EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.

If you think you’re struggling for enthusiasm now, just wait until you start watching it.

Memes are reposts! That’s their defining characteristic! They become memes by being reposted! If they didn’t get reposted, they would not be memes!

Internal politics is going to be responsible for some of it. This is an unexpected opportunity for individuals to advance their careers or agendas outside of the usual process, and some of them are going to take the opportunity. They might not even dislike the idea of Harris being the nominee, but they want to find a way to use their support to their advantage. The Democrats are hardly a monolith, they’re a broad coalition that barely holds together at the best of times, it’s not that weird that there would be conflict.

There’s also the issue that there hasn’t been any sort of democratic process to select a new nominee. Harris makes sense for a number of reasons, and the party does have the authority to nominate whomever they want, but they have to avoid making it look like the party insiders are just coronating a new nominee. It’s bad optics, if nothing else. This is also a pretty unprecedented situation, and it seems like no one knew it was going to happen for sure. It makes sense that there’s a conversation out in the open about who is going to be the nominee.

As a candidate, she’s not the best choice, but she’s an improvement over Biden. I doubt she would have won a genuinely competitive primary process. She’s probably in the best position to be the nominee at this moment, but there are no doubt plenty of people who feel that this could have been handled better and are going to make their opinions heard.

I’ve heard WD40 works on some glue residues. Couldn’t hurt to try it.

Making generalizations about people is a problem when the generalization is false or misleading, or is being used to make a false or misleading argument, which is often the case. If you’re wondering if a given generalization is problematic, odds are the answer is ‘yes’ otherwise you probably wouldn’t think of it as a generalization.

Bill Burr is a surprisingly thoughtful and principled guy with consistently good opinions. He’s a comedian, and he doesn’t have any theory underpinning his worldview, but I bet if you look at why he’s been criticized in the past it’s by liberals who are mad that he’s being critical of liberals. I’m not at all surprised that he lit up Bill Maher on his boomer-ass Israel-Palestine takes.

If you already struggle with some form of mental illness, it’s probably best to assume that you’re being irrational, rather than ascribe any meaning to this particular thing. There is a lot of random stuff that happens, and you could project meaning onto any of it to create a narrative. Unless you have a good reason to believe that a specific person or group is messing with you (not just a vague sense of unease) then it’s very likely that it means nothing.

Properly-designed tools with good data will absolutely be useful. What I like about this analogy with the talking dog and the braindead CEO is that it points out how people are looking at ChatGPT and Dall-E and going “cool, we can just fire everyone tomorrow” and no you most certainly can’t. These are impressive tools that are still not adequate replacements for human beings for most things. Even in the example of medical imaging, there’s no way any part of the medical establishment is going to allow for diagnosis without a doctor verifying every single case, for a variety of very good reasons.

There was a case recently of an Air Canada chatbot that gave bad information to a traveler about a discount/refund, which eventually resulted in the airline being forced to honor what the chatbot said, because of course they have to honor what it says. It’s the representative of the company, that’s what “customer service representative” means. If a customer can’t trust what the bot says, then the bot is useless. The function that the human serves still needs to be fulfilled, and a big part of that function is dealing with edge-cases that require some degree of human discretion. In other words, you can’t even replace customer service reps with “AI” tools because they are essentially talking dogs, and a talking dog can’t do that job.

Agreed that ‘artificial intelligence’ is a poor term, or at least a poor way to describe LLM. I get the impression that some people believe that the problem of intelligence has been solved, and it’s just a matter of refining the solutions and getting enough computing power, but the reality is that we don’t even have a theoretical framework for how to create actual intelligence aside from doing it the old fashioned way. These LLM/AI tools will be useful, and in some ways revolutionary, but they are not the singularity.

I’ve been looking for an appropriate analogy for the current AI hype and this sums it up perfectly.

This is surprising to read. Ukraine was never going to have enough ammo, weapons, or manpower to win the war, but I never thought the western media would run out of cope.

Flawless. No notes.

Mashing the buttons over and over trying to get the high score.

Evergreen headline.

Ergolf Hitler

Maybe Hasbro is finally realizing that they never understood why D&D is valuable, and are coming to the conclusion that they’ll never be able to monetize it properly.

With seemingly-comparable game franchises, a lot of the value is in either a business model that’s good at generating consistent sales (selling cards or miniatures) and/or the setting and characters that can be used to sell merchandise. D&D has neither. No one really cares that much about the D&D lore, and the business model is selling books that aren’t even that necessary to play the game.

The value in the D&D franchise is that the game mechanics (which aren’t protected by IP laws) are well-known by a large user base, plus there’s a lot of existing material that is compatible with that system. People play D&D because lots of people already know how to play, and it’s easy to find material to play with. Stuff like Baldur’s Gate is popular incidentally, mostly because the developers have been good at making games, but no one is going to get excited about a mediocre D&D game in the same way that people would for a 40k game.

Hasbro has shown that they don’t understand this dynamic. When they tried to monetize the game system itself with the OGL nonsense, people just said “Okay, I guess I’ll just switch to a different RPG system” because of course that’s what you’d do. The community is interested in the hobby, not the franchise, and if the franchise is going to make it difficult to engage with the hobby, then the hobbyists, including content creators who do a lot of the heavy lifting to keep the franchise relevant, will go elsewhere.

Hasbro likely thought they could take D&D and do the usual “we have this user base and we can get X amount from merch, Y amount from video games, Z amount from some sort of subscription service, etc.” not realizing that no one actually cares that much about D&D as a franchise, at least not in the same way as with stuff like Warhammer or Star Wars. It’s a hobbyists hobby, and the hobbyists aren’t going to go full “consooom!” on D&D lunchboxes and funko pops.

TTRPGs are, to their credit, extremely difficult to monetize. It’s hard to squeeze money out of a game when the players can buy a couple of PDFs and then play for years, only buying new material when there’s an update or a setting book that looks interesting to them. It’s a bad business, which makes it a terrific hobby, and I wish Hasbro a very lmao get owned if they do try to pass it along to someone else.

The actor of captain Picard

Do you honestly not recognize Sir Patrick Stewart? No shade, it’s just wild to think there would be people who don’t recognize him at all, given the length and breadth of his career.

In answer to your question, I can’t speak for Patric Stewart, but my guess is that he chose to play the scene that way because it’s likely that very few people in the Federation smoke, and that’s probably doubly true for people who spend most of their time on a spaceship. My guess would be that Stewart was trying to indicate to the audience that smoking would be somewhat of an anachronism in the 23rd century.

I’ve seen every episode of both shows and this didn’t occur to me once. She doesn’t even look different, she’s just a great actress.

Getting older and more mature has definitely helped with this. For example, I completely cut out the part where I promise myself I’m going to change the pattern.

As the saying goes, philately will get you nowhere.