• 0 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle


  • Last I checked, his audience was those self-proclaimed “intellectuals”. The kind of atheists who define their identity by dunking on religious people, and the kind of mediocre people who feel superior by laughing others.

    People who look at cherry-picked and out-of-context examples of progressivism and then dismiss the entirety as anti-science wokeness. People who cherry-pick scientific beliefs (without deeper research) in the same way most religious people cherry-pick passages from their holy text. Take the (out-of-context) quotes that reaffirm what you already belief in, ignore the rest, and most importantly: Declare that your “truth” is superior to others.




  • Yeah. Putting all the effort into useless stuff like NFTs, crypto, or really even the whole terrible New Reddit into first making the actual experience better would have been much better. Make people pay for your awesome features after you actually have awesome features.

    Instead, they made the user experience worse and worse, and repeatedly broke the tools people used to make it convenient. Not to mention all the bots and bribing mods to promote Subreddits…

    Perhaps New Reddit was supposed to be their big break. Too bad it sucks so badly.


  • Yes and no. I’d prefer user choice/curating your own list of instance you interact with.

    However, each community also adds further burden on moderation. The communities you allow affect the culture, and some are very clearly more trouble than others.

    My current solution would be to have multiple accounts for different sections of the fediverse. Currently I only have a generic Kbin and a Lemmy account, but if you find a Lemmy instance that’s federated with the broader free-speech spectrum without just veering into insane territory itself, I’d be interested.


  • Kbin user here. It does not federate downvotes from lemmy. So far, I have a total of two (2) downvotes and every single interaction, including the one I got downvoted for, was quite positive.

    No toxicity in normal interactions so far. The only (slightly) toxic comment sections were regarding meta topics of users complaining about toxicity elsewhere and/or wanting to defederate more communities. Even those discussions were nearly entirely polite and productive.

    The only somwhat toxic topic I participated in was when one car-enthusiast complained about the fuckcars community and got called out throughout the comment section. Piling on like that was probably not the best way and they deleted their post some time after.



  • If Windows works fine for you and does not annoy you, there is no need to migrate.

    Personally, I’ve been mostly happy using Linux as my sole desktop OS for ~15 years. However, I only switched because Windows kept breaking and reinstalling no longer fixed it. I couldn’t imagine going back now, but a big part is probably being used to it.


    These days most major Linux distributions should be fine for desktop use.

    Linux Mint Cinnamon use to be the go-to beginner distribution. Its design is apparently somewhat similar to Windows, giving you some initial familiarity. Linux Mint is also based on Ubuntu, which used to be so widespread that many support pages and simple how-to instruction still default to explaining it for Ubuntu.
    (This can still lead to confusion if you search for “install [Windows program] Linux” and the instructions work for Ubuntu based distribution only, not for any other distros.)


    The last few years, I’ve seen a switch to Arch-based distributions around. Valve itself switched away from Ubuntu to Arch in some ways. (On Steam, the system requirements still use Ubuntu as default.) SteamOS used to be based on Debian, which Ubuntu is related to, until the Steam Deck. Now it is based on Arch. More specifically, Valve seems to default to:

    Base: Arch
    Desktop environment: KDE Plasma (more powerful/options than Cinnamon)
    Compositor base: Wayland for gaming, old X11 for Steam Deck’s desktop. (Apparently Wayland isn’t quite ready yet for that in their opinion.)

    EDIT: Fixed thanks to feedback.


    Arch itself is seen as a more technical distribution. There are extremely many support pages for every issue or question you may have, similar to Ubuntu, but some may be more difficult to understand. Still, support systems improve as the user base grows and Arch is growing.

    For specific distributions, EndeavourOS is the one I’ve heard about being the most friendly. Manjaro is also beginner-friendly, but the folks who maintain it have some serious issues with seriously fucking things up sometimes.

    https://itsfoss.com/arch-based-linux-distros/

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVlD17OjFAc (Video compiling Manjaro fuckups.)





  • OsmAnd is my family’s go-to app for navigation. I didn’t notice it missing information compared to Google Maps. The opposite really, with several hiking trails or small side-roads not being on Google some years ago. The only issue it has is navigation for more than ~200km at a time. Often, it just times out if you try that. That’s why Google Maps is still installed on some devices.

    I haven’t added anything actively. I think I might have enabled an option to send location data to improve the accuracy of the streets or something at some point, but I’m very unsure about that one.





  • Yes. Various, with various limitations.

    The simplest is Stable Horde/AI horde. Volunteers donate GPU time to the public. Please do not abuse this trust by overusing it without giving back! Great for quick experiments, though, since it requires no sign-up. Also includes a “get probable description from uploaded image” function, I’ve just noticed:

    https://aqualxx.github.io/stable-ui/about

    Personally, I’ve been playing around with leonardo.ai. It has a payment structure, but the free tier is very generous, in my opinion. You get 150 free daily token. Images cost between 1-4 token. It has a prompt generator, and you can even train your own model for free. There are also a lot of community models, since every model is set to public by default. You can even browse public images and directly copy all settings/prompts into the generator or use them for image-to-image stuff.

    The company is very much focussing on building an active community, which can be both good and bad. You are first put on a waiting list, but your account is automatically activated if you join the discord and write some comments. There are also constant community contests/challenges to earn more token.

    https://leonardo.ai/

    Edit: leonardo.ai techncally allows nsfw generations, but heavily discourages them. It has an automatic filter for any terms deemed nsfw. You may also not discuss how to circumvent that filter in the discord. (You may discuss how to bypass the filter to prompt safe for work images. E.g. you may discuss how to create Charles Dickens characters despite Dickens being filtered out.)

    Here are few more, but I haven’t tried any of them:
    https://stable-diffusion-art.com/free-ai-image-generator-sites/