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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I think this is less a problem of “nefarious bad actors” and more a problem of expectations. Honestly, I agree with the quoted comment: I think they should be visible all the time, like they already are on Mbin. I think it would help change the way people think about votes so that they don’t expect Reddit-style anonymous votes and instead it’s a more public Facebook/Twitter-style like system.

    If you really want private votes, Piefed has feature that lets you anonymize your votes, but a determined bad actor could still deanonymize you. I think it’s better to change expectations than to try to massage a fundamentally public platform into having private votes, but it’s good there’s an option for people since it’s so highly requested.


  • The American Dream is inherently capitalist, it being a myth doesn’t change that.

    The crux of the American Dream is that you have to suffer on the bottom of the totem pole, but eventually you’ll get the chance to be on top and exploit the others on the bottom. The American Dream is very useful to the capitalist class because it gives people motivation to stay in the rat race, to believe that they have a stake in capitalism as a system, because one day their hard work will be rewarded and they will be a capitalist as well.

    Outside of the context of capitalism, the American Dream doesn’t really make sense. If realizing that it’s a lie helps push people to the left, that’s good and should be encouraged, but I don’t think that makes the Dream itself anticapitalist.





  • This is interesting! I’ve been exploring this and it seems like a neat little license.

    I’m not a lawyer, but one funny edge case I noticed is that the Extractive Industries module seems like it makes it a breach of license for crystal shops to use your software since you’re involved in the sale of minerals.

    I would tend to agree with FSF that it’s not FOSS, though. There are so many restrictions on this license and who can use it, based on fairly arbitrary things like “if CBP claims you’re doing forced labor” or “you do business in this specific region”. It might be more moral, but it’s a different approach than FOSS, which is less restrictive than more and prioritizes “Freedom” above everything else. Maybe it’s time for a different approach, though?




  • I think the utility of blocking people on a public platform is kind of fake anyway. If someone is harassing you, and you block them, it’s obvious that you did it so they’ll just log out and suddenly they can see your posts again. Accounts are trivial to make on the fediverse too so they can always just spin up a new one to harass you.

    I think silent filtering is better for that reason because they can’t tell that you did it so they won’t just immediately switch to a new account and keep going.

    Active blocking like you’re talking about only makes sense if there’s such a thing as “follower-only” posts imo. Otherwise it’s a false sense of security because they can see everything anyway just by logging out or switching to another account.


  • Fediverse software tends to be kind of hostile to convenience features people have grown accustomed to. Recommendation algorithms, for example. Lemmy is on the cutting edge for having a “Hot” sort.

    I know Mastodon has historically been pretty hostile to even more basic things like being able to search posts.

    I get why they think like that, and I honestly agree with some of it, but it inevitably creates a culture shock for outsiders coming from corpo media. I think that plus the network effect means the fediverse will always be kind of niche.



  • Being able to sell FOSS is one of the freedoms “free software” refers to.

    Honestly though I think the thing that struck me the most and I found kind of scummy was their “value statement” where they were advertising the OS by comparing it to the prices of the proprietary software is includes alternatives to. You misreading the website wasn’t an accident, they designed it in a deceptive way IMO.

    If they were more honest about it, I wouldn’t have any problem with them charging for the convenience of having everything pre-bundled. Of course you could set everything up yourself, but Linux is notoriously finnicky. People want a complete experience, they want support. They want the slick branding.







  • LLMs are very good at giving what seems like the right answer for the context. Whatever “rationality” jailbreak you did on it is going to bias its answers just as much as any other prompt. If you put in a prompt that talks about the importance of rationality and not being personal, it’s only natural that it would then respond that a personal tone is harmful to the user—you basically told it to believe that.