> I can tell you're not a parent, because if you were, you would know that basically none of the digital solutions provided by tech companies to facilitate gating adult material from children actually work or are in any way thoughtfully designed.
I can tell you Nintendo's parental controls work correctly. Even the eShop doesn't display any content not suitable for younger ages for accounts under the parental control restrictions if configured correctly.
> I have never seen any form of create generative model output (be that image, text, audio, or video) which I would rather see than the original prompt.
I've used LLM before to document command-line tools and APIs I've made; they aren't the final product since I also tweaked the writing and fixed misunderstandings from the LLM. I don't think the author would appreciate the original prompts, where I essentially just dump a lot of code and give instructions in bullet point form on what to output.
These generated documentation are immensely useful, and I use them all the time for myself. I prefer the documentation to reading the code because finding what I need at a glance is not trivial nor is remembering all the conditions, prerequisites, etc.
That being said, the article seems to focus on a use case where LLM is ill-suited. It's not suited for writing papers to pretend you wrote a paper.
> I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting
Looking at the example posted, I'm not convinced that most people's original thoughts on gimbal lock will be more interesting than a succinct summary by an LLM.
> The fediverse stuff works pretty well as far as I can see.
Not the grand parent, my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.
> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.
If you pay attention to the few notable people in their fields, they describe some of the problems such as:
I read this thread and it's not really clear what it's about. It seems to be about the need to mute and block people explicitly. I haven't had to do that much with Mastodon. I had to do it a lot on Twitter, and by all accounts it has gotten much, much worse.
I called the Fediverse a "regression" for a reason. You could lose all your blog posts, too --- there were things that mitigated the risk, just like there are with the Fediverse, but there were no real promises.
My point is, it's a regression back towards a world nerds tend to aver was a kind of golden age of reading and writing online. A lot of the things people now say they appreciate about Twitter are part and parcel of the way Twitter destroyed that golden age. Now we've got it back. I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.
>I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.
lots of "new world" people used to the new ways, some old people changed, and other old people have simply withdrawn from the conversation.
I think the issue is still size, as well as a more general audience. Mastodon is nowhere near as large as twitter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still has more users (not necessarily more conversation) than the Usenet days ever had. And of course that demographic will be very different from those in the 90's.
we can go back to old tech. Really hard to go back to old culture.
Personally I couldn't stand to use Mastodon without a lot of keyword blocks and blocked users.
There are a lot of people on Mastodon who use the word "fascist" the way some people use the word "fuck". I block that. I block the names of most national Republican politicians because I hear enough about how bad Trump is from the MSM.
There are people on Mastodon who have an absolute fit because somebody replied to their post and unfortunately it is being framed like the "reply guys" are the problem
and not people who take a fit on the slightest provocation. My take is that when Twitter went to hell the bottom 1% of disagreeable people left first to go to Mastodon and you find them there.
I have never had that problem, nor have I personally seen anyone have that problem.
The "you are replying to someone you have no connection to" warning is a good idea. I thought Twitter at one point did something similar. For me, it has nothing to do with any "Reply Guy" phenomenon, but rather countering the weird parasocial thing that happens to make people feel entitled to join conversations they're not a part of as equal (in the conversational sense) peers. You can talk to strangers! But in real life, there is a protocol and a set of norms for doing so. The norms Twitter replaces them with are unworkable and terrible.
I have noticed that some people still take the server affinity thing seriously, that they might work to create bonds with people that happen to be on the same server. I don't think that model is long for the world. I think we're going to end up somewhere similar to Blogger, where most people "run" their own "instances", which are really just tiny managed slices of huge multitenant servers, and the idea of talking mostly to people on "your same instance" will be as archaic as webrings.
It's funny. We yearn for the days when everybody had a quirky website at ~username on their university server, but all those sites disappeared when you graduated.
Single-user instances, maybe not. But running a Mastodon instance for a couple of thousand people is a lot more resource intensive than running a blog or a XMPP server for the same amount of users.
>my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.
I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub? that your comments aren't contained on any one instance and are yours to move around.
And why is your instance shutting down?
-----
from link:
>I can probably count on one hand the number of times I had to block people because, get this, Twitter had a quality filter which caught most insufferable people
I guess "had" is the underrated word there. But even then I'm confused. There were entire curated block lists made because some people were so pervasive in so many circles while skirting the rules.
>My needs and experience here are likely VERY different from yours. At this point, they're often too different to reconcile.
Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net. Strictly moderated popular forums just isn't a thing on the modern net. You need to go to a less popular, lower traffic place for such management.
> I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub?
To allow others to see your posts, yes.
But if your instance goes away, instances can't fetch those posts anymore and admins of Mastodon instances shutting down tend to run a process that prunes users/history across the fedi too. Even if they don't, that information fades, especially as status authentication is a thing now (checks original instance for the post existence).
Then further, if you move to another server, that history is not attached to your new account either etc.
> And why is your instance shutting down?
This time it's due to new laws that the UK has introduced around social media websites. Previously it's been stuff like admin didn't want to do it after getting bullied. Not enough money. Lost all data and can't be bothered anymore etc.
> I guess "had" is the underrated word there.
I don't believe he's on Twitter anymore.
> Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net.
I believe this is currently handled by "algorithms" on the major social media networks.
It's interesting to me that the ones who really have a problem with this change are those who already left Twitter. But, having removed themselves from being the target demographic and already indicated that they won't return; I'm very much in agreement with you here that these changes are now much more with the flow.
This article is so bizarre compared to my personal experience.
> If you’re on Twitter today, you’re likely experiencing an app that is more frequently broken
I'm not, I used to get loading issues all the time in years past, not anymore.
> more random
More random ads, but actually less stuff I don't want.
> and more unhinged
The day after Elon sent all those people home to let them know if they were fired, I never got the political stuff anymore, just the content I was interacting with all along, which happens to be photography and art.
> Many users are complaining about seeing more content in the new For You feed that they don’t want to see.
I scrolled through mine, literally only photography stuff if you ignore the ads.
>
The problem is, Musk’s plan doesn’t seem to be working as well as he’s saying. Twitter’s web traffic dropped by nearly 8 percent last month compared to the year before, and has been dropping for the past three months year over year, according to new estimates from data intelligence firm SimilarWeb. This directly contradicts Musk’s claims that usage is up.
I don't think that's a contradiction because similarweb doesn't measure app usage.
My photography interactions have only increased since last year too...
Yeah I noticed that the home timeline improved drastically literally the very first day that the layoffs started. My tweets also started getting more attention. They also used to push Euphoria (and other celeb gossip) content a lot, no matter how many related words I muted it still found a way back into my TL.
All of this stopped immediately after the takeover.
I think it's pretty obvious now that the employees were spending a lot of time directly "curating" recommendations (if not just boosting their own tweets or friends tweets).
ArchiveTeam's general idea is to archive it first, and make it usable later. Wayback Machine is generally how stuff is "made usable", but in cases like this, a searchable index might need to made. (That's been done before, though - it's not like it's never happened.)
The difference is that Marx was racist in addressing the racism of his time, but he proposed that communism would be the solution. This solution is different from the Final Solution in that communism would remove the elements he was racist against through economic pressure as opposed to ghettoization and genocide.
For the Jewish Question, he shared some antisemitic views towards Judaism with his peers. The difference is that he advocated for their incorporation into society as opposed to being second class citizens. He believed that the transition from capitalism into communism would reform Judaism away from what they were antisemitic about.
I can tell you Nintendo's parental controls work correctly. Even the eShop doesn't display any content not suitable for younger ages for accounts under the parental control restrictions if configured correctly.