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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2024

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  • I’ve heard that many men do this because they’ve realized, in some capacity, that outright admitting they’re right-wing limits their opportunities. In my circles, I’ve noticed this “I’m actually a centrist/apolitical” trend is also found among popular developers and tech influencers.

    Saying you’re anti-woke gets you shunned and surrounded by horrible people, but saying you’re just apolitical gets you the blessing and protection of self-proclaimed centrists. When you, for example, marginalize LGBT folks and get called out, countless will gather to complain about people “dragging politics into tech.” Bryan Lunduke will come out of his cave and write a piece about how the trans fetish is trying to kill open source.






  • mke@programming.devtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldNotepad
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    24 days ago

    Right. In this instance, with hindsight (noticed it’s a meme community), I wouldn’t say anything. I’ve seen similar cases where the intent was to push someone down, though. I wasn’t sure, and sided with caution.

    I didn’t mean to act uptight, or attack the commenter (I tried a mild tone), my bad.







  • mke@programming.devtoComic Strips@lemmy.world[Rusty Creates] 'Artists'
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    1 month ago

    I like the tech and I want it implemented in an ethical way by someone who cares. I got into technology because I love it, I want to see humanity reach ever greater feats of knowledge and have the benefits accessible to as many people as possible. I think LLMs and image generation have enormous potential and it’d be a shame to not it see so much of it fulfilled in my lifetime.

    That said, god, I hate the absolutely insane arguments used by AI fans. Look at this comment section. It’s just the worst, most nonsensical comparisons, over and over again. Use the fill tool in paint but don’t like it when someone compares a fill algorithm with massive art theft by corporations enriching billionaires? Hypocrite. Use anything you’ve ever seen as reference but don’t think software and human beings are comparable? Hypocrite. Take pictures with a camera? Believe it or not, hypocrite.

    Can’t we agree that Sam Altman and his friends don’t have our best interests in mind? That what has been done to artists, authors, journalists, and all sorts of creators, is immoral and shouldn’t be ignored? Shit, they’re the only reason the tech is even possible! We would not enjoy such powerful image generation if not for the decades of material they’ve provided humanity and AI companies have taken without permission.

    Why are you so cruel to those who made it all possible? To frame the shoulders you stand upon, those of creators whose work was stolen and whose livelihoods are at risk, as of Luddites and elitists, then claim their protests should be ignored, is beyond disrespectful.

    Angry and scared people often lash out, and nobody likes being on the receiving end of that, I get it. I would also like it if we could talk this out calmly… But they’re the ones being kicked down. I think a bit of anger is to be expected, it’s understandable. What it isn’t, is an excuse to keep trampling over humanity’s creative workers because someone was mean to you.



  • Ironic. The translator and artist were the first ones to be killed, and now we got this bastardized AI “translation” that’s actually an entirely different image, but worse.

    This is why so many were confused about “personal,” I believe it’s a borrowed term in Brazil that popularly means personal trainer.

    Not personnel, not HR, not personal assistant, nor an AI hallucination, even as some confidently claimed them, all because the original work was discarded for a shitty alternative, much like workers themselves.


  • Most people know this in some capacity, but it’s not talked about enough: the shape of the platform massively shapes its culture. Every mechanism, intentional feature or not, is a factor in resulting user behavior and should be accounted for.

    Reddit Karma was (shitty) reputation from the start, but Slashdot user IDs became one despite being mere sequential identifiers; negative user feedback such as downvotes can be harmful to communities (yet, users without an outlet may lash out in other ways e.g. reports); even how the platform communicates with users influences them; and so on.

    I’m not saying you shouldn’t be nice and incentivize others to do the same, but unless the system naturally leads to the desired behavior, you’ll have a bad time in the long term because building culture by interactions doesn’t scale. By the time you realize there’s a shift, it’s too late; interactions will compound and affect how the average user acts faster than you can try to course-correct.

    I wish lemmy was more experimental, because by building a clone of reddit, we’ve copied too many of its faults. We’ve already got gatherings to complain about mods, and the one time devs considered changing a core component, discussion was killed by an onslaught of users. Problems with the current setup that were brought up then will likely never see that amount of people thinking about how to solve them.

    Contrast with Mastodon, which gets crap for not being a faithful copy of twitter, but their reasoning for not including quote-reblogs is understandable. They’re now putting a lot of thought into how to add them safely. Not ignoring functionality users want, but also not ignoring how it will affect culture, that’s compromise.

    I’d like it if we could talk more about how our platforms work and, particularly, how they affect us, because that’s a big way we can build better platforms, right up there with being nice.


  • mke@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    Apparently the dump doesn’t include media, though there’s ongoing discussion within wikimedia about changing that. It also seems likely to me that AI scrapers don’t care about externalizing costs onto others if it might mean a competitive advantage (e.g. most recent data, not having to spend time and resources developing dedicated ingestion systems for specific sites).

    I want to stress this: it’s not that “tech bros” are just stupid—even though a lot of them are revoltingly unappreciative of the giants whose sholders they stand on—it’s that they don’t care.


  • No one who uses Mozilla software wants more cloud shit or online services from Mozilla.

    I don’t think that’s unanimous. I’d like to use Firefox Relay, myself, and I’m willing to give thundermail a chance.

    Used to think I’d go full Proton eventually, but leaning more towards a diverse set of service providers, nowadays. It’s also my hope that these services allow Mozilla to depend less on companies like Google, and more on the users they ought to serve, which would be healthier for the org and better for users.