He’s also the guy who tried to institute three new letters to the alphabet:

• ⟨Ↄ⟩ or ⟨ↃC⟩ for /ps/ [ps]. Modelled after ⟨X⟩ /ks/ [ks].
• ⟨Ⱶ⟩ for [ɨ]~[ɯ]~[ʉ]. Not a phoneme for sure; I typically analyse it as an allophone of /u/.
• ⟨Ⅎ⟩ for /w/ [w]~[β]. Interestingly he didn’t make a new letter for /j/, but I guess it took longer to fricativise than /w/ did.

They’re useless but show some rather interesting insights. For example, the letters were modified versions of ⟨C H F⟩ - so you don’t need to create new tools to press those letters (e.g. in wax, or to preview in charcoal something you’ll carve in stone), you can simply adapt old tools to do it. He also showed awareness of allophones in his native language, most people don’t do it at all.

I was almost mentioning that.

By Darwin, Huxley and Haldane: why are our playgrounds the same organs as the garbage ducts? Why???

The “bittersweet shipping”: you know it’s canon, and you know it’ll never happen.

I live in in the southern region of brazil. The problem of homelessness here is by no means solved but at least some State and City governments are genuinely trying, through government companies (Cohab, roughly “habitation company”).

Basically: if you have no house, and your monthly income is low enough, here you can subscribe to Cohab so it eventually “sells” you a house. You do pay for it but it’s a rather low amount*. No sane mid class would ever consider those houses - but if you’re homeless, it’s still leagues above living in an irregular shitshack near the river, made of cardboard, metal sheets and random planks.

Additionally, water and electricity are really cheap if you’re poor enough, and your household consumption is below a certain threshold.

The federation also has a similar project (Minha Casa, Minha Vida my house, my life), but… frankly I can’t trust the federation to not divert tax money into someone’s pockets.

* I think R$150~300/month ≃ €25~50/month is typical. For reference, minimum wage in my State is R$1.984,16 ≃ €300 per month.

Now, here’s the catch: the local governments are doing this shit with a tiny fraction of the income the city, state and federal governments in USA have. Why the hell are they not doing something similar? Because of all that ideological meritocracy babble?

Not in the picture: a really, really mad dragon.

They made Atou absolutely adorable! Seeing her embarrassed at the start, then pouting after the charity…

Also, great job highlighting the contrast between how Atou sees Takuto vs. how the dark elves see him. Not just in look (he looks like a shadow, that was already in the manga and novel), but also in “mood”, he’s supposed to be an Eldritch abomination from their PoV and the anime did a great job at it.

The opening was also cool IMO.

…perhaps I’m a bit too excited because it’s one of those series I anticipated quite a bit, but so far it’s a decent start IMO.

• some episodes of Ah! My Goddess, Kimetsu no Yaiba, Overlord, and Darling in the FranXX.
• Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2
• The Lion King
• Matrix

It might look completely random, and… well, it is! I’m rebuilding my “videos” directory, that I share in my LAN. By doing so I always hit something interesting, drop whatever I’m doing, and watch it.

[Warning: I’m mostly rambling.]

As usual you need to be careful with metaphors: they break once pulled hard enough.

The metaphor implies the security layers are independent, and always addictive. Often they aren’t - they interact with each other, and often the presence of one layer makes the other worse. It’s like double bagging condoms - they rub against each other, so they make you less protected than if you wore a single condom.

The “holes” are often dynamic, and they might change place over time. Sometimes the vulnerability crossed a hole of the first slice, hit the second slice and stayed there, until the second slice’s hole aligns with it. Then the vulnerability crosses into the third slice, so goes on. If you’re dealing with human beings, that’s basically any system.

“NEEDS MORE LAYERS!” is not always the solution. Sometimes you’re better off - in cost and security - if you replaced a few layers with a better one. Try mozzarella instead of Emmenthaler.

This is yet another case where people don’t notice the root of the problem, because one of the branches is so fucking large it takes the whole scene.

Spot the common element between the text and the following:

• When Internet Explorer still existed, Microsoft gave you no way to remove it.
• Later on (Edge times), Microsoft went out of its way to ignore your browser preferences and shove Edge down your throat.
• Google: Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect? Enable Play Protect?
• “Because we’re not designing a desktop for people who like to choose their own terminal emulators.” - Bastien Nocera, GNOME dev
• Plenty pieces of software offer you a choice between “yes” and “maybe later”, but rather curiously avoid the word “no”
• “Subscribe to our newsletter!” (i.e. spam). The only negative answer is worded like “I’m braindead trash thus I don’t want to subscribe”.

It’s always about actively disempowering users. Even if technology was expected to do the opposite.

Why this matters: because even if the image + text generators went away, or got heavily regulated, or whatever, the problem still persists. And it’ll still pop up elsewhere.

Solve this disgusting “Stop treating those THINGS as if they were human beings! They’re users, not humans! Those things exist to be herded!” mindset and you’ll solve the problem.

Ah, got it - I didn’t realise you’re running a personal instance. Now it makes sense what you’re doing.

If I had to guess, most people in RVs would rather live in a house. It’s just houses are not affordable in USA; I’ve seen posters from there talking about this in Lemmy all the bloody time.

Based on that I don’t think prohibition is the right way to go. Instead make sure people can afford houses, and the problem goes away. Additionally the ones living in an RV by choice would be even freer to keep with their lifestyle - those are likely not an issue when it comes to zoning laws, as the main reason you’d want to live in a wheeled home is to travel.

From that, I guess you’re browsing by “All”?

My approach was different: I browse by “Subscribed”, and I’m subbed to ~200 comms. It takes a bit more effort but it allows me to have finer control over what I see, for example I subbed to one or two political and memes comms - it’s just enough to get myself informed, but not enough to flood my feed.

Recognising recurring characters is part of the charm for me, too. And also:

While your typical lemming’s behaviour is not perfect, it’s still leagues above your typical redditor’s. For a start I used to dread the orange mail icon… as I saw it I immediately thought, “oh great here comes a dumb fuck distorting what I say”. The bell icon is still a positive for me.

My own behaviour has been positively affected. [cat analogy] I didn’t declaw myself, but I don’t feel as much of a need to extend my claws as before. [/cat analogy] In Reddit I used to pick fights all the time, I simply don’t see the need to do so here, even when exposed to the same annoyances as before.

Once your feed is curated, it’s mostly fun stuff? I do see some politics, but not as much to feel like it’s only political discussion here.

I actually trust the admin of my current instance to do what’s the best for the users, within his capabilities. I couldn’t trust the Reddit admins to die properly. And when the worst came to pass (disagreeing with how the admins of my older instance handle users), I know I don’t need to either ditch everything or suck it up.

Fuck neoliberalism. I might not like those kids giving thumbs up to authoritarianism but they’re less worse than neolib, it’s like comparing elephant shit with cat shit.

That said: a few Hexbear users are fairly reasonable, but plenty of them remind me 11yos. Specially in groups. db0 threw the bait, in a humour community for anarchists… and they all ate the bait, with malagueta sauce. No, wait, Scorpion Trinidad sauce. While screaming “I CAN STAND THE HEAT!” amidst their torrential tears.

Eventually the thing gets old, db0 gets bored and tells them to disengage.

It was funny that the nanny - who was supposed to take care of the kids - was there too. And he’s another 11yo! He forgot to edit his comment and say EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER! They might’ve left Reddit, but they still behave more like redditors than like decent people. Also, I saw a neoliberal Anglo supremacist there. Full of gullibleness. He still didn’t think on the purpose of this utterance. And yes, I’m still laughing my arse off that muppet.

I’m almost sure db0 knows why those kids are mostly defederated. And the reason his instance doesn’t do it is because, good or bad, they’re left-wing presence in the fediverse.

Hexbear users who might take offence with my comment are encouraged to address their complains about their precious feelings being violated to this form.

It’s basically my experience with translation, too: asking a LLM is a decent way to look for potential ways to translate a specific problematic word, so you can look them up in a dic and see which one is the best. It’s also a decent way to generate simple conjugation/declension tables. But once you tell it to translate any chunk of meaningful text, there’s a high chance it’ll shit itself, and output something semantically, pragmatically, and stylistically bad.

I’m not. You can’t lose trust on something if you never trusted it to begin with.

I. Talent churn reveals short AGI timelines are wish, not belief

Trying to build AGI out of LLMs and similar is like trying to build a house, by randomly throwing bricks. No cement, no foundation, just the bricks. You might want to get some interesting formation of bricks, sure. But you won’t get a house.

And yes, of course they’re bullshitting with all this “AGI IS COMING!”. Odds are the people in charge of those companies know the above. But lying for your own benefit, when you know the truth, is called “marketing”.

II. The focus on addictive products shows their moral compass is off

“They”, who? Chatbots are amoral, period. Babbling about their moral alignment is like saying your hammer or chainsaw is morally bad or good. It’s a tool dammit, treat it as such.

And when it comes to the businesses, their moral alignment is a simple “money good, anything between money and us is bad”.

III. The economic engine keeping the industry alive is unsustainable

Pretty much.

Do I worry that the AI industry is a quasi-monopoly? No, I don’t understand what that means.

A quasi-monopoly, in a nutshell, is when a single entity or group of entities have an unreasonably large control over a certain industry/market, even if not being an “ackshyual” monopoly yet.

A funny trait of the fake free-market capitalist that O’Reilly warns us about is that their values are always very elevated and pure, but only hold until the next funding round.

That’s capitalism. “I luuuv freerum!” until it gets in the way of the money.

IV. They don’t know how to solve the hard problems of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) still hallucinate. Over time, instead of treating this problem as the pain point it is, the industry has shifted to “in a way, hallucinations are a feature, you know?”

Or rather, they shifted the bullshit. They already knew it was an insolvable problem…

…because hallucinations are simply part of the LLM doing what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t understand what it’s outputting; it doesn’t know if glue is a valid thing to add to a pizza, or if humans should eat rocks. It’s simply generating text based on the corpus fed into it, plus some weighting.

V. Their public messaging is chaotic and borders on manipulative

O rly.

Stopped reading here. It’s stating the obvious, and still missing the point.

And people who don’t have bread to eat should eat cake instead. *sigh*

The website’s quality decline has been for ten years or so. I remember well how it used to be; if I had my first account there it would be, like, 16 years old? (Good riddance.)

I’m glad people mentioned PieFed there (+10 score as of now!), as well as old style forums. (I’m hoping those eventually join the Fediverse. But even if they don’t, they still have a place in my heart.)

After Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, now it’s Lyon.

I expect “[insert European government] ditches Microsoft” to become more and more common news, until it becomes non-noteworthy.

Group name: None, individual drawing. I’m just reserving the space in case anyone wants to do stuff that interacts with it (like critters climbing it, etc.)
Matrix: none
Template: link
Fun fact: it’s a tree. Very wood. Much leafy.