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Cake day: Jul 02, 2023

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In my experience discord literally feels like I’m in the room with someone. I use it constantly and it’s been great for me. Phones on the other hand are kinda garbage. The signal is consistently unreliable. Sometimes I literally get calls where one of us can’t hear the other. Sometimes several calls in a row. Occasionally calls just don’t even go through.



It depends on whether the server you’re on is boosted, also. But even a standard voice server is better quality than a phone. Phones may technically be able to play audio with a higher bitrate, but that’s limited by both cell service and speaker quality.


More reliable too, honestly. Plus the video streaming is indispensable. Honestly, discord voice chat is a big part of the reason I haven’t made a serious attempt to use Matrix for much if anything. The lack of push to talk is a deal breaker. Also like, none of my friends are there.



Hitler, he only had one ball

Goring, had two but very small

Himmler had something sim’lar

And poor old Goebbels had no balls at all

I dunno. I can’t see more than two of those names in succession without this popping into my head.


Trump is aging like a Nazi opening the Ark of the Covenant.




The covert Trumpism supporters have been busy lately. Every thread about anyone pushing back, they’re out here dragging the energy down. Every time someone in authority starts pointing toward a constitutional crisis, they’re here to chime in with ‘the constitution is already dead’. Every time a judge makes a ruling against the Trump administration they’re happy to trot out ‘it means nothing’. Every time a Democrat actually pushes against this administration they’re here to say ‘you’re doing nothing’.

Incredibly suspect.


Being relatively a relatively unknown outlet that forces extra steps on anyone who wants to read their articles probably sets the bar pretty low. Especially when a lot of people will just share archive links.


Depending on what it is you’re trying to make, it can actually be helpful as one of many components to help get your feet wet. The same way modding games can be a path to learning a lot by fiddling with something that’s complete, getting suggestions from an LLM that’s been trained on a bunch of relevant tutorials can give you enough context to get started. It will definitely hallucinate, and figuring out when it’s full of shit is part of the exercise.

It’s like mid-way between rote following tutorials, modding, and asking for help in support channels. It isn’t as rigid as the available tutorials, and though it’s prone to hallucination and not as knowledgeable as support channel regulars, it’s also a lot more patient in many cases and doesn’t have its own life that it needs to go live.

Decent learning tool if you’re ready to check what it’s doing step by step, look for inefficiencies and mistakes, and not blindly believe everything it says. Just copying and pasting while learning nothing and assuming it’ll work, though? That’s not going to go well at all.




I’m pretty sure people thought Trump would be good at economics literally just because of the Apprentice. Manny more people in the US watch reality TV than have any real understanding of politics. Look at all the Trump voters who literally seemed to have no idea he would do any of the things he very loudly said he was going to do. They just remember him being the boss guy who was supposedly good at business from that one show they watched about business.


In what world does it take two people to “make” a piece of malformed AI schlock?


So he’s going to do the same thing he did to his fanboys to the government? Oh good. Can we impeach this guy yet?


I caught some of the stream of this last night, sans audio. It’s crazy how plainly Vance and Johnson wear their evil on their faces. Vance has some pretty visible moments of shame, but you can see how well Johnson hides his from himself with that smug grin. They’re both dying inside, to be sure, but you can really see the psychological somersaults Johnson is doing on display.

I don’t know how people can look at them and not see it immediately before they even open their mouths.


To be fair, it’s almost infinitely cheaper to hire a bunch of people to post in threads muddying the waters of any discussion than it is to fix any given issue. If any public criticism devolves into bickering, it’s hard for outside observers to make enough sense of it to heavily impact sales.

Look how well it worked for the election. With a proof of concept that dramatic lying around, what money-grubbing executive wouldn’t want to follow the example?


You can. You just can’t have a small iPhone. Android phones are also a mainstream product, they’re just not popular with people who have thousands of dollars to blow on iPhones.

Android phones are, in fact, more popular than iPhones worldwide, and have nearly half the market in the US.

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users


It is illegal. If this is something you’re worried about happening in your local area, I’d recommend making a fuss about it. If you can find evidence of specific people doing this, collect it and make sure the law is enforced. If you know a local library is being targeted, get them to take steps to minimize the risk of it happening. Things like making sure any large trash bins are readily visible to librarians or developing policies about just glancing in the trash every now and then to see if books have been thrown away might be helpful.

You can also probably help by keeping an eye out for books that may be targeted. If there are books you think might be subject to these sorts of actions, you could make a list of them and drop by to check on them every now and then. See if they’re on the shelves. If they’re not on the shelves, ask if they’ve been checked out. If they’re missing from the shelves and also haven’t been checked out, consider looking around to see if you can find them hidden away somewhere or buying a replacement to donate.

It probably isn’t simple to enforce this and to protect books from being removed from the shelves sneakily, because somebody has to put the work in. But if you care enough to do so, there’s no reason that person can’t be you.


Yeah. That’s certainly a possibility. Thinking about it won’t give me the answer, though. It could be that, it could also be something else. We don’t learn the truth of what’s going on in the world by just making up a good-sounding explanation and assuming we must be right, even if that’s how people discussing things on forums largely operates.


I mean, yeah. That’s the less than optimistic guess to make. But it’s a guess, it isn’t definitive. It’d be nice to know if that’s what they’re actually doing or whether it’s just a change in language to cover their own ass. Because both are pretty common.


From the Mozilla forums.

I’m curious what “Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches, for example” means. Like, is that literally just the search I type into the browser bar, or are they talking about scraping data from my browser to improve my searches the way a lot of phone apps do?

I could see some government somewhere passing a data security bill of some kind that makes rules around collecting and using data that redefines what that means in a way that includes something Firefox is already doing. I could also see them using this as a sneaky foot in the door as they plan to ramp up data profiteering like so many companies already have.

It would be nice if they’d clarify their reasoning for doing this a bit more specifically.


I don’t. I hope they get derailed and don’t have enough time to do nearly so much damage. I hope 10 years from now it’s an embarrassing mistake that comes as a wake-up call to people and prompts them to grow.

Why would you want to see shit get as bad as it possibly could? Just to dunk on some random people? To be right? The hell’s the point?

The instinct toward feeling superior being more important than having a decent world and a stable country is the reason we’re in this mess to begin with.


Another attack on trans women by people who almost certainly don’t know the names of even a half dozen non-olympian women who are professional athletes or a single trans athlete.


I literally am just trying to figure out how I’m going to keep making enough money to survive. I’ve been going through an insane level of instability over the past year. I’ve managed to get my mental state to a much less helpless place than it was a few months ago, but in terms of actual stability? I don’t even know what my life would be looking like in a few months if this wasn’t happening.

I have no fucking clue how I’m meant to be doing anything more than keeping my head above water. I’ve been sounding the alarm about this shit for years. I’ve been trying to get people aware and motivated, and I’ve had some success. But right now? I’m just trying to keep myself safe and I’m not sure how to do that.

I’ve been the person who resists the bystander effect so many times in my life. I’m the person who breaks up fights at parties. I’m the person who steps up and says something when they see something fucked up. I’m the person who’s stuck my neck out to stand up for the right thing even when it made me a pariah. But I don’t know how to do that now. And honestly, reading vague lists isn’t really giving me any further ideas.

The best I know how to do is not get completely overwhelmed by hearing the kind of rhetoric I’m hearing about myself and people like me from our government and from the people who’ve propped them up. Literally just figuring out how to do something as simple as get out of bed when I’ve got a neighbor who suddenly feels bold enough to throw transphobia right in my face in a world where I don’t even feel like I can safely apply for a passport.

I’m literally just trying to keep my finances straightened out and keep some kind of hope alive. I can’t be the person to fix this. I wish I could. Some days it feels like I have a target painted on my back just leaving the house, and I live in a pretty safe area of a pretty safe state. I worry about my friends who don’t. I worry that I don’t have the resources to do much of anything to help them other than talk to them and be there for them. I know that’s not nothing, but compared to all the shit going on it kind of feels like it is.

I don’t know who to point at and say “hey, I need help”, let alone who to point at and say “hey, this other person needs help”.




I’m not sure the US saying “okay, Putin gets whatever he wants” is going to be as effective as Trump would like to think.


… One could say the same of participation in the electoral process. Taking your ball and going home doesn’t work any better as a voter than as an official.


Wah! I refuse to leave the leopard cage and don’t understand why there are leopards in it!


Posts like this make me question the wisdom of being on Lemmy. The more I look at the kind of messaging I see on this platform, the more I think maybe it isn’t great. It’s a lot of demotivating, depression-inducing, defeatist gloom and doom and far fewer calls to action than I remember seeing on other platforms in previous conservative administrations.

I’m starting to feel like having a particularly leftist environment where the most frequent message is “we’re fucked the there’s nothing we can do about it” mostly just works to prevent the people who might actually get together and do something from doing anything at all.

I’m also not really sure where else to go for content aside from YouTube and Ground News though, at this point. Maybe we would benefit from considering the impact of the kind of things we’re signalling to the rest of the left, though. Because I’m not sure this is helping at all, and it may be actively making the situation worse.

We have ample reason to be discouraged, but I’m not sure targeting the only block of voters and potential activists who might actually both give a shit and be educated enough to get something to budge in order to inflict depression is a good strategy.


Nah, inability to produce the actual image is the point. All the “artist” did was type in a box, so that’s all the purchaser gets.


It would be kind of funny to offer AI schlock for sale and then give the buyer a framed copy of the prompt instead of the print itself


Everyone knows in real life your shoes come apart every 15 minutes and if you don’t eat every 20 minutes you’ll immediately die.


So… No one should ever give any feedback on what kinds of thread anyone else posts? Not sure I agree with that.



Agreed.

This is actually why I stopped using Startrek.website, though. One of their mods posts constant updates about STO. Honestly, I’m pretty sure he’s employed by STO.


To be fair, it is kind of odd to post patch notes. All sorts of games get new patches all the time. If people start making a habit of posting every set of patch notes for the games that they play, it’d very quickly become a substantial portion of the posts here.

Personally, if people were regularly spamming patch notes I’d probably eventually either block the community or block the poster.


How do we shift power to the state level? Can we break up the US?
With each one of Trump's announced appointments, it looks like the situation in the Federal government is getting worse. Even before the gutting of our Federal agencies occurs, we're still dealing with the court system stripping away sound policies both at the highest levels and in backward districts, often seeming to come down to a decision by a single judge in Texas. So what can we do in states that actually want to make things better to either work on our own or even begin to pull away from the decision making of the backward parts of our country that keep making these decisions for us? How can we act without their input? How can we pull back the money that blue states that are doing well funnel into red states that could scarcely afford paved roads without our tax dollars? Is pulling out of the US or creating a smaller state-to-state coalition to consolidate our collective financial power reasonable or possible? In Massachusetts we have a ballot initiative process, but it takes years to get it together to get a question on a ballot, and by then we're likely to be much further down this road. What can we do *today*? How do we petition our representatives to pull us out of this absolute mess as much as possible? How do we maintain the protections, freedoms, and quality of life that our own local and state governments and the voters that put them into power have signaled their desire to secure in the face of a Federal government where RFK decides the health care policy and Elon Musk literally gets his own meme department?
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Want to impact the election? Tell your friends to vote!
>Using the formulas from corollary 1 of Aronow and Green [2013], we find that untreated compliers have an implied turnout rate of 66.88%, whereas treated compliers have an implied turnout rate of 78.48%. Given the high base rate of voting among compliers in this study, it is interesting that friend-to-friend appeals elevated turnout so profoundly. The results of this study suggest that simply talking to your friends, even just through a text message, is *far more likely* to get them to go out and vote than organized but impersonal voter mobilization. If you want to secure the outcome of the election, text or call your friends about it, especially your friends in swing states. Moreover, *encourage them to do the same*. If a text will increase their voter participation, it'll probably also get a decent number of them to send a similar text themselves. Gloom and doom is not going to win the election. Endless panicked articles are not going to win the election. People going out and voting will, and you, person reading this, have the power to get more people to go vote. It will do more than a century of posting on Lemmy would.
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Android Dialer App Recommendations?
For years I was using Drupe, but they've thoroughly enshittified. What used to be a sleek, extremely functional dialer app with a fantastic UI has become a slow, ad-filled sack of garbage with a still pretty good UI. A few months back I had enough and I switched to FOSS Dialer. The biggest thing on my radar was looking for something that isn't prone to being turned to adware garbage for a quick quarterly profit, so it seemed like a good fit. But in the past few months I've probably made more accidental calls in a single week than in the years that I used Drupe. It's super obnoxious. Click once, and I call some random person. When I open my phone it literally just starts at the top of my contact list. Drupe was great because I could arrange which frequent numbers I wanted to use in which order along the left side of my screen and calling or texting just required me to drag it over to a spot on the right side of my screen. I could call people without looking at my phone, I hardly ever called the wrong number or accidentally dialed someone, and it was really comfortable and easy to use. If it hadn't turned to a bloated piece of crap I'd have used it forever. So my question: is there anything more along the lines of Drupe in terms of UI that is at least not at the moment packed full of ads, slow as hell, and collecting all sorts of data? I've kinda had it up to here with FOSS Dialer.
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Hallucinated AI Dependencies as Vectors for Attack
Archive Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20240330224149/https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/ This is fascinating. I've certainly seen AI hallucinating things like imaginary functions in gdscript. Admittedly, it does it a lot more with gpt3 than with gpt4 on a subscription, which is consistent with what 3 vs 4 has access to, but I'm sure the problems apply in a lot of other use cases that might have not had the benefit of more recent documentation. I suppose it's not surprising that a number of larger entities have been falling prey to this, as they keep trying to inappropriately jam AI into their production lines where it's incapable of doing the job. Pretty clever vulnerability to find, though. Ultimately, this is probably a good thing for human coders, imo. The more LLMs demonstrate that they're not effective without robust human intervention, the better.
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I was trying to do a memory test to see how far back 3.5 could recall information from previous prompts, but it really doesn't seem to like making pseudorandom seeds. 😆
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