing happened. Oh, I should do this instead? You got it boss.
Or how he conveys in the simple things how Amos feels there is a moral right but having grown up as he did it’s hard to know what that is and who has the authority to enforce it it just chefs kiss
What? Stop beating this guy? Ok. Sorry fella, buy you a drink?
And the Shohreh Aghdashloo knocks the character out of the park. Every move and word both foul and sweet personifies the character in the book that it’s impossible to convey how absolutely masterful the performance is.
I loved every moment she was on screen, totally captivating. Great costume design, script writing and acting all together.
All I can do is apologise, I really tried, so I'm going to chalk it up to a me problem. Desperate for a good Sci fi series as well, that's the most annoying part!
I dunno that I'd rank it worse than GoT myself but I did really hate that ending.
Honestly between Lost, BSG, and GoT I'm kinda burned on endings generally. I can't really think of a show that isn't a super short limited series that I'm like, that ending was great!
It's so tricky isn't it, so I watched bsg and lost way past their initial airing and the hype and I found I didn't love either of the endings but I didn't mind them either. And overall I still loved the series and the characters.
I think in terms of long series endings maybe breaking bad?
Yeah, part of the problem for fans was that part of the slogan for BSG was "...and they have a plan". So when it became clear that no one had a "plan" for the plot arc, including the showrunners ...it was quite a disappointment.
I honestly never watched the last season of the show, because I liked the book ending so much, and I knew the show was going in a different direction. But I haven't heard bad things about it like for these other shows, so I assume they did a good job?
Honestly bsg's ending wasn't amazing, it didn't end anywhere near as strongly as it started. But I didn't hate it and I was invested enough in the characters that I wanted to see what happened to them all. I also found the overall series, world building, characters etc. far out weighed the ending itself for me.
I often find endings to series, like got, are lacklustre. Finding a beautifully crafted series from beginning to end is so rare.
I guess that depends a lot on your perspective on narrative and the world in general
[SPOILERS], I guess, I don't see a content warning tool in this editor, but someone let me know if I'm missing something and I'll edit this.
I happen to be an atheist. Non-beligerent, definitely not an "internet atheist" type, but I just don't believe in a supreme power, so it's always jarring when a narrative thing ends on a note where they assume that of course in this years-long debate between mysticism and reason the figure matching the Christian deity is the right answer.
It's not even annoyance at there being religious people or anything like that. It's just in my world when somebody raises "well, it could be God intervening in our lives", that is obviously the wrong answer unless you're in a show where Christian mythos is explicitly established as a fantasy trope (say, Supernatural or Buffy or whatever). If you just spring that stuff on me in the finale you're already losing me, even before you use it as a plot device to deus ex machina all the garbage and loose ends you couldn't figure out during the show's run.
So yeah, I'll take "we'll make the omniscient hemiplegic kid kid and the cool dragon lady a nazi because the outline says so and we have better stuff to do than wrap this up" over "God hates robots and that's why all this happened, I dunno".
I am an atheist as well and I liked the ending. It isn’t supernatural, it just matches old cylon legends.
I’m currently rewatching and what actually bothers me is how the tomb of Athena works and all the plot holes and poor episodes. For example there is an episode where is a lack of metal just after they disable hundreds of cylon raiders. Also, the heavy raider taken back from Caprica is never used again.
Wait, how is it not supernatural? The show literally ends on a debate between two supernatural beings about whether the do-over current-Earth version will avoid repeating the cycle when their technology gets advanced enough. There is zero question that they're supernatural. The text says it outright. And it's not a hallucination or a fakeout or a technological artifact, we get an omniscient POV showing us this, it's not filtered by the views of a character.
Hey, I also wanted it not to suck, but the text is what it is.
@MudMan The thing that really pissed me off about the ending was that by throwing away their tech, history, and basically all knowledge they ensured that all the hard-earned lessons of their history and the course of the series were lost.
"All this has happened before and all of it will happen again"? Well, congrats, dumbasses, you just guaranteed that it will and the cycle will continue by ensuring that humanity won't have any opportunity at all to learn anything from all the shit it's just been through.
(The only way I can rewatch it is to pretend it ended just before Lee "Fuck Your Descendants" Adama breaks the future.)
But also, no, there is no guarantee that it will all happen again. Why would it happen again? Beyond the entire thing being the whim of a heartless omnipotent deity there is no reason why a whole sentient technoorganic species going full paleo would then rebuild themselves into two factions of mostly organic and mostly artificial lifeforms and trigger a galactic war.
That's extremely specific. They could also all die fromt he plague because they never stumble upon antibiotics instead. Unless more angels come to tell them to lick the heal fungus, of course, which is now a thing that could absolutely happen.
You really think I'd be over it at this point, and yet...
But also, no, there is no guarantee that it will all happen again. Why would it happen again? Beyond the entire thing being the whim of a heartless omnipotent deity there is no reason why a whole sentient technoorganic species going full paleo would then rebuild themselves into two factions of mostly organic and mostly artificial lifeforms and trigger a galactic war.
That's extremely specific. They could also all die fromt he plague because they never stumble upon antibiotics instead. Unless more angels come to tell them to lick the heal fungus, of course, which is now a thing that could absolutely happen.
You really think I'd be over it at this point, and yet...
If you are least made it past s1e4 CQB then you gave it a solid shot. That episode imo is where you either pick it up and like it or move on. The first 3 episodes can be a bit slow and introduce so many characters.
I heard this, and so I think I get to episode 4 or 5 drop it and then I leave it too long, try and watch it all again but I've seen the first 4 episodes too many times.
Don’t feel guilty but as an example I love the BSG remake. But when I introduce somebody to it I suggest they watch 33 if they can’t get through the mini series.
Yes it presumes a lot but it gets you into what’s going on without hours of setup in the mininseries.
No sure about outside the UK, but in the uk the full battlestar series including miniseries is on bbc I player. Worth taking a look to see if you can access!
Usually it’s included alongside the bluray editions. I’m not sure if it’s included on Peacock (the only streaming platform that has BSG). Also, it’s not really “miniseries”. It’s more like an extended episode zero that sets up all the characters going into main series. Honestly, IMO, it’s critical for maximum enjoyment of the early series.
I wrote up a watch guide for the series over on /m/bsg:
With out the “miniseries” you go in without any context as to what’s happened to humanity, no? Like, doesn’t the miniseries set up Roslin as president and explain her cancer? Without details like that I would just be confused going into “33”.
Absolutely. So I suggest the mini series first. But if they came back with “it was so slow… I couldn’t get through it” then I suggest 33 as a “taste” of things to come.
I'd heard it was a bit hard going until episode 5 so I always try and get to that point but I don't think I've got past. At this point I've rewatched the first episodes too many times
That means you've missed out on Andor, which I think is better than any live action Star Wars (including, perhaps controversially, Empire Strikes Back)!
It's mature, deep, detailed, grounded, and very political. The characters and world are built up phenomenally, and it's much more contemplative in its pacing, and it definitely treats its audience as intelligent rather than beating them around the head with obvious exposition. It feels more like an HBO show than your standard Star Wars affair, frankly. And it works as a standalone, too - it's not just yet more Skywalker family drama.
Oh my sibling in Xenu, Andor is mandatory viewing if you have any love for Star Wars at all, but ESPECIALLY if you love Rogue One. It is absolutely incredible.
I've always loved anything Star Wars that didn't really involve Jedi. The universe is incredibly diverse and interesting, and cutting out the light side vs dark side trope most star wars content is centered on lets writers make really interesting characters and situations. Like in Mandandolrian the scene with Bill Burr confronting the Imperial officer that spearheaded the Burning Khan massacre was just fantastic, regardless of it being star wars.
Like in Mandandolrian the scene with Bill Burr confronting the Imperial officer that spearheaded the Burning Khan massacre was just fantastic, regardless of it being star wars.
Bill Burr crushed that entire episode. He showed acting chops he's rarely had the chance to flex before, honestly. The guy is so self-deprecating in his humor, almost aggressively so, that it's easy to miss his talent. Heck, I did, and for a damned long time.
You know how OP said 2001 was pretentious nonsense? That's how I felt about Andor. It was actively bad, and I struggle to see all the praise it gets as anything other than Morbius level trolling! It was badly written, badly plotted, was trying to be about three things at once and didn't do any of them well, and was about six episodes too long. It's what really turned me off Starwars!
I'm not trolling. I honestly thought it was utterly awful on pretty much every level people seem to praise it for and cannot understand why anyone liked it! The first three episodes should have been one, the next three should have been two (and I would have started with them and had the first arc as a flashback), iirc literally nothing happened in the 7th episode except for the last two minuites when he was arrested for arbitrary and stupid reasons, then next two episodes were just messy, and then I gave up because I had been told "oh it all comes together at this point" too many times and it was just making me angry.
I mean okay accusing it of being Morbius levels of bad might have been a troll, it wasn't as bad as Morbius (but few things are) but it was nowhere near good, let alone deserving of the praise lauded upon it!
You're valid. It took us a couple tries before we really got into The Expanse.
As for Star Wars, we stick with the Dave Filoni shows now. If I may suggest, try a Clone Wars rewatch with a viewing order that emphasizes the story arcs. That's what brought me back to Star Wars, and I hated the sequels and the prequels.
Thank you, I appreciate the star wars watching suggestions! I'm more of a trekkie but there are elements of star wars I love, they just became less and less with the latest films!
Unpopular? Yes. Wrong? I don't think so. I finished The Expanse and at the end I didn't feel like it added anything to my life but I didn't hate it either. There was definitely some standout moments but I would not rewatch it.
Interesting! I've only ever heard people sing it's praises, so I've definitely felt in the wrong for not loving it. Someone else suggested the books so I might try reading them instead of going for the 6th rewatch
I would say that while the show does a fantastic job of bringing the books to the screen, it misses the interpersonal intimacy that makes the book series so fantastic. The plots are cool, but at its core, The Expanse is really about its characters. If you like to read or listen to audio books, I HIGHLY recommend them. A big part of where the show fails, is it was impossible for them to tell the story and also deal with the internal dialogues of each character. In the books, every chapter is told from the point of view of a specific character, so you get to know their inner thoughts and feelings on an extremely personal level.
This is one of those series where I will tell someone that if they read the books and enjoyed them, they would enjoy the show - and vice-versa. That said, if you didn’t enjoy the show for the reasons you stated, and you’re willing to give it a go, I think you’ll probably enjoy the books.
jesus christ, we really got elected officials acting like the goddamn Prom committee choosing a theme. This isn't a congress, this is high school in the Valley.
Haha, holy shit, that is the perfect description. I think you’re shooting too high by putting this in the Valley though. As a midwesterner, this is some small town, small school, Queen Bee-at-the-apex-of-her-existence shit.
It’s not gonna be long before someone busts out some Boone’s Farm at one of these meetings, 2A Barbie and Madge have a few too many, and suddenly we’re in the middle of a donnybrook.
Reddit has no idea how lucky it is as a platform. I've met and interacted with and learned from some of the most intellectual down to earth people on Reddit. It's a real shame. Hopefully those users will find other platforms and get away from the parasite that Reddit is becoming. And they want to go public? Need a new CEO.
Meta is a capitalist social media company and they seem to be doing okay. Facebook might be uncool with the kids these days but it's still massive. And Instagram and WhatsApp are still very popular.
I think the difference between Meta and Reddit is that I bet Meta would issue some sort of apology and carefully crafted PR if they found themselves in Reddit's current situation. But Reddit doesn't even seem to care about angering its users, which just feeds the anger more.
Meta is doing great if all you care about is liking pictures of your nieces and nephews. That's not totally fair, they do allow niche communities to post information and share photos. But there's no where near the thought provoking discussion that Reddit or Lemmy provide.
They are also heavy-handed with moderation and auto-moderation. I'm in a private tabletop wargame group, and a popular game from the early days of wargaming is called Third Reich, say that on Facebook, and get a 30-day ban.
Depends on a country. In Poland Facebook is the place for discussions in many many communities gathered on Facebook groups. They have all the Reddit vibe of sharing informations with similar variety of topics from cats to serious military analytics.
The difference is Facebook doesn’t want to be indexed so those posts never reach beyond Facebook audience.
Meta is just a shell of its former self these days. I went back a few times recently and I shit you not : 3 out of 4 posts on my feed are sponsored or suggested content. Almost nothing of my friends, it's just full of garbage people are trying to sell, or clickbait videos.
I'm more of a lurker on there, but I have the Facebook Purity extension that hides all that crap. It's a bit of a shock when FB changes their code and the author has to catch up.
Facebook has been stagnant for a while, as they focused on pushing advertising and monetising users. It's not just "uncool", it's broken what made it good in the first place. I left Facebook a few years ago due to it's enshittification, and it's very very different to what it was right back at launch. It's a very similar issue to Reddit's but just manifesting in a different way.
Meta bought Instagram and Whatsapp to stay ahead of it's competition, particularly with younger users when it comes to Instagram. It's increasingly pushing ads on Instragram and trying to monetise users, and at the moment trying to monetise Whatsapp by getting businesses to pay for access via new tools. They've already changed terms of services on Whatsapp to the benefit of businesses and Meta, and are trying to merge it in with Facebook and Instagram messaging. On all platforms it is harvesting and selling user data.
Meta's revenues fell for the first time in 2022, and profits are also down, plus the "metaverse" is not succeeding despite heavy investment. Expect "enshittification" to accelerate as ultimately Meta cares about it's share price more than anything else, and shareholders in the tech space expect year on year growth. Meta's pivot to the Metaverse is because the company knows there is not much growth left in it's core social media products, and also a lot of competition it's struggling to beat (TikTok for example).
Meta is treading water at best, and it already monetises it's users and disrespects their privacy and data in ways that people wouldn't tolerate if they understood what is going on. I honestly wouldn't hold Meta up as a company that Reddit should look to for good PR.
This is an important point. Just because a platform is profitable, doesn't mean it hasn't been enshitified. It's far more likely to have been enshitified to drive profits, imo.
And the underlying problem is capitalism itself. There's nothing wrong with making money. But capitalism is based on the pursuit of infinite growth and profit, which of course is impossible, which means that every capitalist enterprise is doomed to follow the same predicable path of enshittification and eventually collapse.
Capitalism is a plague on society—a malignant cancer on humanity.
Facebook is a repository for aging, red-cap-wearing boomers. Meanwhile, Meta is focusing all efforts on Instagram, which becomes shittier by the day as they attempt to transform it into whatever competing service is most successful—currently TikTok.
Meta also does A LOT of data harvesting, which is what drives profits for them. Due to anonymity, Reddit could never really do the same. Meta, Instagram, and Whatsapp all serve as different routes of recurring revenue for Meta, they can park millions of users on each platform and sell the data collected to interested advertisers. Reddit could never really do the same, so they come up with the next best (worst) thing.
Enshitification does not mean it becomes unpopular. It means it becomes non-valuable. If Instagram disappeared tomorrow, there are other platforms that will happily absorb those users because nothing important happens there anymore. Facebook is much the same; the only reason to engage on FB these days is because you are trying to do some kind of locals thing or neighborhood association nonsense.
I recommend you read the essay for enshitification, because I think you're mistaken my use of the word for a random pejorative instead of a description of a process that platforms go through in which they become bad for their users.
Reddit, maybe, will have a longterm position as "a place you go to for product reviews". Unless most people do the right thing and nuke their posting history. But it's gone down the enshitification road where it intentionally squanders its value for profit.
If you don't already have an OpenAI account, don't make one. You don't need it. There are several other ways to access it without an accounts. Shamelessly stolen from Reddit:
No Sign-Up:
Perplexity AI [https://www.perplexity.ai/] (web-browsing)
Vitalentum [https://vitalentum.net/free-gpt]
OraChat [https://ora.ai/chatbot-master/openai-chatgpt-chatbot]
Vicuna [https://chat.lmsys.org/]
GPTGO [https://gptgo.ai/] (web-browsing)
AnonChatGPT [https://anonchatgpt.com/]
NoowAI [https://noowai.com/]
Character AI [https://beta.character.ai/]
BAI Chat [https://chatbot.theb.ai/]
iAsk AI [https://iask.ai/] (web-browsing)
Phind AI [https://www.phind.com/] (web-browsing)
GPT4All [https://gpt4all.io/index.html] (open-source) [suggested by u/CondiMesmer]
DeepAI Chat [https://deepai.org/chat]
Teach Anything [https://www.teach-anything.com/]
Forefront AI [https://chat.forefront.ai/]
Sign-Up:
Poe AI [https://poe.com/ChatGPT]
Bard [https://bard.google.com/] (web-browsing)
Easy-Peasy AI [https://easy-peasy.ai/]
HuggingChat [https://huggingface.co/chat] (web-browsing)
WriteSonic [https://app.writesonic.com/chat]
FlowGPT [https://flowgpt.com/chat]
Sincode AI [https://www.sincode.ai/]
AI.LS [https://ai.ls/]
LetsView Chat [https://letsview.com/chatbot] (only 10 messages allowed)
CapeChat [https://chat.capeprivacy.com/]
Open-Assistant [https://open-assistant.io/] (open-source)
GlobalGPT [https://www.globalgpt.nspiketech.com/]
Bing Chat [bing.com/chat]
JimmyGPT [https://www.jimmygpt.com/]
Codeium [https://codeium.com/] *mainly for coding*
YouChat [you.com/chat]
Frank AI [https://franks.ai/]
OpenAI Playground [platform.openai.com/playground]
Great For Blog Articles (with chatbot):
Copy AI [https://app.copy.ai/]
TextCortex AI [https://app.textcortex.com/]
Marmof [https://app.marmof.com/]
HyperWrite [https://app.hyperwriteai.com/chatbot]
WriterX [https://app.writerx.co/]
Best File Chatbots (PDF's, etc.):
AnySummary [https://www.anysummary.app/] (3 per day)
Sharly AI [https://app.sharly.ai/]
Documind [https://www.documind.chat/]
ChatDOC [https://chatdoc.com/]
Humata AI [https://app.humata.ai/]
Ask Your PDF [https://askyourpdf.com/]
ChatPDF [https://www.chatpdf.com/]
FileGPT [https://filegpt.app/chat]
ResearchAide [https://www.researchaide.org/]
Pensieve AI [https://pensieve-app.springworks.in/]
Docalysis [https://docalysis.com/] (suggested by u/upsontown)
Best Personal Assistant Chatbots:
Pi, your personal AI [https://heypi.com/talk]
Kuki AI [https://chat.kuki.ai/]
Replika [https://replika.com/]
YourHana AI [https://yourhana.ai/]
One of these stands out, the GPT4All project. Do you know how does this even work, it's locally installed and no internet required? Isn't the model running GPT4 absolutely huge and proprietary closed code? There is a short summary of what it is on the page but it doesn't really answer anything...
so hear me out... not a popular opinion by any stretch of the imagination.. but the real reason manufacturers are doing this is because of how much RF spectral splatter EVs put out (think inverters/switching noise, computers, etc) and it's bad news for ham radio operators that use AM/SSB bands. it's cheaper to ignore the problem than it is to EMI shield everything to reduce the noise floor low enough so that the AM receiver works in the car, otherwise you'll hear a bunch of static/popping/whining from the EV electronics that make the AM radio effectively useless. a similar concern that has since gone away was the battle over BPL [broadband over powerline] for the same reasons in that power lines would be effectively big antennas radiating crap in the AM bands. personally, i'm in favor of keeping AM around if it forces these manufacturers to follow proper EM shielding practices, but again... minority opinion for my own selfish reasons. the FCC doesn't give a shit about ham radio, so it's not looking good.
Damn, I wasn't aware of this aspect of electric vehicles, but that makes sense and is interesting. Thanks for posting, looks like I have some reading to do.
and it's not an easy problem to solve. proper EMI mitigation is a super tough engineering problem that you can make an entire career out of (and make good money doing so). there are so many sneak paths that can pop up that it turns into a constant game of whack-a-mole... simple things like applying a piece of tape to a cable harness next to a metal plate can either make the product pass or fail a radiated emissions spec....it's crazy. and the automotive industry is so behind in the latest tech, the whole chip shortage thing during covid was because they're using way outdated process nodes that no one wants to invest money in. don't get me wrong, my fellow EEs in automotive do a good job given what they have to deal with, but they don't have the experience in RF like us cellular/radio guys... obviously.
1,000% this.
Except it's not just that a few hobbyists can't play with their toys. The frequencies being disrupted aren't limited to amateur radio bands which make up only a small fraction of the radio spectrum. This has the potential to disrupt military and emergency communication worldwide and I'm actually shocked it's not a bigger issue. RF Pollution is a nasty problem and is one of the main reasons the FCC exists.
Making this a political side-show about talk radio weakens the whole debate in my opinion, even if it has the potential to grab the attention of a wider audience. It's much easier to refute that and "win" the argument.
I hoped that a few stray enthusiasts would find their way to kbin
They did. "A few" as a portion of the whole, where the whole is much larger than you ever expected it would be.
One thing I have learned in my own technical career is that you can't do everything. Even if there was enough time in a day for you to do everything, you can't know everything, at least not sufficiently enough to be most effective. You have to depend on other experts, and delegate to them what you are not qualified to do. This requires a pretty high level of trust, and makes it so that you need to develop people management skills.
Lots of technical people are short on people management skills. I don't know where you sit on that spectrum, but you may need to consider bringing on an "overseer," kind of like a project manager, to keep tabs on all of the technical resources involved - yourself included. This will help ensure that concerns are prioritized appropriately, and that communication and messaging about those priorities are consistent and clear.
I've been in that kind of position, and I take a bit of pride in my use of words. I'm happy to give any advice you like.
I sense an opportunity here: managed hosting of Fediverse services. I don't mean a managed host where you can install/run the services. I mean a top-to-bottom setup, management, backup, upgrades, monitoring, etc. so the only thing you need to do is administer the community. I'd love to set up several Fediverse services for my local community, and I know there is an audience that would also love that, but I also know I do not want to invest the time it takes to manage the technical side of that.
Having easier to set up instances would help in relieving the pressure from the more popular current instances. We're starting to see those hosting options come on line for some of the services, but not fast enough for my liking.
Love it. I'm sure there are some spam-evaluation services up or starting soon that use AI, but that will also soon be important as we become more of a target.
I've been thinking recently that machine learning models could be used as a first-line defense for moderation, e.g. identify obvious spam/violations, but also identify borderline cases that require human intervention. So you could reduce the burden on moderators, and perhaps even shield them from some of the more extreme things, although I think those tend to be more image/video which I imagine will be a lot harder to really effectively harness ML for.
Obviously that's a tried and tested model with email, but i'm not sure there's a great way to implement that on federated servers without keeping the model fine tuning pretty secret. Any spam detection AI model that's public can simply be used to train better spam.
My past experience with this sort of thing suggests it's probably better to focus on identifying some kind of humanness score. Since kbin instances are responsible for moderating their own user population (I believe) that means they could quite easily keep a good running score of how viable an account is. Some of that could be ML that picks up on both the information content and uniqueness of a post, but you can also infer a good amount by how much interaction it gets with other users who also have good scores.
There's also some interesting stuff in the upvote structure. If you draw a directed graph of who-upvotes-who then spammers and trolls tend to form much more distinct islands than regular users do.
Check out Grow Your Own Services. It doesn't have everything (e.g., kbin, Lemmy, Calckey) but it does offer what I think you're looking for with a number of the other more popular services.
Thanks! Hadn't come across that particular site yet. Unfortunately, still the same list of hosts. I'm really looking for Frendica/Mastodon and maybe Pixelfed and Writefreely. So, basically all the ones that aren't yet available in a turn-key solution.
Like I said, slower than I'd like. But I'm sure we'll get there.
@bourbonmakesitbetter We're a small independent "mom & pop" managed hosting provider focused on Mastodon and we're currently testing out kbin, send us an email at keith[@]thunderhost[.]com with the size of your community and we might be able to assist
Something like this already exists for Mastodon (check out masto.host, and there are also a few others). But a service supporting all fediverse softwares would be cool.
Yeah, I've had no trouble finding hosts for Mastodon. Being the oldest (?) and most popular service (at least until now, not sure what the current stats are) has its advantages.
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