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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • It’s lemmy.ml . During the API wars on Reddit lots of people came here and lots of new instances were founded. lemmy.world was part of that and quickly grew into -I think- the now largest instance by far. But lemmy.ml is at least 2 years older and hosted by the actual developers. And due to history hosts to this point some of the large communities.

    Yeah. And “Lemmy self-corrects” is kind of what this post is about (in my opinion.) I’d like to see lemmy.world and a few other instances now do it and defederate. That’s how it should be, call out bullremoved, be vocal and then do something about it. My point is, we’re at phase 1 or 2. Now we’re going to see if Lemmy self-corrects. As of now it didn’t.

    I think just hoping for a bright future isn’t cutting it. And if you ask me, all the infighting and defederating each other also isn’t healthy.


  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.detoFediverse@lemmy.worldLemmy.ml tankie censorship problem
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    27 days ago

    I get you. But they’re the flagship instance. At least they used to be. They shape the brand identity of whole Lemmy. And that’s being tankie and having a culture that could be nice, but regularly isn’t. So everyone on the internet knows Lemmy isn’t really something I want to subject myself to. And if we’re being honest, alsmost nobody knows the fine nuances of power abuse on specific instances. It’s just “Lemmy” that this gets attributed to.

    Every interaction here represents Lemmy. Some disproportionately so.

    And we’ve established, me leaving (which I’ve done) is not gonna change anything about it. The communities are still amongst the largest and where most of the users are, and also attracting the new users.

    Your argumantation would be perfectly valid if lemmy.ml were some small instance that’s unheard of by most users. Or blocked by the rest of the network. We could ignore them then, let them do their own thing like the Fediverse does with a few nazi and conspiracy instances. But this isn’t the case here.

    Regarding money and doing it “for the fun of it”: That’s not correct. They get money for two or three full-time jobs from the NLNet fund and the EU. They could be having fun, too. But they definitely also get a substancial amount of money for it.

    Concerning the 4chan example: That’s on point. 4chan is the epitome of echo chamber and incel culture. That’s mainly because there’s no one else. They left. And now, why would anyone else visit a place like that in the first place? I’d rather not Lemmy become like that. Do you?


  • And am I supposed to let other people be subject to that, too? Let people like that drag down Lemmy as a whole? Shouldn’t I have a nice and welcoming place on the internet for me and my friends?

    Do you like echo chambers? If you want my perspective: I have until now recommended Lemmy to exactly zero of my friends. Because of things like this. Lemmy has quite some potential. But it just has so many issues to tackle and the culture here just isn’t what appeals to “normal” people. If other people share my experience, that’s exactly why Lemmy still is below 50k active users and super small.

    Sure. I moved away from the .ml communities a few weeks ago because I think it’s the right thing to do (for me). It’s just dragging down everyone and making Lemmy a worse place. Like we see constantly with all the posts like this. Should we (the people who want more than an echo chamber, and want fair and honest discussions) all abandon Lemmy?



  • rufus@discuss.tchncs.detoFediverse@lemmy.worldLemmy.ml tankie censorship problem
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    27 days ago

    I don’t think so. It’s a bit like being bullied and your friends are being bullied, too. What do you do? Leave the room and be happy they bully your friends and not you? Keep silent which ultimately enables them? No. You’re being vocal about it. You warn your friends not to go in there. And you try to do sth about it. In the end it’s the bullies who should leave, not the nice people. Or the whole place is doomed and just getting worse.


  • My first idea would be to have users report posts and ping a random sample of like 20 active and currently online users of the community and have them decide (democratically). That way prevents brigading and groups collectively mobbing or harassing other users. It’d be somewhat similar to a jury in court. And we obviously can’t ask everyone because that takes too much time, and sometimes content needs to be moderated asap.


  • You’re 100% right OP. Don’t let the people tell you it’s a you problem and you should leave. It’s exactly like you said (in my opinion.) If at all, it’s the bad people who should leave. Not the nice ones and the ones calling out the bullremoved.

    Nothing changes if the just people keep silent and let bigotry or whatever just happen. It just makes the whole place become worse. And I’d say it’s warranted to speak up or do something. And as far as I heard you’re not the only one complaining.







  • Do these private computers run a properly licensed version of Windows? What’s the cost for a license? Same as in other countries?

    And another thing I wodered: Is there more Linux expertise available than in other countries? I guess the average person from India isn’t in IT. But there’s lots of IT, lots of companies from my country have outsourced parts of their IT. I occasionally watch tutorial videos or university lectures on Youtube either in english with a heavy accent or for domestic use and not in english. Some of them discuss some crazy niche Linux topics or software development, which is also oftentimes deployed on Linux infrastructure. Or is it just because India is a big country and it’s just a matter of scale that I get to see some videos from over there?



  • Hmm, I mean there is also publication bias. You’re more likely to edit a Wiki page if you found a solution… But you’re also likely to rant and ask for questions if it’s really bad… There is a bit in the middle where it doesn’t work that well. What I find super annoying if I find my question already posted 2 years ago and there isn’t a solution posted underneath. That means someone either got it working and didn’t update their post… or they moved on and it’s impossible. But you’re right, this really mostly happens to obscure and niche problems. Not if it’s a ThinkPad or Dell laptop midel that has already sold millions of times. But somewhat likely if it’s a newer high-end gaming mainboard or niche server that isn’t common amongst the Linux-folks.




  • I’m not sure. Afaik the research is happening. And AI related stuff always happens faster than I can imagine. Ultimately I want the LLMs to hallucinate. They should be able to combine ideas and come up with new and creative answers and be more than just autocomplete. I think what we need is the LLM knowing what it knows and what is made up, and a setscrew. I can see this happening with a higher level of intelligence and/or a clever architecture. I’m not an expert on machine learning myself, however that is what I took from news, companies struggling with their chatbots and everyone wanting their AI assistant to provide factual information. And I don’t see anything ruling that out completely. I mean we humans also sometimes get things wrong or mis-adjust our level of creativity. But I think the concept of facts can be taught to LLMs to some degree, they already seem to grasp it. And concepts have been proposed and things like AI agents that come up with ideas and other agents that check for factuality are in active use. Along with the big tech companies making their AIs cite the sources. In my eyes, progess is being made.

    But this is why I currently don’t use LLMs for important and unsupervised stuff, and i try to avoid them when I need correctness. However… I really like to tinker with them, do AI assisted storywriting, or have them come up with 5 creative ideas for a birthday party for my wife. That works well, and with a bit of trickery you can make them output more than the most obvious ideas. And I’m impressed by their ability to code, but as I said it’s still far away from being useful to me. I currently don’t fear for my job. And I additionally struggle with the size of models I can do inference with and their respective intelligence… We’re in the Linux community here, so I think I can be open… I don’t like big tech companies doing my compute and providing me with closed and proprietary services. I don’t use ChatGPT, only open-weight models I can run myself. They aren’t as smart, but I don’t want the future of humankind to be shaped by services and good will of big tech companies.


  • I think so, too. I mean the traditional history search and command option suggestions are instant and come at no additional cost. I don’t know how fast ChatGPT is, I only ever play around with local LLMs. And roughly exploring what Github Copilot is about, just made my laptop fans spin on max and started to drain the battery really fast. Would be the same for an ‘AI’ terminal. And when asking the LLMs for shell commands I got mixed results. It can do easy stuff. So I guess for someone who wonders how to find the IP address… It’ll do the trick. But all the things I tried asking some chatbots that would have been really useful to me, failed. It hallucinated parameters or did something else. And I needed to google it anyways or open the man page.

    I’m not sure, I currently don’t see me using such tools. I like talking to chatbots and have them draft stuff and provide me with ideas. But I also like computers in the other way, that they are machines that just follow my orders and don’t talk back. And when working in the terminal or coding, it seems to distract me if suggestions pop up and I need to read them and decide what to do, or occasionally laugh… For me it seems to work better if I think about something, have an idea in my head and type it down without discussing it with the machine… I mean not 100% of the time, sometimes a suggestion helps… But I think I rather have the chatbot in a separate window and only loosely tied into my workflow if at all. And I don’t like proprietary and cloud-based products for something like this.


  • There are lots of fish shell extensions, zsh stuff and loads of things that make suggestions, autocomplete, remember your shell history and remember frequently executed commands and visited directories. All of that works WAY better than the AI suff. (And sometimes also has nice pop-up menus.)

    So compared to plain bash without autocomplete and Ctrl+R it may be useful. It is probably a step back for everyone else. Especially if they roughly know what they’re doing.

    But I didn’t try this specific software. Maybe I would if it were free software and connected to a local LLM.