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452
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • mastodon, bluesky, and lemmy are just going to be footnotes in history

    Only if they squander their lead. So long as they innovate in ways befitting the fediverse form, they will probably maintain their position. That said, it seems to me like modular systems like bonfire will probably leapfrog the existing platforms pretty quickly.

  • Absolutely wild that this is a group of minors.

  • There's an interesting aspect of this that I have not seen mentioned yet. While this is true you are usually better off using your residential heater rather than an electric space heater because residential heaters are frequently over 100% efficient. That is, they deliver more heat for the energy expenditure than if you had converted the energy directly by redirecting ambient heat. Heat pumps are this same principle taken to the extreme.

  • As somebody who works in this field, I think we have already lost the fight in reserving artificial intelligence for what I would now call theoretical AI or maybe agent theory. The meaning has changed, and we are not putting that toothpaste back in the tube. Big social's algorithms are certainly AI under the new generally understood meaning.

  • Yes but if you want to do just want anything more advanced than putting users in a list you're out of luck.

  • You're absolutely right and I definitely shouldn't be making broad statements like that. Another thing I've found is that if you can stomach the effort (or do this from the get go), it's a good idea to put all your academic or professional accounts into a single list. It's nice to check into a slightly smarter feed from time to time.

  • I don't think this is a money making move. The previous CEO was absolutely overly focused on monetization and this move is a step away from that. I should've addressed this more explicitly in the above comment but even for the players who actively monetize, AI is a money incinerator.

  • Mastodon really does seem to rally around braindead takes and misinformation. The culture over there can be hard to stomach sometimes.

  • Tell me this is a good thing.

    Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space (while still producing SOTA ML). All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility.

    ALSO, the other half of this story is that Firefox is becoming the primary focus again. Everybody's freaking out about the AI stuff but that's because they're only reading the headlines. The programs they've shut down are things like Hubs (Mozilla's metaverse platform), the VPN, and the sensitive data scrubber (which was using a third party service anyway).

  • Though, it's tough to pull from the headline/discussion this pivot is explicitly meant to refocus on the browser.

    As far as the AI stuff goes, Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space. All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility. It's really hard to see how this is a bad thing.

  • So frustrated to see how this conversation is playing out. This is exactly what people have been asking for but all anybody can seem to see is "AI" in the headline.
    This pivot is about refocusing on:

    • The Browser
    • Privacy
    • Ethical AI

    This seems like a much better position for Mozilla to operate from, particularly because they've excelled at producing ethical SOTA ML for YEARS before ChatGPT. In all, this seems far more forward looking than the previous strategy of "make weird little web tools to make money maybe" and it's an absolutely massive untapped niche, that they already have the talent to tap into. If we punish the players best positioned to shift the industry standard away from extreme and exploitative data collection, we will end up in exactly the Orwellian AI hellscape that we're all so afraid of.

  • This is a particularly silly opinion because Lemmy is an algorithmic social media platform. It's just an algorithm that you happen to have access to documentation for. Almost certainly, any fediverse algorithm would have to work on the same principles as Lemmy (open and based on public interactions). Likes and upvotes are king. User similarity ranking is wildly inefficient on the fediverse due to its distributed nature and keyword systems are easily gamed (although some hybrid is possible).

  • This has always been the killer feature of the fediverse. Open non-exploitative content algorithms. So weird to see people against it for no reason.

  • So, you won't see Mastodon content on Lemmy unless a Mastodon user has posted in a group (the generic term for community, subreddits, etc). For example, here's an exchange I had with some Mastodon users. Groups don't always come from Lemmy and as a Lemmy user you can subscribe to more Mastodon centric groups like !histodons@a.gup.pe or even PeerTube channels like !veronicaexplains_channel@tilvids.com. Direct user-to-user microblog style interaction with Mastodon users is not supported, and that's mostly a design choice of the devs. Projects like kbin/mbin seek to bridge the gap and directly support both experiences.

  • The Verge has been all in on the Fediverse, and they're probably the biggest advocate in the media. They're also going through the process of switching their entire backend for direct fediverse support. If you have a mastodon or kbin consider boosting this at their official account (@verge@mastodon.social) here: https://mastodon.social/@verge/111891107107406018

  • The bureaucracy of the military is not at all representative of what would be necessary to ensure people's basic needs are met.

  • It's a shame that this discussion so frequently centers around the political discussions, but this has definitely seeped into the broader discourse. Short, low-effort comments with no actual content are nearly always at the top. The only solution I can see is to create some heavily moderated spaces where low-effort comments will not fly, but we've seen time and time again that lemmy users are more anti-moderation than most.

  • Posted elsewhere: Really I mean anything more advanced than keyword filters and grouped feeds. Performance friendly NLP has come a long way since the advent of RSS

  • We don't need to use that word here