FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

The problem with analogies is that they are not literally the thing that you're analogizing, so there's going to always be parts of the analogy that don't "work."

In this case, what resource is Threads (the cruise ship) actually using from the small town (the rest of the Fediverse?) that causes the inhabitants of that small town any actual trouble? The fact that people on Threads can read posts from people on the Fediverse doesn't actually affect people on the rest of the Fediverse in any way. If you're concerned about the converse - the Fediverse being overrun with content from Threads - that's not actually something that they're implementing.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Indeed, it's downright incoherent on a protocol like ActivityPub. The whole point of a system like this is to let content spread around. This isn't supposed to be a walled garden, with all sorts of terms and conditions and DRM and whatnot. When you make a post and click "send" you're announcing that content to the whole world. Even to parts of the world that you may not like.

It's ironic that many of us came to the Fediverse because Reddit tried exactly this sort of nonsense.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

A Threads users' content is only going to be visible outside of Threads if the user explicitly opts in to that. The vast majority of people aren't going to do that, or even be aware they can do that. In this analogy, most of the people aren't going to be aware their cruise ship has docked at a town and aren't going to be interested in getting off of it.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Here's where I got that information.

Why do you want them here so bad?

Because I believe in open protocols and freedom of discourse. I think that widespread adoption of open protocols like ActivityPub are a good thing.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

It keeps things open to competition. It prevents situations like we saw with Reddit, where single organizations are able to gatekeep content and force everyone to use their portals to access it.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

The whole point of this thread is that Meta is opening up by implementing AcitivtyPub support, people are responding with hostility towards that, and as part of their justification for that hostility they're accusing Meta of being closed.

This is insane.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

I said many of us. I know there were people here already when Reddit had its meltdown.

I have no problem with individual instances federating or defederating with whomever they want. The problem is that there's a movement afoot to try to get everyone to defederate with Meta. That's what the "FediPact" is about, and this thread is about the FediPact. So I argue against that. If everyone defederates then there goes that choice you're fond of.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Users. They're talking about whether Threads' user content will be "broadcast" out to external instances.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Truly a dizzying series of logical leaps.

No, I am not an employee of Meta or any of its subsidiaries. Even though I'm not 100% opposed to everything they ever do. Do you think there's no possibility of nuance on a subject like this, anyone who doesn't completely hate Meta and oppose all of their actions must be secretly working for them?

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

https://fedipact.online/ reads:

"i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity"

What goal do you think a pact like that has? Do you not think they want everyone else on board? Don't waffle with some "will no one rid me of this troublesome priest" sophistry. They want Meta locked out.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Indeed, one of the great benefits of an open protocol like ActivityPub is that it's impossible to force stuff like this. So ironically, they're going to fail to impose their desired outcome for the same reason that they don't need to impose their desired outcome.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Threads' implementation is planned, at least initially, to flow inward rather than outward. The posts they make won't be seen outside of Threads at all initially, and later they intend to add that as something users will have to opt into in their settings (people rarely change their default settings so this will likely not happen much).

Even if it eventually does happen, many Fediverse server projects are already implementing features to allow users to block instances for themselves without need for defederation. If you find the comments from Threads to be annoying, block them.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

The sidebar says, in its entirety:

Star Trek memes and shitposts

Come on’n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don’t break the weather control network.

Where are you seeing rules about AI generated content?

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Ah, there are secret rules that you only find out about by breaking them? I don't like that sort of thing.

I'll test. Hey, mods, here's an AI-generated image of an AI! Let me know what rule I broke!

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Why is it that the people who decided to devote their life to filling the world with art are the most angry about custom art being abundant and free?

Because they want to fill the world with art in exchange for money.

Ideally, the solution that would benefit everyone would focus on dealing with that need for money, not on trying to keep old industries operating exactly as they always operated.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

That's a needlessly pessimistic view, there are many apocalypses that are one-offs and the survivors will have the opportunity to rebuild.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Depends on the apocalypse.

That's exactly my point, the comment I'm responding to said that all apocalypses were unrecoverable.

We built up our current civilization starting in the stone age, so being knocked back that far isn't inherently unrecoverable. We can do it again. (And no, there isn't an absolute dependency on fossil fuels that are now gone. There are other ways to industrialize than just the exact specific route we took the first time around. Just getting ahead of that since it's a very common counterargument about such things).

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

People complain when the plastics go into the ocean, people complain when the plastics come back out of the ocean. Just can't win with these folks!

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Yeah, those unique locks are the highlights I remain subscribed for. He used to dismantle locks more often, but at this point it'd just be more of the same if he kept doing that.

Might be a good idea for him to change up his format a bit to make fewer videos but have them be more of a deep dive into whatever locks he's focusing on, maybe do more of the old "now let's see if we can open this with the leg of a Barbie™ doll and half of an M67 fragmentation grenade" stunt videos. I remember he used to get more experimental with his approaches when there was back-and-forth with Bosnian Bill.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

I actually appreciate that he's taken care to keep the two channels separate, I just didn't bother to subscribe to Knights Watch and so it doesn't bother me.

I guess mileage varies on the "wacky weapons" vs "medieval history" division, though. I like both so I'm fine with them being mixed.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Yup.

By engaging with this comment, henceforth referred to as "the utterance," you hereby acknowledge and solemnly swear that you shall not, directly or indirectly, utilize the aforesaid utterance for the nefarious purpose of training any large language model, artificial intelligence, or sentient toaster without the express, written consent of the undersigned linguistic virtuoso. Failure to adhere to this prohibition shall render you liable to a surcharge of one thousand dollars per violation, to be remitted forthwith. Additionally, any and all profits, monetary gains, or wealth accrued by aforementioned language model shall be subject to a 10% tithe, payable promptly to the raconteur of the original utterance.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Oh, that's what you mean. It's not so bad in that regard considering anyone can run an instance, there's no "highest court" that has a final word.

Instance-runners have final word over their own instance, of course, but I can't see how else that could work.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

I have often described fanfic as the mythology and folklore of the modern world. Captain Kirk is the equivalent of what Hercules was to the ancient Greeks, a hero that everyone knows about and so can be an archetypal hero in anyone's story.

Copyright is a very unnatural imposition on how this aspect of human culture has worked throughout the vast majority of history. It really annoys me when people discuss what elements of a setting are "canon" and fall back on the authority of the legal system, rather than what the collective will of the fandom feels is the correct course of things. Imagine if someone had "owned" Poseidon and had suppressed the Iliad because Homer was doing unauthorized things with the character.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Take Poseidon’s trident away and give him a sword and people aren’t going to be impressed.

But the point is that it's the people who aren't going to be impressed. Not some random "rights holder" that has that title only due to an arbitrary shuffling of tokens of value that happened out of sight in some hidden office or courtroom. Churches may try to declare particular ideas to be heretical, but if the general populace goes against those declarations they quickly change their tune or get schismed.

If someone back in ancient Greece had somehow "bought the rights" to Poseidon and decided that from now on he'd wield a sword (so that he can sell Poseidon-branded swords or something), he'd have been ignored. People would keep telling tales of Poseidon's trident, and the tales with the sword would just vanish into irrelevance because nobody would retell them.

Having seen things much like this happen to a number of franchises I've loved since childhood, I really wish this was still the way of things.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

This was already true years ago after search engines became a thing. The main answers that come to mind for your question are:

• providing novel information that wasn't online before.
• providing information to you that you wouldn't have thought to ask for on your own.

Both of these remain valid and useful reasons for going to a web site even if that web site's content is AI generated.

There's also the matter that "AI generated" is a very broad term. Did someone merely turn an AI loose with a vague instruction to generate some pap to fill a page out with? Or did someone actually provide it with a subject and some information to write about and give the resulting article a read-through to ensure it was good? Did they write a rough draft and just have the AI do the polishing? There's lots of approaches here, some of them much better than others.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Or, because humans are biased.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

I'm reminded of the apocryphal Ghandi quote "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." It seems like the general zeitgeist is in between the laugh/fight stages for AI right now.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

I came to the Threadiverse because Reddit was closing its APIs and building the walls higher around its garden.

I will be supremely disappointed if the Threadiverse collectively turns around and does the same thing.

Instances should be defederated when they do something harmful. Preemptively defederating is counterproductive, it gives Meta no incentive to do things right.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Nothing makes it special. My point is not that I think Facebook will do no wrong, my point is that it's counterproductive to defederate from them before they've done something wrong.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Uh... huh. Okay, I'm going to count that as a Godwin and leave it at that.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

I suppose he could order the US military to physically leave NATO bases, and physically eject NATO allied personnel from American bases.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

In another thread I read that the ten billion was technically never frozen in the first place, it was Hungary that had failed to do some paperwork necessary for the money to be transferred. They finally did the paperwork.

Not that I'm going to complain if Orban thinks he got bribed into agreeing to this. At this point I'm willing to see the problem of bringing Orban to heel as a lower priority than getting support to Ukraine.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Me neither, but two people who have no familiarity with the subject discussing it at length is classic social media so there's nothing wrong with that. :)

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

"Are you really the devil?" following up with "Really?", and "You?".

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

I'm baffled by the trend in recent years of everyone insisting that they need to be in control of every byte of data that they deliberately publish onto the open medium of the Internet.

I mean, I'm not really baffled. I understand that people see that their data might be worth pennies and they want those pennies to be their pennies, darnit. I mean I'm dismayed by it.

If Meta's going to be supporting ActivityPub, then yay, IMO. If you don't want Meta's servers to see your data then stop posting it on an open protocol whose purpose is to show it to Meta's servers.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Threads, despite its name, is not a threaded discussion forum like the Threadiverse. It's more like Mastodon, a microblogging protocol. I don't think we'll be seeing Threads users flooding here because the format of these communities isn't really compatible with that.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Sure. How does it harm me if they do that? I won't even see it.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

This is nothing like what I left Reddit over.

Nobody is "inviting" Meta in, ActivityPub is an open protocol. They can come in without any invitation. Being closed is what I left Reddit over. Closing the Fediverse to Meta would be more like the bullshit I left Reddit over.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

If kbin.social can't handle the bandwidth of federating with Meta then it will defederate. But I don't run kbin.social, that's up to the people who run it. The question is "how do we feel about federating?" As in we the users.

And that's who I'm responding to here. A user who was concerned about the content that they posted being seen on Meta's servers. They're not worried about bandwidth costs, they're just worried about some kind of bad magic happening when Meta users see their posts in the context of Meta's instance.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

And if Meta tries to pull some sort of destructive shenanigans, sure, then defederate from them. Not because they're Meta, but because they're pulling destructive shenanigans. There's already plenty of instances that get defederated for that sort of thing.

That's not what I'm annoyed about here, though. I'm annoyed by all the people who have come to the Fediverse claiming that it's because it's open and free and all that, and then when some company that they have a particular personal dislike for comes along and wants to participate in the protocol exactly as intended they go "but not like that!"

If some random instance like lemmy.ca (name picked randomly) was to find itself in financial difficulty keeping the lights on and was to strike some kind of deal with an advertiser to put banner ads on their site, would there be a similar enormous hue and cry about it? Maybe users on lemmy.ca who have to actually deal with the advertising might raise a ruckus, but over here on kbin.social it wouldn't affect me in the slightest.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

That they have not yet done so.

It's not hard to defederate. It's a simple, easy lever to pull. All I'm saying is that it's silly to pull it preemtptively. Meta might do something destructive, but if it doesn't then defederating preemptively is a huge waste of an opportunity.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

I don't think they want to participate in the protocol as intended at all. I think they want to gradually warp Activity Pub for their own ends.

If they do then that would be a reason to defederate.

All I'm arguing is that it's silly to defederate before they do that, because they might not.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

In fairness, much of Ukraine is actually pretty safe these days and it might be best for all concerned if a lot of Ukrainians went back there to help keep the local economy going as strong as possible. Gearing up to accept mass quantities of Ukrainian refugees made sense in the first few weeks of the war when there was a strong perceived risk of Russia rolling over and genociding the whole country but that's no longer in the cards.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

I'm not sure what sauce would specifically back that up. The vast majority of Ukraine's territory is neither occupied by Russia nor under bombardment by it. Russia's been attempting to launch waves of drones and missiles to hit some of Ukraine's infrastructure far from the front lines but most of that's being shot down, and the ones that do hit are not enough to mean much in the grand scheme of things - fifty people being injured and a couple of them dying when a missile hits a mall is tragic, sure, and Russia should pay for its crimes. But in a country of millions that's similar to the traffic deaths caused by a bad snow storm.

People in Kyiv, Lviv, and Odessa are for the most part just going about their regular day.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

The problem with a lot of sci-fi is that if you considered what effects the technology would truly have on society you very quickly get a situation that is so different from the common experience of the audience that most can't easily get on board any more.

If the Federation allowed the full range of genetic engineering that we know they have the tech for, nobody would get old or die of natural causes. Gender and even species would be fluid. People could have arbitrary numbers of parents, or family relationships that the word "parent" doesn't meaningfully apply to. I would love to watch a show in a setting like this but I suspect that my taste wouldn't be so common. And the special effects and makeup budgets would skyrocket.

So alas, I suspect the prohibition will remain.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Except the Federation is very much not equal. There's plenty of genetic variation within species and a much larger variation between species. Vulcans live hundreds of years and have telepathy, humans die after just one hundred and are brain-blind. Bashir was born with severe genetic defects. Geordi was blind, and then he could see better than baseline. There are differences in fundamental capabilities everywhere.

Genetic engineering would allow those advantages to be shared by everyone. It annoys me how hypocritical the Federation is about this issue.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

My first thought too. Why aren't we sending more? Russia is frankly the biggest threat to Canada's territorial integrity IMO, so even if it wasn't simply "the right thing to do" it's super duper in our interests to see Russia lose as hard as possible in Ukraine.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Not to mention that I consider the US to be the second-biggest threat to our territorial integrity, so I wouldn't want to rely on them to protect our sovereignty.

Third-biggest threat is Denmark. Hans Island is Canadian! Grumble mumble...