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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.detoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldcoping
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    5 days ago

    Absolutely there is, but unfortunately the solution to CP is having moderators who can delete content, and that alone is enough to cause all the problems with moderators. It seems largely intractable to me. The only thing I could see maybe working is some system where moderators can be removed by community vote, but then you rely on systems preventing fake accounts from being created or account age to stop those votes from being botted, etc… I just don’t see how to technically solve the problem of moderators having power to delete things. It’s the classic issue of who watches the watchmen. Humanity has never had a great solution to this.


  • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.detoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldcoping
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    5 days ago

    The problem is that if you actually have no or insufficient moderation then people just start using the site to post child pornography. And then you visiting what used to be a site you like becomes basically illegal and dangerous, not to mention potentially traumatizing. I’m not exaggerating, there was a small game fan forum site I used to love along with many others, but someone caught on to the fact it was run by just one guy and kept signing up with fake accounts and posting child porn or links to it. Luckily I had already fallen off using the site by then, but one of my Internet friends who still visited it kept me updated on the drama. First everyone normal stopped visiting. Then it eventually got so bad the owner had to shut down the site.

    People lack imagination when it comes to what will happen with no moderation. It quickly becomes horrible.


  • Big insult chains like that only hit home for me if each one adds a new dimension or sense to the insult. This is just saying stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again. Reminds me of le epic reddit insults like “fuckwaffle” or whatever the hell it was. I hate conservatives and fascism as much as anyone, but it’s tiring to see such circlejerky posts that basically just say “conservatives dumb, upvote below”. I don’t need my opinion circlejerked, I’m already convinced of it without some random man telling me it’s true. And there’s nothing cathartic about reading this either because of how try-hard the insult sounds. Bleh.


  • All these AI doing X things out of context of the prompt are super misleading. Obligatory, I hate Musk and Grok. But spreading misinformation and half-truths is, and I can’t believe I have to say this, bad even if it aligns with your beliefs.

    MechaHitler has mecha in it, which of course makes it more appropriate to be chosen in some sense. You could rerun even the same prompt and likely get different answers. It’s totally meaningless. And don’t let the battleground of whether Musk is a Nazi or not shift to whether Grok says Nazi shit or not. That’s a stupid battleground with lots of ambiguity. The existing battleground of Nazi shit that Musk directly says and does is enough. It’s a stronger ground to stand on for that position. Desperately trying to append even the weakest evidence to your position just gives you more weak points that the other side can use to make you look stupid and ridiculous. Stick to the strong points, we eat too good with Musk’s direct behavior to stoop to nibbling up scraps like this.



  • I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I’d rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word “Allah”, etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don’t want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

    Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I’m not going to take that into consideration, because that’s not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

    Lastly, all other things equal, I’d rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let’s be honest, especially developers) won’t want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that’s reasonable or not, it’s hard to deny. It’s certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.


  • Gross implications of this post unless I’m misreading it. The implication of course being that the FBI is protecting Epstein’s clients but has it out for the Jan 6th people, which proves the deep state is aligned with the liberals!!!

    No, the government is aligned with the powerful. The FBI can name that ICE tracking app guy, they can name all the people arrested at the BLM protests, No Kings protests, etc. The common thread is being a nobody, not political affiliation. This is because the system doesn’t have a political affiliation. Its only affiliation is with power itself.


  • Yeah same. I respect the huge amount of work it takes to make a suite like that, but… I’m lucky I’ve worked with Blender a lot to give me a good impression of open source software. If Libre was my first thing I experimented with in the open source world (and I think for many, many people it probably is), I would probably think “wow open source software is a joke, I guess you get what you pay for after all”. It really makes a horrible impression. I wonder why LibreOffice has so many usability pains vs Blender, despite the fact that both applications have very high demand. Maybe it’s just that LibreOffice seems really dull to contribute to?




  • I do think that “the system” (not any particular person or group of people, but the more abstract social meta-organism) is evolved, all systems are, to integrate and channel possible destabilizing forces into neutralized or even system-reaffirming forces. The system does not “platform” people who would legitimately threaten the system as a general rule. Jon Oliver is a pressure release valve, if he was to propose solutions that threatened to alter the system too much (systems see significant alterations as akin to death), he would be deplatformed organically. Again, I must stress that it is not an actual person or organization explicitly setting out to do this, like some sort of shady Comedy Central Illuminati. It’s just the same as how our body has a bunch of independent organs and cells that all work together without exactly trying to or knowing that they’re doing so.

    Unfortunately Bernie is largely the same sort of thing. We can be assured of this by the fact that he is influential. Almost without exception, the more influential someone wants to be, the more pro-systemic they must be. In Bernie’s case he may not even realize how pro-systemic he is, he likely sees himself as more anti-systemic. But he is anti-systemic in the same way as a white blood cell is anti-systemic - that is, not at all, and only in appearance without inspection of the bigger picture. I suspect this is why he ends up not proposing any clear course of action. His role, although again I think he is unaware of this, is to create the sense that establishment dissent exists and is possible, that change and reform is possible. I say this without taking a stance on whether it is actually possible or not. Both in a system where it is possible and in a system where it is not possible, there would still be a flag bearer for that possibility regardless of its actual existence.

    What I mean to say is that the system self-selects for the type of people who acknowledge problems but not the type of people who make proposals to fix them. It wants to appear to be investigating the desires of its constituents while not actually doing so - the system only cares about its constituents in so far as its constituents lead to the system’s well-being as a whole. The system does not intrinsically care for its constituents well-being. So while systems do indeed evolve and legitimately investigate ways to improve their own well-being, they will only appear to investigate ways to approve the well-being of their constituents, if they can help it.

    All just my impressions of course, I hate talking in an authoritative voice about my ideas, but it’s better than prefacing every sentence with “I think”, “it seems like”, etc.


  • No, it’s actually the worst name possible. It’s the latest in a long line of giving things names that force them to be talked about like they’re good. Big Beautiful Bill. Patriot Act. It’s like if I name my proposal to make every human on Earth my personal slave the “Best Idea Ever Act That Only Stupid Evil People Disagree With”. What’s sad is that it’s actually effective. There are people out there stupid enough to really think “How can you be against the AMERICA party? Aren’t you an AMERICAN???”. It takes advantage of linguistics to manipulate psychological response to the topic. And even if you say “well actually the big beautiful bill is actually not beautiful at all” then you sound like a silly hair-splitting moron who doesn’t have an actual argument and can only attack the name.

    Furthermore it creates an ambiguity. I can no longer say “I’m proud to be an American” without tacking on “but not the Elon Musk Party kind”, which then spreads and reinforces the dominance of his term.

    The left should really try to start some sort of social media trend of saying we’re proud to be Americans just to try to undermine the ambiguity before Musk’s marketing bots get into full swing and co-opt the term.


  • I am also weary of Bernie’s endless calls to do this or that while not specifying any way of doing it. I certainly don’t expect him to do anything more, he’s already made a much larger impact than most individuals ever can or will. But that entire tour with AoC kind of felt like only half of a useful thing. We all know it’s a problem. We all want to put a stop to it. But nobody knows how, that’s what’s missing. What do you want us to do, Bernie?!? Vote in the primaries, I guess? Would be nice if the next steps were included in the message to take action. Like an instant macaroni box whose instructions just say “You must make the macaroni!”, it feels a bit silly.






  • I, too, spent longer than I ever should have thinking about this. My first thought was, they’re just using it in a linguistic sense, so it doesn’t matter that the exponent would have to be something very small to go from 1 qualification to 4. But then I thought, hm, I guess since there’s only 1 qualification for Bill, no exponent would be enough. But then I realized that grammatically the value in question is “qualification” and not “number of degrees”. The number of degrees is merely standing in as a heuristic proxy to illustrate qualification. This “qualification” scale makes the most the most sense if it’s between 0 and 1, representing percentiles of qualification. Therefore, the exponent applied to Bill’s qualifications must also be between 0 and 1 in order to increase the value to Lundgren’s. For a moment I thought this was the nail in the coffin for the original text, but of course the word “more” there again refers to the qualification, not to the exponent itself. This interpretation has the nice benefit that no matter what the exponent is, we always get a qualification value between 0 and 1. Hence I can conclude this is the only viable headcanon for this post.