“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Yes. Seriously.

I last looked at this graph a few months ago. New data has been added. It just gets worse each time…

Here’s a link to a newspaper article that refers to this study.

The previous research they refer to is entitled “Evaluating the 35°C wet-bulb temperature adaptability threshold for young, healthy subjects (PSU HEAT Project)” and is here.

Agree.

Even on sites with an algorithm (eg Reddit and Twitter) my experience was severely improved by trimming down the follow list and then always sorting by new.

I think there’s an element of “careful what you wish for” (hence my stance of “let it be”). I think the risks of over-zealous behaviour, defederation and apparently spontaneous loss of host servers is quite real.

Your idea of multi-communities seems sound; as long as the user is made aware of which community they are posting to when they reply (in case of quirks in the community rules etc) it should work - and over time it is likely that certain communities will become the “go to” for certain types of discussion.

Let it be. The duplication problem is all over the Fediverse. Over time some of those communities will die out and some will become more distinctive or specialised, attracting specific engagement in their own right; the problem will solve itself.

TIL; “Out of Place Artefact”

No idea.

Hawking threw a party once to see if any time travellers would turn up.

Have you disabled viewing posts from bot accounts? It’s one of the user settings.

If you have disabled viewing posts from bots, this is what you would see if a bot commented.

Aneurysms are not related to neurones. They’re bulges in the walls of blood vessels related to structural weakness. They can affect vessels that supply the brain and if they burst it can be catastrophic and rapidly fatal - is this what you were thinking of?

Wikipedia link for proper definitions and examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurysm

Agree. Ideas, however heinous, never quite die out. But we can educate people so that they can recognise abhorrent ideology for what it is and avoid being radicalised.

Sadly the terrible ideas that lead to Nazi Germany and the horrors that came with it still abound.

Wikipedia link to NeoNazism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Nazism

That’s my guess too.

Reddit admins chose to strengthen censorship and guidelines against anything that could be considered lewd.

I am not sure that this is quite correct; I got the impression that the NSFW content management / content restriction aspect was chosen to be the palatable or defensible thin end of the wedge on the road to creating increasing disparity between what was available via the official app and what could be accessed by third parties via API - my guess is that we would start to see gatekeeping of things like sport content and maybe some sponsored subreddits etc.

Reddit admins chose the path of strict regulation and higher prices, and then made the pricing for API access exorbitant.

Exactly; the impression I got was that they wanted third-party apps to be financially non-viable.

Ultimately, Reddit was trying to force traffic (and revenue) through ONLY their app

Absolutely. And by the time they killed off Apollo, I was already browsing Lemmy.

What if I tasked an LLM with replying to your comment? Say I instruct it to provide something with an agreeable tone and I pick one out of two or three drafts.

Is it still me?

I suppose that by that point it’s not much different than having a speech writer…

I think the key difference is that the words put out via printing press were still arranged the way they were by human hand.

The painting and the photograph are framed by human eyes.

The output of an “AI” seems different because it seems that there is less (of potentially no) human input. I say “seems” because that may or may not be true. If a human guides the AI with instructions, is that enough?

In my line of work, AI is coming. I see it as a friend in silico

Let’s explore this further. When we look at the work of a human we can often see their influences (and they can often acknowledge them or even cite specific works). In a way, they are able to credit those they were inspired by.

Would an “AI” be able to do the same? I’m guessing it probably can, but more as a statistical similarity to other works. I don’t know if it can cite its sources.

A discussion around the extent to which painters were replaced by photographers (and professional photographers replaced by laypersons with smartphone cameras) isn’t going to quite be the same as a discussion about human illustrators being potentially replaced by “AI”.

I suspect the words “soul” and “character” (and derivatives thereof) to turn up more.

That’s the one that got defederated.

Gives new meaning to the term “air head”.

I’ll see myself out, but only after I’ve read the Wikipedia article in full. Morbid curiosity and all that.