There really isn’t much that can harm rich people that won’t indirectly do splash damage on other people, just because their actions control so much of the economy that people depend on for survival.
It is accurate to call it a parrot in the context of it essentially being used as ambiguated plagiarism machines to avoid paying workers.
Yes it is capable of that. Yes that word means something else in the actual field. But you need to understand people are talking about this technology as it’s political relationships with power, and pretending prioritizing that form of analysis is well thats just people being uninformed about the REAL side and that’s their fault is yourself missing the point. This isn’t about pride and hurt feelings that a robot is doing something human do. It’s about the fact it’s a tool to undermine the entire value of the creative sector. And these big companies aren’t calling it AI because it’s an accurate descriptor. It could also be called a generative language model. They are calling it that because the common misunderstanding of the term is valuable to hype culture and VC investment. Like it or not, the average understanding of the term carries different weight than it does inside the field. And it turns the conversation into a pretty stupid one about sentience and humanity, as well as legitimizing the practice by trying to argue this is fundamentally unenforceable from the regulations we have on plagiarism, which it really isn’t.
People who are trying to rebrand it aren’t doing it because they misunderstand the technical usage of the word AI. They are arguing the terminology is playing into the goals of our (hopefully shared) political enemies, who are trying to bulldoze a technology that they think should get special privileges: by implying the technology is something it isn’t. This is about optics and social power, and the term “AI” is contributing to further public misunderstand how it actually works, which is something we should oppose.
Look, some people are not switching. But if they aren’t going to switch, more negative PR for Reddit is the most they can accomplish. We can speculate all we want about the abstract value of negative PR vs engagement, but at the very least I support this over them being there and silent about disliking it.
The members of a site openly despising the site itself encourages migration too. Keep the attention on how lothesome things are and people are more likely to drift away slowly over time.
Because it doesn’t seem to matter currently if you play ranked games or casual games, the general experience tends to be the same. But one has numbers and things to go with it. You still get people playing to win in casual games and you get people dicking around having fun in ranked games, and the ranks don’t necessarily...
I recently started playing GTAV again and sometimes I’ll get in my car and let the radio stations play while I do house stuff. Favorite stations are the 80s one with Kenny Loggins, and West Coast Classics and Rock Radio.
A weakness of inclusive leftist language is it removes most of the rhetorical shorthand insults that are useful for negative propaganda. What is rhetorically sticky is insulting people looks, behaviors, etc. But it also participates in the stigma of that stuff. Explaining the real reasons your political enemies are bad takes more work, which makes it lose out in comparison to your opponents who don’t have this limit.
There are ways to walk this line, but it’s very difficult. Stigmatizing language is the norm with stuff like “stupid” and “crazy” which are ableist. There often aren’t better alternatives that are equally effective rhetorically.
I don’t really have a point here, just acknowledging that this is an issue that arrives from a conflict that isn’t as easy to solve as it seems at first.
It sounds like you already have values that align you against him, which makes you not the target of the rhetoric. When people characterize others using ad hominem it’s usually with a subtext of alienating then from empathy.
Calling Musk a Boomer Karen buffoon for example, is much more effective than calling him a hateful fascist to people who aren’t politically opposed to him. Same with posting ugly pictures of him at the beach or calling him super divorced. All of these things are participating in stigmatizing things that should be fine. But they click with people brains and turn society against people sometimes more than accurate descriptors like calling him a fascist.
This same principle applies to the association with reptiles which is stigmatizing neurodivergence.
That doesn’t make all of them the same of course, because people have different priorities and make different judgements on what stigmatizing is too far in different situations. So your assessment of the language accepting a degree of stigma is accurate. Just also want to be clear its a messy layered decision that can’t be reduced to black and white in all context for all stigmatizing, without a lot of tradeoffs.
You’re also right that using rhetoric that throws certain groups under the bus also alienates those groups, and comes with downsides. It can even plant seeds that can evolve into actual bigotry in movements (a lot of the “boomer” talk for example has basically evolved into general ageism against the elderly, and Karen has transformed into something you can call any women who annoys you or is complaining about something).
So there’s a lot of good reason to push back on this stuff. But it can also be effective, particularly with fascists who loath feeling humiliated and form cult of personalities around being charismatic. But also in just turning neutral people into psudo allies. Sometimes. It’s complicated, is all I’m saying.
For the homophobic insult thing, just want to point out we still do it.
Stuff like saying “Trump is Putin’s bitch” or using pictures of them kissing to gross people out for instance. The insult purpose is to alternate you from Trump not from gay people, but it can also do that, and it taps into a knee jerk revulsion to effect those with that specific disgust response.
This isn’t about personally susceptiblity to bigotry. It’s about what the words are doing and achieving socially. There are different things that effect everyone on this level. The aggragate impact is what is relavent.
Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a...
while it will draw more users into the fediverse, nearly all of them will join directly with threads
users who would have joined other instances will be parasited to threads as the safest best supported option
whatever threads does, other instances will be forced to copy or risk losing feature parity with the most important player in the space.
existing users will get accustomed to the content from threads as occupying the dominant super majority of content on the site.
Threads will essentially be the space, with all currently existing communities left as periphery. Which is very bad on it’s own because the decentralized space is no longer decentralized, and in fact is in the hands of Meta.
Meta will eventually wall itself off because not having control of your users social graph is an unnecessary threat. And since they are the space, so they will lose very little by walling off. When they do wall off, the fediverse will have it’s communities deeply intermingled with Meta, and when people lose most of their friends and content to meta walling themselves off - most are going to choose to relocate to meta.
Slowly growing the decentralized space organically is important to avoid this kind of stuff. If we allow someone to become the hyper-dominant instance, the principle of de-federation ceases to matter because they have so much controlling leverage over the users.I do still think this is a good thing, but it’s a complicated good thing that could do more damage. I am very worried that they aren’t starting off federated. That also means their internal community norms will develop isolated from what fediverse has tried to establish.
these folk are always the ones trying new things, especially anti-corporate things. They aren’t keeping people away. this is just how the bleeding edge of new technology. The communities natural grow out over time as more people show up and start to outnumber them. But it’s thanks to them that niche new stuff gets supported in the first place while it builds up it’s audience (and reduces the friction to joining)
Threads will immediately be the largest community in the fediverse when they join
As in several times bigger than everyone else combined. Most content and users will be from threads. this has consequences:
while it will draw more users into the fediverse, nearly all of them will join directly with threads
users who would have joined other instances will be parasited to threads as the safest best supported option
whatever threads does, other instances will be forced to copy or risk losing feature parity with the most important player in the space.
existing users will get accustomed to the content from threads as occupying the dominant super majority of content on the site.
Threads will essentially be the space, with all currently existing communities left as periphery. Which is very bad on it’s own because the decentralized space is no longer decentralized, and in fact is in the hands of Meta.
Meta will eventually wall itself off because not having control of your users social graph is an unnecessary threat. And since they are the space, so they will lose very little by walling off. When they do wall off, the fediverse will have it’s communities deeply intermingled with Meta, and when people lose most of their friends and content to meta walling themselves off - most are going to choose to relocate to meta.
Slowly growing the decentralized space organically is important to avoid this kind of stuff. If we allow someone to become the hyper-dominant instance, the principle of de-federation ceases to matter because they have so much controlling leverage over the users.I do still think this is a good thing, but it’s a complicated good thing that could do more damage. I am very worried that they aren’t starting off federated. That also means their internal community norms will develop isolated from what fediverse has tried to establish.
What I am describing is how EEE would apply in this context. Decenterlized spaces can be undermined by corperate power becoming the supermajority, subsuming the spaces valuable users and content, and then walling themselves off causing people to abandon the original project as their social graph has once again become held hostage to the users the super instance has. We already see this here with Beehave de-federating from Lemmy.World. Lemmy.World holds most of the content, so losing access to that harms the smaller instance tremendously more than the largest instance, because they’ve become reliant on that content. Arguing that Meta is not a threat to the fedeverse for this reason is suggesting that decentralization isn’t necesary, because they are 30 times larger than the entirety of mastodon combined. It will be centralization on a whole nother scale to anything we’ve seen so far here. And this is literally how EEE works to undermine decenterlized networks strengths, which rests in not having all the power held in one instances hands.
Your counterpoints make just as much sense in the other EEE spaces. Why didn’t they just keep doing what they were doing after google walled them off? Why did they largely abandon the decenterlized space and follow the supermajority that held all the users they grew accustomed to interacting with?
The reality is that this is what happened. I can’t really debate with you about this because it’s not just prediction, this has an existing history of happening. I hope you’re right, but the record so far does not agree with you.
Luckily, we’ll find out not too long from now. Hope you’re right.
The fact they don’t need us is entirely the danger. They will have a controlling leverage of users and content. If they are the biggest player in the fediverse, the fediverse itself is beholden to courting them.
People don’t want to lose what they get used to. Beehaw defederating from [Lemmy.world] is a good example. The defederation is far worse for Beehaw than it is for [Lemmy.world], because it means people will leave their smaller instance to get the content of the larger instance because [Lemmy.World] is such an enormous player in the space.
This problem would be infinitely worse with Meta if they become the larger instance, who after becoming a mainstay here will eventually be the entire space. and if they eventually wall themselves off - which they will, everyone who has built communities up with them will leave with them. The fact they don’t need us is why it’s dangerous.> eople using Threads are those people who have never used reddit, and never would have signed up for lemmy.
People using Threads are those people who have never used reddit, and never would have signed up for lemmy.
this will only be true at first. afterwards, the people who would have signed up for mastodon will instead sign up for Threads. They don’t just bring in new users, they also parasite users who were at all interested. Long term sabotages the organic growth of the decenterlized space. We build up leverage slowly, but once they are here they have all the power.
The problem isn’t their intentions, the problem is the moment they join they will have more power and leverage in this space than any other instance. As well as become a magnet for hosting most of the content. Which they will eventually wall off, and when they wall it off people will choose them over federation because they got used to them.
AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble (futurism.com)
As the AI market continues to balloon, experts are warning that its VC-driven rise is eerily similar to that of the dot com bubble.
Twitter Blue subscribers can now hide their blue checks (www.theverge.com)
deleted_by_moderator
RIP Twitter’s iconic bird logo (www.theverge.com)
(Some) Redditors be like (lemmy.world)
it's honest work (lemmy.ml)
On hard mode (i.postimg.cc)
how is this so accurate? (reddthat.com)
If you could have one small thing as a superpower. What would it be and why?
I mean small like I sneeze and a 20 dollar bill appears in my hand or something like that. Not classic answers like flying or super strength.
It do be like that
Someone calling you a ‘Normie’ has the same energy as “I’m not like other girls, Im quirky” Change mind
Most Brits reckon Brexit has failed, new poll finds (www.politico.eu)
Do I understand correctly that I have to subscribe to 5 different NoStupidQuestions on 5 different instances?
The content on all the communities seem different....
Reddit (i.imgur.com)
Instead of "casual" or "ranked" they should just have "play to win" or "play for fun."
Because it doesn’t seem to matter currently if you play ranked games or casual games, the general experience tends to be the same. But one has numbers and things to go with it. You still get people playing to win in casual games and you get people dicking around having fun in ranked games, and the ranks don’t necessarily...
What’s one of your favorite game soundtracks?
I recently started playing GTAV again and sometimes I’ll get in my car and let the radio stations play while I do house stuff. Favorite stations are the 80s one with Kenny Loggins, and West Coast Classics and Rock Radio.
Is this old enough for ya? (youtu.be)
Anyone remember these?...
given how little one vote matter, it seems to me that stripping felons of their right to vote is both petty and counterproductive if the point was to reform them into civic minded individuals ?
Also, seems kind of scary that this implies a future where so many people are in prison that their vote could actually tip the balance ?
Elon Musk goes low against Zuckerberg as Twitter-Threads spat intensifies (www.theguardian.com)
“Twitter owner calls Facebook founder a ‘cuck’ as rancour grows over launch of Threads, a competitor to Musk’s network”...
What does defederating from Meta's Threads.net actually accomplish?
Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a...
Does it feel like the fediverse is exclusively used by older tech nerds?
The mastodon and lemmy content I’m seeing feels like 90% of it comes from people who are:...
Why are fediverse admins blocking out threads?
I get meta evil, but aren’t we just blocking out any users from accessing the wider fediverse?
Why Defederating from Facebook/Meta is So Important (ploum.net)
I strongly encourage instance admins to defederate from Facebook/Threads/Meta....