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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Like I mentioned, just because you dislike something, doesn’t mean it’s actually unfavourable, or that other people shouldn’t see it, and that holds true a lot of the times, unless you’ve sort of geared yourself such that what you dislike is also something unfavourable. But even so, you can’t assume that other people would be or do the same.

    And yeah, they’re functionally the same, but the intent is different. The point here is that votes have intentions behind it, and what we’re telling you is that it shouldn’t be a self-centric intent.

    For your last question, I actually don’t really have a good answer for you. I’ve seen many people react in similarly clueless ways in order to rile others up. I’ve also seen too many who can’t look at things pass their own lenses, can’t properly put themselves in someone else’s shoes (despite claiming they do, but what actually happens is that they’ve set up a convenient strawman of the person and put themselves in that instead), and can’t think for the sake of others, and how this shows through how they use social platforms. So I guess I’m being wary.


  • There’s likely no such thing. How you interpret upvotes and downvotes is up to you. But don’t you think that’s a more much more useful measure than “I like this” and “I don’t like this”?

    1. Nobody knows who upvoted or downvoted, at least if you don’t get to see the database or server logs. This means nobody would really know if you in particular liked some post or comment or not. IIRC Lemmy doesn’t even show you what your upvotes and downvotes are. This means you wouldn’t remember what you upvoted or downvoted.
    2. What we like or dislike has nothing to do with what is good for more people. We can dislike something, but it doesn’t mean that that something isn’t good for ourselves, or everyone else.
    3. Votes can sway where a post/comment appears depending on the sorting option.

    Given all that info, you should know that votes matter not for yourself, but for others. Want something to be more visible up top in the Top sorted comments? Upvote. Up in Hot? Upvote. Want them down the list? Downvote.

    So then the final question is, well how should I decide what do I want to be more visible and what do I want less? That’s really up to you and what you think your relationship with other people and your world is. You want chaos and like watching the world burn and have yourself caught in that too? Upvote crazy takes and downvote the sane voices of reason and care. Want to promote a healthier world where people have useful conversations that help each other in their lives? Upvote those good comments that do so.

    Get your mind off the kind of Facebook voting treadmill where it’s your own visible voice and that everything is just about “me, me, and me” and focus on others for once.

    Ofc, if you want to be a troll, have at it and do whatever you want. I’ve wasted my words on you, but I’ve at least left some words for other people.


  • Uneducated 2 cents. afaik the publishers have some kind of “part ownership”, where they can pull it out from the store whenever. The “anti-piracy” feature you get with DRMs is why many publishers actually like them tho. The part ownership thing is just icing on the cake. So no, a good chunk of publishers won’t be furious at all. DRM gives what publishers want and more, at the expense of the consumers in a way that most wouldn’t realize.

    And if anything, I think it makes more sense to think that these publishers are also just granting Amazon some kind of “license” to sell their e-books.

    Amazon would absolutely be destroying their relationship with a publisher though, if they decide to block the selling or access of a book to large group of people who are would-be buyers. But, at the end of the day, publishers want to know how much they’re making from putting their e-books on Amazon, and as long as that revenue is enough to satisfy their needs, they don’t need to care too much about the odd customer who had their book revoked, and they would generally be pretty shielded from any sort of disputes as long as Amazon is making those revoking calls.


  • This was pointed out in another comment but I will basically echo it to just give that call a boost: Point your instructor to well-regarded sources for introversion and extroversion, and let them know that the labelling in their note is not only inaccurate, it falsely attaches a wrongly defined word onto problematic behaviours that have nothing to do with what introversion and extroversion is, which is not good because it propagates a false narrative.

    If your instructor doesn’t seem cooperative and insists on being correct, talk to other instructors that you trust, or even go to those with more authority to tell them about the issue. If you can’t get anyone to actually do something, I suggest you change schools immediately, and call the school out for what they did.

    Maybe it’s just one of those days, but I have no tolerance for this sort of false narrative being spread, even if the original intention is innocuous, and especially in a school. Being forced to act in a certain way that deviates from one’s personality to not be perceived as a problematic person, especially over a badly-informed opinion, can have lasting negative consequences to children and adolescents. I’m tired of seeing introverted friends and family members suffer over the fact that they’re introverts, to the point where they will deny being an introvert and even echo these sorts of statements in order to blend in.






  • You could create an account that blocks off communities for news and technology, and any other communities that have a high likelihood of reporting on current events. Just switch to the account on days where you just don’t want to read such news, for any respectable reason you may have (it’s understandable, it can be draining).

    This should be a no-brainer, but Lemmy doesn’t really filter stuff out by default, unless the admins decide so. So as long as you’ve created an account on a fairly managed instance, and given that the current news cycle, especially in the Western & English-speaking world, you won’t be able to escape Trump and Musk, especially when they’re dominating headlines due to how they are literally affecting the lives of millions, if not billions, of people.



  • It’s the 21st century. Many of us are educated enough and have a strong enough image of what a country is. Any country may try to annex any land, but they’ll almost always face resistance. Even in the event of a full annexation, you can’t stop the people from revolting, essentially making your country look as miserable as possible to everyone. Heck, even the full cleansing of an entire population won’t guarantee you’ll reach long-lasting stability on annexed lands; people will hide, repopulate, teach their descendants about their past and forever torture your nation and its people, however horrifying of a worldview it may sound like.

    I remember reading somewhere that some department in the US gov have a paper on their inability to annex or even control foreign lands and their people. Essentially, it doesn’t matter if the USA has the most powerful military in the history of humanity; it cannot conquer the minds of people today, and will suffer from instability for a very long time.




  • This. Any time someone’s tries to tell me that AGI will come in the next 5 years given what we’ve seen, I roll my eyes. I don’t see a pathway where LLMs become what’s needed for AGI. It may be a part of it, but it would be non-critical at best. If you can’t reduce hallucinations down to being virtually indistinguishable from misunderstanding a sentence due to vagueness, it’s useless for AGI.

    Our distance from true AGI (not some goalpost moved by corporate interests) has not significantly moved from before LLMs became a thing, in my very harsh opinion, bar the knowledge and research being done by those who are actually working towards AGI. Just like how we’ve always thought AI would come one day, maybe soon, before 2020, it’s no different now. LLMs alone barely closes that gap. It gives us that illusion at best.


  • Most of us can’t help but feel powerless while trying to change the world. That’s normal, because the reality is, no one can change the world as quickly as we can make a turn at the next junction. Not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, not Vladimir Putin, not Xi JinPing. They’ve spent decades getting to where they are today, but the best they can do is do big strokes to sway the world to some extent. And these people just look so lonely; nobody seems to really understand them, neither do they seem to truly understand people, aside from knowing enough to take advantage of them, and they put up some sort of distance between themselves and others, distance in various ways you can measure. Meanwhile, most of us spend our times to be close to those we love and care, trying to be a part of a larger society in a healthy and responsible way.

    If the alternative is to give up and watch this beautiful world burn and die, watch wonderful people suffer and I turn a blind eye to their pain, I would rather continue trying, and one day die knowing that I tried, instead of regretting alone.