EnsignRedshirt

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.

If you think you're struggling for enthusiasm now, just wait until you start watching it.

Whatever, put cameras in and have them bluetooth to my Apple toothbrush and save it to the iCloud, fine, but "replace" the mirrors? As in rely entirely on cameras? Why? Leave the mirrors there. There's no reason not to have mirrors on the car. Extremely cheap and reliable feedback system that never malfunctions. Putting new tech in cars is all well and good right up to the point where they start creating unnecessary failure points by getting rid of solutions that already work.

It's like when they started getting rid of aux inputs in favor of USB and/or bluetooth. Why? An aux input is such a trivial thing that would cost nothing to implement, takes up almost no space on the dashboard, and always works. Granted, most current devices don't use aux cables (which I also think is a mistake for the same reasons), but that's only been the case very recently, and car companies started getting rid of them years ago when plenty of devices still had them. Plus, they're still useful if you just want to plug an audio source into a car quickly and easily with zero chance of failure, even if you'd have to use an adapter. It's nice to have the option to use USB or bluetooth, but getting rid of the aux altogether is nonsense. Getting rid of mirrors? Nonsense and potentially dangerous.

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!

This is grounds for a class action suit

I’ve heard WD40 works on some glue residues. Couldn’t hurt to try it.

Hard to believe that anyone involved in AI would stoop to plagiarism.

Making generalizations about people is a problem when the generalization is false or misleading, or is being used to make a false or misleading argument, which is often the case. If you’re wondering if a given generalization is problematic, odds are the answer is ‘yes’ otherwise you probably wouldn’t think of it as a generalization.

Bill Burr is a surprisingly thoughtful and principled guy with consistently good opinions. He's a comedian, and he doesn't have any theory underpinning his worldview, but I bet if you look at why he's been criticized in the past it's by liberals who are mad that he's being critical of liberals. I'm not at all surprised that he lit up Bill Maher on his boomer-ass Israel-Palestine takes.

Ask a friend or family member? Or just knock on a neighbor's door and ask if they have a spare egg. You could offer to pay for it, but I feel like most people would happily just give you an egg if you said you needed one for a recipe.

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.

Properly-designed tools with good data will absolutely be useful. What I like about this analogy with the talking dog and the braindead CEO is that it points out how people are looking at ChatGPT and Dall-E and going "cool, we can just fire everyone tomorrow" and no you most certainly can't. These are impressive tools that are still not adequate replacements for human beings for most things. Even in the example of medical imaging, there's no way any part of the medical establishment is going to allow for diagnosis without a doctor verifying every single case, for a variety of very good reasons.

There was a case recently of an Air Canada chatbot that gave bad information to a traveler about a discount/refund, which eventually resulted in the airline being forced to honor what the chatbot said, because of course they have to honor what it says. It's the representative of the company, that's what "customer service representative" means. If a customer can't trust what the bot says, then the bot is useless. The function that the human serves still needs to be fulfilled, and a big part of that function is dealing with edge-cases that require some degree of human discretion. In other words, you can't even replace customer service reps with "AI" tools because they are essentially talking dogs, and a talking dog can't do that job.

Agreed that 'artificial intelligence' is a poor term, or at least a poor way to describe LLM. I get the impression that some people believe that the problem of intelligence has been solved, and it's just a matter of refining the solutions and getting enough computing power, but the reality is that we don't even have a theoretical framework for how to create actual intelligence aside from doing it the old fashioned way. These LLM/AI tools will be useful, and in some ways revolutionary, but they are not the singularity.