• 95 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • holy fuck what an embarrassing post

    You’re giving “David,” and I doubt very much you’re personally familiar with him, credit where it isn’t due.

    hey “David”, this fucking weirdo goldbug gold stockpiling enthusiast says we don’t know you

    anyway, I had to dig through way too many of your unending awful posts (please log the fuck off) to find out that the reason why you’re in here posting about gold is because you’re into the other thing weirdo ancaps love:

    Of course, BitCoin is doing better than ever, and it will continue to rise while Russia is under sanctions and drives demand.

    Unless you do what they call a “rookie move” and don’t keep a personal wallet.

    so how about you fuck off out of buttcoin






  • once upon a time a guy named paully sucked at lisp, but most people couldn’t tell so they figured he must be good at it

    then he made a website that was an ugly orange color, and everyone assumed it was ugly on purpose even though every web site paully makes is ugly and barely functions under load

    then paully implemented moderation structures on the orange site that both cloak and enable discrimination and bullying, and everyone figured that couldn’t be correct because the orange site said it had good moderation

    and now paully’s godawful startup accelerator is run by openly fascist little freaks and all it does anymore is AI, but the orange site says it’s prestigious and not at all a multi-layered affinity grift

    the moral of the story is fuck paul graham









  • I think you’re absolutely correct, and this feels to me like the only reason why we’re seeing some of the bizarre shit we’ve been keeping an eye on:

    • several old forums, all of which are unique high-quality data sources, are being polluted by their own admins with backdated LLM-generated answers. this destroys that forum as a trustworthy data source and removes it as competition for the LLM that already scraped the forum — and, as a bonus, it also makes training a future LLM on that data source utterly impractical without risking model collapse.
    • Wikipedia refuses to compromise on quality in general, so it’s under increasing political pressure to change. the game here is to shut down or pollute the original data source by any means necessary, so that the only way to access that data becomes an LLM. the people behind the AI startups are experts at creating monopolies, and shutting down a world-class data source like Wikipedia or making it otherwise unusable would guarantee a monopoly position for them.

  • I keep stopping myself from doing this exact project, with the fediverse as the curation source, several times. I’ve talked about this before, but interestingly Postgres’ full-text search is effectively the complete core of a search engine, minus what you’d need for crawling and ranking (which is where curation and a bit of scripting would come in)

    other than resources and time, one big open question is how to do this kind of thing as a positive part of the fediverse — to not make the same mistake that a bunch of techbros already have and index the fediverse without consent. how does one make the curation process simultaneously consensual and also automated enough that it can be reasonably ruggedized against abuse?


  • The philosophy is: your content is what matters, everything else is a bonus. Put in effort, not money. We’re making punk rock here. I did fanzines in the ’80s and books in the 2010s on the same principles.

    this is brilliant, and it’s worth keeping in mind for anything independently produced or self-hosted. for our instance’s infrastructure, I do as much as I can with what we’ve got before I increase our monthly bill, and with proper planning you can make the compute you’ve got stretch to handle a lot more requests and users than you might think from modern cloud doctrine, which is built around throwing money at your problems.

    to return to the subject of media production, it’s very easy to spend money and damn yourself into spending more later: an expensive microphone might need an XLR soundboard or newer audio computer to work well, the expensive video editor likely comes with a subscription fee or paid upgrades, and so on. it’s unwise to start out by splurging, because working on the style and content of what you’re producing will get you better results for much cheaper, and you won’t trap yourself into paying more than anticipated.

    Export at 720p as “MP4 (H.264 va).” I could go to 1080p, but this is a talking head show and you don’t need my nose hairs that sharp.

    this is an excellent point too, and it’s something that’s easy to forget just viewing videos. as a viewer, I usually want 4k if it’s available but will go down to 1080p or 720p if bandwidth’s a concern. for production: chances are 720p’s more than enough to start with, especially for YouTube, and it needs a whole lot less in terms of resources and attention to detail to look good than 1080p or especially 4k.