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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Yeah man I know a lot of guys who drop money on shit like this. None of them are “whales”, but i know they’ve dropped hundreds if not thousands on this mtx bs. None of them own homes (which is kinda normal as we are in our 20’s), but only a few of them are even living on their own at all. Something is clearly going on psychologically there, if someone is willing to forego their own needs for cosmetics (that they will later replace with new cosmetics they bought!!)



  • Everyone with a dissenting viewpoint from your own is not some secret right-wing troll smuggling in the “wrong” viewpoints. You are not helping anyone with this mindset.

    I live in a pretty red area. I talk to a lot of people who have a lot of these right wing beliefs. Im not going to pretend these aren’t dogshit takes, they fucking suck. But like this guy is trying to tell you, these views and talking points are very prevalent. We can’t treat these people like right-wing sleeper cell trolls that just want to attack us, they are people who have been misled.

    I’ll give you an example. I was talking to someone who was a little upset we were sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. Is this a shit take? Yeah it is, but he didn’t have it because hes some russian fascist who wants to see putin recreate the USSR, he’s just living in the COL crisis like everyone else. When I pointed out it was a shit move to let ukraine burn and made him think about it, he changed his mind. Theres other shit we spend way more money on, like our military, and we should defend a country that is being annexed by another world power.

    He’s not a bad dude. He just hadn’t stopped to think about it. If i had just attacked him for it he would have just doubled down, because im being an asshole, and why would he adopt the assholes position? Thats how most people are. It sucks but it takes a lot of energy to really sift through all the bullshit, and surviving in todays world is stressful enough as it is for people. Its hard to look at the bigger picture when your smaller, immediate one is so turbulent.




  • Its a collectors game with nothing good to collect. This might seem like a silly take, and with 813 pokemon now in the game, it should be. But the way pokemon are laid out in this game is just horrendous.

    In the main series games, you LOOK for pokemon. You might just wander around the grass for a while and take what you get, but at some point, you have a shopping list. In order to find specific pokemon, you go to a specific location. You find the pokemon you are looking for, often with others similar in type.

    Well, in pokemon go, this isn’t the case at all. There are maybe 20-40 pokemon in the spawn pool at any given time. Go somewhere, ANYWHERE around you, and you are going to see more of the same. Once you have them, you wait for the next spawn rotation (sometimes thats 1 month, sometimes its 8) or events. The events are somewhere between 3 hours and 1 week long, and then you might actually have some cool shit, and the game is exciting for a bit. But after that, its back to the same old bullshit.

    Now the game is just about collecting shinies. This is really what niantic has tried to monetize. The (often only) way to get them is to either hatch eggs (buying incubators) or doing raids (buying raid passes). The other way to get them is by doing certain events where they hand them out like candy. I stopped a couple years ago when i had well over 300 shinies, because there just wasn’t a point anymore. The whole “cool collectible” factor came from them being rare, if everyone gets them in events, why is it special?






  • Sure, AI is not doing anything creative, but neither is my pen, its the tool im using to be creative. Lets think about this more with some scenarios:

    Lets say software developer “A” comes along, and they’re pretty fucking smart. They sit down, read through all of Mark Twains novels, and over the course of the next 5 years, create a piece of software that generates works in Twain’s style. Its so good that people begin using it to write real books. It doesn’t copy anything specifically from Twain, it just mimics his writing style.

    We also have developer “B”. While Dev A is working on his project, Dev B is working on a very similar project, but with one difference: Dev B writes an LLM to read the books for him, and develop a writing style similar to Twain’s based off of that. The final product is more or less the same as Dev A’s product, but he saves himself the time of needing to read through every work on his own, he just reads a couple to get an idea of what the output might look like.

    Is the work from Dev A’s software legitimate? Why or why not?

    Is the work from Dev B’s software legitimate? Why or why not?

    Assume both of these developers own copies of the works they used as training data, what is honestly the difference here? This is what I am struggling with so much.


  • Sure, but what I’m asking is: what do you think is a reasonable rate?

    We are talking data sets that have millions of written works in them. If it costs hundreds or thousands per work, this venture almost doesn’t make sense anymore. If its $1 per work, or cents per work, then is it even worth it for each individual contributor to get $1 when it adds millions in operating costs?

    In my opinion, this needs to be handled a lot more carefully than what is being proposed. We are potentially going to make AI datasets wayyyy too expensive for anyone to use aside from the largest companies in the market, and even then this will cause huge delays to that progress.

    If AI is just blatantly copy and pasting what it read, then yes, I see that as a huge issue. But reading and learning from what it reads, no matter how rudimentary that “learning” may be, is much different than just copying works.


  • Okay, given that AI models need to look over hundreds of thousands if not millions of documents to get to a decent level of usefulness, how much should the author of each individual work get paid out?

    Even if we say we are going to pay out a measly dollar for every work it looks over, you’re immediately talking millions of dollars in operating costs. Doesn’t this just box out anyone who can’t afford to spend tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on AI development? Maybe good if you’ve always wanted big companies like Google and Microsoft to be the only ones able to develop these world-altering tools.

    Another issue, who decides which works are more valuable, or how? Is a Shel Silverstein book worth less than a Mark Twain novel because it contains less words? If I self publish a book, is it worth as much as Mark Twains? Sure his is more popular but maybe mine is longer and contains more content, whats my payout in this scenario?


  • They might be bots, but I think there’s a good chunk of people who just don’t think about it, so they don’t care. Writing them off as bots won’t change that, but maybe we can help them look a few steps ahead and change some of their minds.

    What is more likely? An army of bots has been deployed to astroturf Lemmy already, or people are just ignorant to some of these issues? Probably a mixture of both. But more of Column B I would guess.


  • The craziest thing to me is that people seem to be lining up to make excuses for Meta. We learned the first week of this migration that defederating can get messy, we saw it right away with Beehaw.

    Had Beehaw defederated from the larger instances sooner, then there would have been no outrage in the community over it. But while Lemmy was seeing a lot of growth, a lot of the big communities were being made on beehaw. All of the sudden, people were unable to access these communities properly and they were PISSED.

    Guys, look around! Threads has what, 10 million users already? We have like, a hundred thousand, maybe a few hundred thousand at best? They will no doubt have huge communities formed by the time they decide they want to start federating. The ratio of Lemmy/Kbin users to threads users will be 100:1.

    If we federate with Meta we basically have no choice but to use the communities they host. People only want to use 1 community (the issue of duplicate communities is brought up daily), so they will flock to the largest one. When Meta decides they don’t want to play nice with us anymore (and they will, it is never profitable to let people access all your content completely free, and shareholders will come knocking), defederation is going to decimate whats left here. Personally I think the place would implode, and many would migrate to where the content is.