Everyone who disagrees with you is a bot, probably from Russia. You are very smart.

Where did they say that? They just said bots in general. It’s well known that Russia has been running a propaganda campaign across social media platforms since at least the 2016 elections (just like the US is doing on Russian and Chinese social media, I’m sure. They do it on Americans as well. We’re probably the most propangandized country on the planet), but there’s plenty of incentive for corpo bots to be running their own campaigns as well.

Or are you projecting for some reason? What do you get from defending Putin?

Because Bluesky is centralised.

You say that like that isn’t exactly what the majority of people want. When I first left Reddit, I was trying to explain Lemmy and federated services to some friends and one of them immediately replied with “why would you want that?” And this was from a guy who owned and operated his own TeamSpeak server just for his friends to use.

The average person wants a service that’s easy to use first and foremost, and that is always going to be easier to do with a big centralized one owned and operated by a large company. They just want to be able to make an account and connect with friends and content. They don’t care about things like privacy until it actively harms them.

The short of it is that he was an entry point for the MAGA pipeline years back. I don’t know if he still schills for white supremacist podcasts and the like anymore, though.

I mean, he did a little more than “one too many Nazi jokes.” Including, but not limited to, supporting white supremacists and advertising their social media and books on his channel and social media platforms.

The number of people that I’ve heard (especially teenagers) arguing that “it’s normal over there” was honestly disheartening. He was a major component of the MAGA pipeline in the years leading up to Trump’s first presidency.

In short, AI is useful when it’s improving workflow efficiency and not much else beyond that. People just unfortunately see it as a replacement for the worker entirely.

If you wanna get loose with your definition of “AI,” you can go all the way back to the MS Paint magic wand tool for art. It’s simply an algorithm for identifying pixels within a certain color tolerance of each other.

The issue has never been the tool itself, just the way that it’s made and/or how companies intend to use it.

Companies want to replace their entire software division, senior engineers included, with ChatGPT or equivalent because it’s cheaper, and they don’t value the skill of their employees at all. They don’t care how often it’s wrong, or how much more work the people that they didn’t replace have to do to fix what the AI breaks, so long as it’s “good enough.”

It’s the same in art. By the time somebody is working as an artist, they’re essentially at a senior software engineer level of technical knowledge and experience. But society doesn’t value that skill at all, and has tried to replace it with what is essentially a coding tool trained on code sourced from pirated software and sold on the cheap. A new market of cheap knockoffs on demand.

There’s a great story I heard from somebody who works at a movie studio where they tried hiring AI prompters for their art department. At first, things were great. The senior artist could ask the team for concept art of a forest, and the prompters would come back the next day with 15 different pictures of forests while your regular artists might have that many at the end of the week. However, if you said, “I like this one, but give me some versions without the people in them,” they’d come back the next day with 15 new pictures of forests, but not the original without the people. They simply could not iterate, only generate new images. They didn’t have any of the technical knowledge required to do the job because they depended completely on the AI to do it for them. Needless to say, the studio has put a ban on hiring AI prompters.

• This is likely the first major outage of the company since Musk took ownership in 2022.

Didn’t Twitter go down multiple times for similar periods of time not long after Musk fired everybody? Or am I just hallucinating wishful thinking.

Plug that random USB stick you found on the sidewalk directly into the server and open up Link_ParkFullAlbum-LimeWire.exe

I don’t know the 5 9s reference, but the two 8s is 88, a Nazi dog whistle for Heil Hitler, as H is the 8th letter of the alphabet.

There was somebody crazy enough to make an entire game in Blender, I don’t doubt that somebody has at least tried to make a soundtrack in Blender.

I refer to this as the Wind Waker effect.

Before Wind Waker was announced, Nintendo did a reel showing off the power of the GameCube that included a “realistic” (for the time) fight scene between Link and Ganondorf. So when they announced a new Zelda game, people were hyped for a gritty realistic Zelda, and when the first trailers appeared, people hated it.

For years after its release, Wind Waker’s art style was dragged on by people, but today, it’s remembered as one of the most iconic Zelda games from that time period and a major influence on the aesthetic of many Zelda games after it.

Today, its art style looks just as good as it did when the game first launched, while most other games from that time period - especially those that went for high fidelity and realistic graphics - look outdated.

A good art style is timeless and will always age better than trying to push the envelope on graphical fidelity or realism.

Unless they’re into that.

But this isn’t about kink shaming foot fetishists - it’s about the power dynamic and bruising Trump’s ego. It’s about as NSFW as you can get without getting into major trouble. Showing dommy mommy fElon in latex holding a leash and Trump on his knees wearing a pup mask on TVs in a government office would be hilarious and amazing, but I don’t know if you’d survive long enough to laugh about it.

Depends on whether you have an Android or iPhone for 99% of people. Or, they use an email account that their ISP provider created for them when they signed up.

They want a backdoor so they can use it, but so can everyone else if they know where it is. In some ways, that makes it worse than having no encryption at all because it gives you the illusion of safety when in reality, if people know how to jiggle the handle of your door the right way, they can walk right into your living room at any time.

Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can’t see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.

Very true. I was just saying that you can also blame enshittification for it going down like it has as well. Burning the candle at both ends and all that.

This brings up an interesting point because my first thought when I read “inundated with sexualized media their whole lives,” my first thought was, “In this Puritan culture?!” On the one hand, ads are all about using sex to sell products, while on the other, advertisers want nothing to do with anything that isn’t ‘kid friendly’ content. You just need to look at how sanitized the internet has become by corporations to see that at work.

But I think there’s something to be said there, and I think it goes deeper than just “the kids these days live in a Godless society of homosexual perverts” or whatever. I think the normalization of sex and availability of information about sex and sexuality has probably influenced it. I’d also say that the current state of the world and the stress of daily life have as much of an influence on this as the amount of sexualized media in their everyday lives. It’s been a noticeable thing with Milennials having less sex and fewer kids from stress, both financial and otherwise, and I see no reason that wouldn’t continue to trickle down to other generations. And even the amount of media out there, regardless of type, has just as much of an effect. If you have books to read and movies to watch, you’re less likely to pop out kids accidentally because you were bored and got frisky.

But how do you keep making the line go up, especially in a “market” with such a guaranteed drop-off point in user retention? You can do what these companies do and fill your apps with bots to keep engagement metrics up and users coming back as they fail to date your fake users. I’d call that enshittification, and it probably makes everything worse in this case.

Is Gen Z becoming the new Millennials?

“Gen Z is ruining the Dating App Market!”

I might be wrong (obligatory I am not a lawyer), but I think the laws either make it so that they can’t be considered as an accomplice to a crime like that, or they’re a corporation, which means that fines are really the only way they can be punished.

Either way, the arbitration clause, I believe, means that you can’t take them to court like that in any situation. An out of court settlement is your only option, except in the case of a class action lawsuit, which let’s them get a bulk deal on how much they have to pay out.

No, I believe the argument they’re making is if someone else posts your private information on BlueSky (think Kiwifarms doxxing gay people and sending that info to Christian hate groups), and BlueSky moderation doesn’t take action against the account posting the info, and then somebody uses that information to find and attack you, then BlueSky is culpable in the attack because they could’ve done something, but didn’t.

A better example, I think, would be the recent issue with known transphobe Jesse Singal and his followers, who came to BlueSky around a month ago and immediately began posting bigotry and false info. When reported to the moderation team, they did nothing about it (he actually got banned by the auto-mod and then manually unbanned during that period, but that’s another story). If he were to do something like my example, posting a trans person’s private information online and telling his followers to harass them, and BlueSky did nothing to remove the posts or his account, then they’d be legally culpable for enabling anything that might happen to you. But under arbitration, you can’t sue them for it.