Mastodon is pretty different to its competitors. It looks similar to Twitter / Bluesky, but the way the social network functions is completely different.

It’s designed to be anti-infuencer… One of the things I hate about most social media platforms is a few people get all the attention. There are a few reasons for this, but it’s not really based on merit.

I think a lot of people joined Mastodon wanting a Twitter clone. It’s obviously not and Bluesky is, so people moved there. The approach Mastodon takes is far from perfect, and may not work out in the long run. But it seems like it’s worth at least trying something different.

OP is obviously very eco-concious… Instead of using an LLM to generate crap (and burn half the Amazon while doing it) they just recycled

The thing is even if AI could do all that (which is doubtful in my life time), you would still need someone to prompt it with something interesting. And CEO types have never had an interesting idea in their lives

I agree the execution of the end of GoT was bad (i.e. the problems weren’t just the issue of everything needing to come to a head). There were a lot of different complaints about how GoT ended, but I definitely saw a lot about how it was all just battles in the last season and no nuance. I think that was always going to be hard to avoid given how GRRM had set up the main plot. And I think he will find it hard to avoid when writing the last 2 books, which could be part of the reason he doesn’t want to do it.

Trump may flirt with anti-vaxx sentiment or climate denial, etc., but he can’t fully support those ideas. They’re very niche and he’d lose the centre if he did.

RFK Jr doesn’t hold back on those issues. For conspiracy types he is closer to their beliefs than Trump.

I always felt that one of the main problems with GoT/ASOIAF was that it was a nuanced, political fantasy with top class world-building, but the overarching plot was pushing everyone towards a massive final confrontation (or 2 really). There was not really a good way to resolve the confrontation without a massive battle (or 2). So the ending was always going to have to move away from what made the series interesting/successful (book and TV), i.e. plot, characters, intrigue, shades of grey.

There were other problems as well, but that was something baked into the whole series by GRRM, and I’m not sure he can really find a way to do it differently. He might come up with a different outcome of the final confrontations, but it still has to be done with epic battles.

He already bought NZ citizenship… Because we had a dumbass government at the time

Sadly, the lock-in is pretty extreme… as is user inertia. Office 365 has made the problem worse as well, even if you have something like OnlyOffice that does a good job of compatibility with Office, it can’t sync with OneDrive.

If you collaborate with non-technical people, they will expect you to work in Office formats, and won’t even entertain discussion of any alternative.

Yeah, this is one of the many things that annoys me about AI discourse.

“We can use it to solve climate change!”

We already technically know how to solve climate change, but politics makes doing that impossible.

And, no, AI can’t “fix” politics. We’re going to have to figure that out by ourselves.

Why would you have zero expectations that he’ll win? Were you not around in 2016?

There’s some evidence to suggest he’ll lose significant support: https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48654-would-donald-trump-conviction-move-his-voters-evidence-from-past-present-bill-clinton-polls

But hard to know for sure.

How long before it’s illegal to hack LLMs?

Depends where you live. Plenty of countries with high % of renewables

I wouldn’t call it “surreal” at all, I’d call it “completely expected” given who runs that platform

As far as animal consciousness is concerned, the consensus now seems to be that many animals have some kind of consciousness, including non-mammals such as birds. e.g. http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf

Might want to read the article?

Maybe I don’t understand Substack that well, but it seems like its market share would be extremely vulnerable. It’s just a way to provide a newsletter (also published on the web) and accept subscriptions (and presumably they take a cut). It’s really easy for someone to set this up themselves even with minimal tech skills. If they already have a following on Substack, they just tell their subscribers to move, and potentially could even import the subscriber list to a new platform. It’s not like social media where there’s a lot of boosting or whatever from others on the platform, so the switching costs are high.

So unless I’m missing something, I hope people who don’t want Nazis around just move somewhere else. Because from the sounds of this article, they’re not really doing much about the Nazis.

Reading the comments in that thread made me realise how little I miss Reddit. The sub is RedditAlternatives and there’s a whole lot of people in there whinging that people are talking about alternatives to Reddit. Lemmy has it’s problems, but Reddit is toxic AF.

It’s highly country specific… America’s puritanical roots seem to still hold sway. Go to Western Europe and nudity is commonplace

The research suggests it will be quite hard to remove in practice. Probably needs to be tested more in the wild though.

And it doesn’t have to be voluntary. But even if it is, the main AI companies may want to start doing it anyway. Training their models on ai generated text can lead to model collapse, so they will want a way to avoid that.