EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

“Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!”

By “generally legitimate” I just mean that they’re awarded to scientists for real things, as opposed to, like, giving the medical prize to RFK Jr. It’s still a shit institution.

Most things are named after pieces of shit. Being a piece of shit is the number one way to get something named after you. That’s not to say the Nobels aren’t a sham, but conceptually there are more offensive things than a prize that’s supposed to go to someone who contributes to humanity. Impressive that the system so effectively coopted them to do more shitty things. Important lesson there.

The science ones are generally legitimate. The literature and peace prizes have been wholly co-opted by western interests. The economics prize isn’t even a real Nobel, it’s just a prize sponsored by the Swedish central bank and administered by the Nobel Institute, and it’s a pure PR tool for legitimizing neoliberalism.

Reddit banned all the subreddits I actually enjoyed so I stopped participating altogether. It’s helpful to recognize that reddit’s structure leads to total stagnation in the content. I haven’t been active for years, but I still end up on a reddit thread from time to time to get answers to questions that Google should be answering (that’s another topic altogether) and I see the same stake jokes being made, the same arguments being had, the same mediocre insights from the same dull people, and it makes me so glad that I left. I don’t begrudge younger people going through the process of figuring out how to engage with the world, but I also don’t want to participate.

I wish we saw more (good) mobile ports of those old games. 4X/management sims are great on a touchscreen device, and the lower resolution isn’t a problem on small screens. There’s so much mobile garbage that isn’t as good as games made 20-30 years ago that are essentially abandoneare now.

I’m not even sure it’s really parasocial. There’s nothing to have a relationship with. This seems like something else, although I don’t know what you’d call it. It’s more akin to getting addicted to a video game.

But simply not liking a privacy conscious experience or utilization of AI at all? I’m not getting it?

I have heard zero people object to this extremely narrow definition of AI. This is an extremely fragile straw man that has no relationship with reality.

Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely anti “AI baked into my operating system and cell phone so that it can monitor me and sell me crap”

Well I’ve got bad news for you, that’s the only thing that the AI industry gives a shit about. That and pretending that they can replace human labor to justify wage depression and layoffs.

Also, you didn’t mention the excessive environmental impacts, or the fact that the industry is hemorrhaging money with no clear path to viability.

If you can’t think of at least a few reasons to be speculative about the current state of the AI industry then I’d go take a closer look at what’s actually going on.

Extremely jealous that someone got to use the word “Kafkaesque” correctly and in an appropriate context.

Researchers suspect that this is because screen time displaces sleep by taking up time when people would otherwise be resting.

So if we went back to the old way of doing it where we stayed up late sitting upright at the computer until we couldn’t physically stay awake any longer, that wouldn’t be considered disruptive? I’m just trying to be cozy for my late couple hours of browsing. I’m not going to be going to sleep earlier. This has nothing to do with bed. Bed is a saint. You leave bed out of this.

I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that it’s accurate and something that continues to be a problem.

This isn’t new. Every job posting is always in a superposition of being real or not real until someone actually gets hired. Job postings are used as bait to get cheaper talent, as an implicit threat to existing employees that they might be replaced, as a way to gain negotiating leverage with internal candidates, etc. There are no rules about job postings, you can literally post any job with any salary and any requirements, of course they’re going to be abused by any number of bad actors.

The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.

Memes are reposts! That’s their defining characteristic! They become memes by being reposted! If they didn’t get reposted, they would not be memes!

Internal politics is going to be responsible for some of it. This is an unexpected opportunity for individuals to advance their careers or agendas outside of the usual process, and some of them are going to take the opportunity. They might not even dislike the idea of Harris being the nominee, but they want to find a way to use their support to their advantage. The Democrats are hardly a monolith, they’re a broad coalition that barely holds together at the best of times, it’s not that weird that there would be conflict.

There’s also the issue that there hasn’t been any sort of democratic process to select a new nominee. Harris makes sense for a number of reasons, and the party does have the authority to nominate whomever they want, but they have to avoid making it look like the party insiders are just coronating a new nominee. It’s bad optics, if nothing else. This is also a pretty unprecedented situation, and it seems like no one knew it was going to happen for sure. It makes sense that there’s a conversation out in the open about who is going to be the nominee.

As a candidate, she’s not the best choice, but she’s an improvement over Biden. I doubt she would have won a genuinely competitive primary process. She’s probably in the best position to be the nominee at this moment, but there are no doubt plenty of people who feel that this could have been handled better and are going to make their opinions heard.

If you already struggle with some form of mental illness, it’s probably best to assume that you’re being irrational, rather than ascribe any meaning to this particular thing. There is a lot of random stuff that happens, and you could project meaning onto any of it to create a narrative. Unless you have a good reason to believe that a specific person or group is messing with you (not just a vague sense of unease) then it’s very likely that it means nothing.

This is surprising to read. Ukraine was never going to have enough ammo, weapons, or manpower to win the war, but I never thought the western media would run out of cope.

Elon Musk got me to stop using Twitter.