I’m not suggesting Arch, but Arch-based distros. Manjaro doesn’t break anywhere as often as Arch does.

…or alternatively go with Mint and re-learn how to handle the packages. pacman vs. APT is not a big deal anyway.

Its all just to play games.

Ditto - that W3.11 install is just because of the Windows Entertainment Pack, I love a few of the games in it (like Pipe Dream). I don’t even know if it’s able to connect to the internet!

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

I started with a Knoppix-based distro, called Kurumin. KDE 3 was the rage back then!

On your main point: the shell might be hard in the beginning, but for most things that you need to use the shell with, people on the internet already had the same issue and shared how to do it. Unless you’re actively trying to make something different, like I did with my audio switching script.

And even the sort of situation that you need to use the shell for decreased by a lot from back then to now.

Besides what other users said: if you feel comfortable with SteamOS you might want to give EndeavourOS and Manjaro a check - all three distros are based on Arch Linux, and while Arch is geared towards experienced users the later two try to “sell” it towards a wider audience.

Repeated the test now (Friday, 18:30); same lang settings as above. Couldn’t find a single post in Portuguese after rolling across ~30 of them.

x.com and twitter.com are still inaccessible here.

If you speak Portuguese maybe.

I did some tests here, setting up my browser config to show content preferably in Italian, then German, then Portuguese, then English. It showed something like 5~10 posts in English for each post in Portuguese. (No content was shown in either Italian or German, so odds are that Bluesky doesn’t even take the browser config into account.)

Granted, for most Portuguese speakers it should be 7:00 now, so it might be worth repeating the test for the later afternoon, dunno, 18:00 or so. Or in the weekend.

So this is just another part in reducing cost on section that doesn’t produce money.

That’s what I immediately thought - they’re cutting corners to decrease dependency of googlebux, as depending on how things go those bux will go dry.

But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

True that.

Weirdly enough (or perhaps not surprisingly) I see the same here with Bolsonaro supporters; there’s a disproportionally high amount of them among classicists, even if humanities as a whole leans heavily to the left.

The alt right obsesses over the Roman empire, but ignores the republic, as if Julius Caesar and Octavius were the origin of everything. As such I’m not surprised that they don’t learn about what caused the fall of the republic. (A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.)

And, even when it comes to the empire, they’re busier cherry-picking examples that show that the grass was greener, the men were manlier, the women were chaster, and dogs barked quieter.

At least when it comes to languages, the eurocentrism and subjectivity are being addressed for at least a century. Sapir for example proposed that the “classical languages” weren’t just two but five - Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. And the definition became roughly “varieties with a heavy and outlasting impact outside their native communities”. (Personally I’d also add Sumerian, Quechua and Nahuatl to that list. But that’s just me.)

Additionally plenty linguists see the idea of “classic” not as specific languages, but as a potential stage of a language, assigned retroactively to the period when its prestige and cultural production were specially strong. For example, Classical Ge’ez is defined as the one from centuries XIII~XIV.

I didn’t know that I needed to know about Jevons’ paradox. Such a simple but brilliant reasoning.

You’ll get less pollution and crash deaths if, instead of trying to improve cars, society improved transportation methods that compete with cars: walking, biking, public transport, so goes on. They either don’t show those issues, or show them in a meaningfully lower level.

I’m aware of the site:example.com google feature. And, while useful for users who already know about Lemmy, it doesn’t help to recruit new users, and that’s a main point of the OP.

About centralisation: that “yet” is key. Putting all your eggs in the same basket is not a bad thing… until someone drops the basket, you know?

I’ve seen your post. Ouch - you stumbled upon some nasty circlejerking there. On multiple levels.

Plenty people here expect you to treat their “vision” as above everything else. Including your agency (“free will”), issues that you might want to solve, etc. That makes them unable to tell the difference between “criticising Apple” (a fair thing to do) versus “treating someone who bought an iPhone as an emissary of Satan” (what they’re doing against you).

To make things worse plenty muppets there are putting words in your mouth, regarding Samsung vs. Apple.

If it’s any consolation, it isn’t just Lemmy. The whole internet of the 20s feels like this nowadays.

TL;DR: I know that feel, bro.

The “instances hosting communities” structure alleviates albeit not solves this problem; communities about related topics end in the same instances, that you can block.

I mostly agree with the OP, it would be great if Lemmy had more sources of newbies than just “pissed off redditors”. (I have further reasons for that, but they don’t matter here.) As such I’ll focus on specific tidbits here and there.

The content is indexable (by Google), but your point stands as it sucks. It’s hard to reliably find Lemmy content by it.

Do you - or anyone here - have a good idea on how to solve that? Someone suggested a Lemmy-based engine; it’s tempting but it wouldn’t help if the person doesn’t know about Lemmy already.

Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure

It used to be like this. “Stumbling” upon the site was only a thing later, as it had already enough content to become a source of info.

Even taking only English speakers into account, it isn’t a bad name. It’s a simple word, it sounds like “let me” (good association - unlike… GIMP), at most it might evoke you Lemmings.

And once considering other languages it’s actually better than plenty brands out there, including Reddit, Facebook or Twitter. By sticking to CV syllables there’s less room to butcher it into unrecognisability.

Really my point is there are enough things to criticize about LLMs and people’s use of them, this seems like a really silly one to try and push.

The comment that you’re replying to is fairly specifically criticising the usage of the word “hallucination” to misrepresent the nature of the undesirable LLM output, in the context of people selling you stuff by what it is not.

It is not “pushing” another “thing to criticise about LLMs”. OK? I have my fair share of criticism against LLMs themselves, but that is not what I’m doing right now.

Continuing (and torturing) that analogy, […] max_int or small buffers.

When we extend analogies they often break in the process. That’s the case here.

Originally the analogy works because it shows a phony selling a product by what it is not. By making the phony to precompute 4*10¹² equations (a completely unrealistic situation), he stops being a phony to become a muppet doing things the hard way.

If it were the case that there had only been one case of a hallucination with LLMs, I think we could pretty safely call that a malfunction

If it happens 0.000001% of the time, I think we could still call it a malfunction and that it performs better than a lot of software.

Emphases mine. Those “ifs” represent a completely unrealistic situation, that does not show anything useful about the real situation.

We know that LLMs output “hallucinations” way more than just once, or 0.000001% of the time. They’re common enough to show you how LLMs work.

To make it worse decision makers - regardless of country - are typically old and clueless about “this computer stuff”. As such they literally don’t see the problem.

I did read the paper fully, but I’m going to comment mostly based on the challenged that the OP refers to.

My belief is that the article is accurate on highlighting that the Fediverse on its own is not enough to reclaim the internet. However, it’s still a step in the right direction and should be nurtured as such.

Discoverability as there is no central or unified index

Yes, discovery is harder within a federated platform than a centralised one. However the indices that we use don’t need to be “central” or “unified” - it’s completely fine if they’re decentralised and brought up by third parties, as long as people know about them.

Like Lemmy Explorer for example; it’s neither “central” nor “unified”, it’s simply a tool made by a third party, and yet it solves the issue nicely.

Complicated moderation efforts due to its decentralized nature

This implicit idea, that moderation efforts should be co-ordinated across a whole platform, quickly leads to unsatisfied people - either because they don’t feel safe or because they don’t feel like they can say what they think. Or both.

Let us not fool ourselves by falsely believing that moderation always boils down to “remove CSAM and Nazi” (i.e. “remove things that decent people universally consider as bad”). Different communities want to be moderated in different, sometimes mutually exclusive, ways. And that leads to decentralised moderation efforts.

In other words: “this is not a bug, this is a feature.”

[Note: the above is not an endorsement of Lemmy’s blatant lack of mod tools.]

Interoperability between instances of different types (e.g., Lemmy and Funkwhale)

Because yeah, the interoperability between Twitter, YouTube and Reddit is certainly better. /s

I’m being cheeky to highlight that, as problematic that the interoperability between instances of different types might be in the Fediverse, it’s still something that you don’t typically see in traditional media.

Concentration on a small number of large instances

Yes, user concentration into a few instances is a problem, as it gives the instance admins too much power. However, there’s considerably less room for those admins to act in a user-hostile way, before users pack their stuff up and migrate - because the cost of switching federated instances is smaller than the cost of switching non-federated platforms.

The risk of commercial capture by Big Tech

Besides what I said above, on the concentration of users, consider the fact that plenty Fediverse instances defederated Threads. What is this, if not the usage of the Fediverse features to resist commercial capture?