Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is probably the tech you’d want. It basically involves a knowledge library being built from the documents you upload, which is then indexed when you ask questions.

NotebookLM by Google is an off the shelf tool that is specialized in this, but you can upload documents to ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, etc., and get the same benefit.

If you self hosted, Open WebUI with Ollama supports this, but far from the only one.

If you dislike decentralization, then that’s like being on an instance that’s banned every other instance.

Do you mean that you dislike defederation?

You said, and I quote “Find a better way.” I don’t agree with your premise - this is the better way - but I gave you a straightforward, reasonable way to achieve something important to you… and now you’re saying that “This is a discussion of principle.”

You’ve just proven that it doesn’t take a moderator to turn a conversation into a bad joke - you can do it on your own.

It’s a discussion of principle.

This is a foreign concept?

It appears to be a foreign concept for you.

I don’t believe that it’s a fundamentally bad thing to converse in moderated spaces; you do. You say “giving somebody the power to arbitrarily censor and modify our conversation is a fundamentally bad thing” like it’s a fact, indicating you believe this, but you’ve been given the tools to avoid giving others the power to moderate your conversation and you have chosen not to use them. This means that you are saying “I have chosen to do a thing that I believe is fundamentally bad.” Why would anyone trust such a person?

For that matter, is this even a discussion? People clearly don’t agree with you and you haven’t explained your reasoning. If a moderator’s actions are logged and visible to users, and users have the choice of engaging under the purview of a moderator or moving elsewhere, what’s the problem?

It is deeply bad that…

Why?

Yes, I know, trolls, etc…

In other words, “let me ignore valid arguments for why moderation is needed.”

But such action turns any conversation into a bad joke.

It doesn’t.

And anybody who trusts a moderator is a fool.

In places where moderator’s actions are unlogged and they’re not accountable to the community, sure - and that’s true on mainstream social media. Here, moderators are performing a service for the benefit of the community.

Have you never heard the phrase “Trust, but verify?”

Find a better way.

This is the better way.

Then why are you doing that, and why aren’t you at least hosting your own instance?

Yes, I know, trolls etc. But such action turns any conversation into a bad joke. And anybody who trusts a moderator is a fool.

Not just trolls - there’s much worse content out there, some of which can get you sent to jail in most (all?) jurisdictions.

And even ignoring that, many users like their communities to remain focused on a given topic. Moderation allows this to happen without requiring a vetting process prior to posting. Maybe you don’t want that, but most users do.

Find a better way.

Here’s an option: you can code a fork or client that automatically parses the modlog, finds comments and posts that have been removed, and makes them visible in your feed. You could even implement the ability to reply by hosting replies on a different instance or community.

For you and anyone who uses your fork, it’ll be as though they were never removed.

Do you have issues with the above approach?

As a user, you can:

• Review instance and community rules prior to participating
• Review the moderator logs to confirm that moderation activities have been in line with the rules
• If you notice a discrepancy, e.g., over-moderation, you can hold the mods accountable and draw attention to it or simply choose not to engage in that instance or community
• Host your own instance
• Create communities in an existing instance or your own instance

If you host your own instance and communities within that instance, then at that point, you have full control, right? Other instances can de-federate from yours.

Not directly, but indirectly. You gerrymander the district-based positions, which allow you to pass legislation enabling you to suppress enough votes to win the statewide elections, too.

That sounds like something someone who’s never heard of gerrymandering or voter suppression would say.

From https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-vaccines-reduce-long-covid-risk-new-study-shows

At the pandemic’s onset, approximately 10% of people who suffered COVID-19 infections went on to develop Long COVID. Now, the risk of getting Long COVID has dropped to about 3.5% among vaccinated people (primary series).

…

Then, the team conducted analyses to uncover the reasons for the observed decline in Long COVID cases from the pre-Delta to Omicron eras. About 70% of the decline was attributable to vaccination, they found.

Apparently there’s a vulnerability with sending messages with images in them and “she” might be logging people’s IP addresses through that.

If the images are hosted on your instance, this wouldn’t be relevant. If they’re links to an image hosted somewhere, this is possible, but there’d be a lot of noise and not much value. To link accounts to IPs the URLs would themselves need to be different

I checked the urls to the images in my PMs and they’re all hosted on Lemmy.

Orcas are dolphins, though. Do you mean bottlenose dolphins specifically?

They didn’t say it was a Linux problem; they said it was a mobile problem

Fight Club 5th Edition.

• Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lionsden.fc5
• iPhone / iPad / Mac: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fight-club-5th-edition/id1484084460

There’s no need to bond with your own child?

No. Trickle down economics refers to things that benefit the wealthy (mostly government policies, particularly related to taxes and subsidies) that will allegedly benefit everyone by “trickling down.” Supply-side economics are an example of trickle-down economics. Trickle-down economic policies have been shown to effectively increase income inequality and studies suggest a link between them and reduced overall growth.

Giving the wealthy tax breaks in the hopes that they’ll spend the extra money they have available on security details, on the other hand, would be an example of trickle down economics.

That isn’t what it means at all.

The way to do this is to use a mailing list that only allows a limited number of people to send emails to it. You could do this automatically when someone clicked a “Prohibit Reply All” button, but such a feature is unnecessary if you use mailing lists configured that way by default.

The rules text says it creates an area of darkness, and with your interpretation, it doesn’t, which means your interpretation is wrong. Yes, the ability could be written more clearly, but the logic for a reasonable way for it to function follows pretty cleanly. Your interpretation is not RAW or RAI.

There’s a reply on RPG StackExchange that covers a similar line of logic to what I wrote above.

Remember that Fifth Edition D&D is intentionally not written with the same exacting precision as games like M:tG. The game doesn’t have an explicit definition of magical darkness, but it’s pretty clear that the intent is for magical to trump mundane (when it comes to sources of light and darkness). Even the Specific Beats General section says that most of the exceptions to general rules are due to magic.

White straight able bodied men age 25-64

25-36 is still “young” by their definition.

and a union doesn’t exist in their industry (as far as they know)

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re working in if you’re interested in that industry having a union. Making unions more commonplace was part of the point. The second sentence in the Union Members and Families section reads “Democrats will make it easier for workers, public and private, to exercise their right to organize and join unions.”

But sure, if you don’t believe unions have value, this wouldn’t include you.

Fuck 'em lol. Wait are they religious, rural, a business owner, or a veteran? No? Ok yeah fuck 'em!

You and I must have different definitions of “fuck ‘em,” because I clearly said:

Economically, Democratic policies favor poor and middle class people, which statistically makes up the majority of all white men. And there aren’t any policies that oppress white people or men the way that Republican policies oppress women or reduce support for all of the groups that Democratic policies help support.

So sure, if you’re a white man with wealth that puts you in the top 1%, the Republican’s economic policies will be better for you. For the other 99% of white men - no. And for the specific issues called out in the original post linked (on Reddit):

1. Men account for 75% of suicides in the US
2. 70% of opioid overdose deaths are men
3. Men are 8 times more likely to be incarcerated than women
4. Young men are struggling in schools and are increasingly the minority at universities, opting out of higher education

• 1 is addressed under “Investing in Mental Health” in the Party Platform as well as indirectly by gun safety policies (since 50% of suicides are by gun, 60% of gun deaths are suicides, and 87% of gun suicides are committed by men)
• 2 is explicitly addressed under “Faith Community (“respond to the opioid crisis”) and under “Beating the Opioid Epidemic” in the Party Platform.
• 3 is addressed under “Criminal Justice” in the Party Platform
• 4 is addressed in multiple ways, under “Good Jobs” (“you shouldn’t have to go to a four-year college to live a good, middle-class life.”) and under “Education” (investing in K-12 education, providing free, universal preschool, investing in other forms of secondary education - e.g., trade schools, community college, registered apprenticeships)

Democrats need to work on their messaging, obviously (and the comments on the Reddit post touch on that), but the problem isn’t that their policies don’t help white men, because they obviously do.