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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • A big issue with the 2022 signup wave was the influx of new Masto websites, run by new admins. The subscription model of ActivityPub meant they were mostly contentless, and they weren’t seeded by knowledgeable users. People needed to understand the basics of federation to find anything because nothing was being syndicated on those sites.

    And then a bunch of them shut down when admins who were ok hosting hundreds of like-minded users suddenly had thousands of generalist users flooding their sites.

    It was major human infrastructure failure.

    And that was as a whole bunch of tenured users started getting hostile over people not adopting the idiosyncratic nettiquite of the was-niche-only-yesterday space. The server blocks started rolling out, and people needed to understand the idea of “federation” (and, apparently, “the Internet”) to understand why they were being “denied access” to the cranky people, trolls, and unmoderated spaces.

    The truth is, most people don’t like the internet. They like the simple, streamlined process of just being owned by corporate interests. Walles gardens work for them in a way public parks never will.








  • The thing is, we’ve seen what the working class wants: Not concrete policy that will help them, but to have their feelings of struggle, outrage, and anger acknowledged and reflected back to them.

    The Democrats could have radical pro-worker, pro-working-class reforms in their policy platform, but if what they’re broadcasting is “things are great” energy, or “there are bigger fish to fry” energy, then they’re going to get ignored.

    The Democrat’s talking points have focused on the health of American institutions. That’s the thing they’ve repeatedly signalled is most important to them.

    It’s not what’s most important to most households. It’s actually pretty far removed from the top of their lists of concerns.












  • There’s a lot of things that LLMs are really good at, or incredibly useful for, such as ingesting large bodies of text, and then analyzing them based on your ability to create well thought out prompts.

    That’s the story people tell at least. The weasel phrase at the end is fun, I guess. Leaves a massive backdoor excuse when it doesn’t actually work.

    But in practice, LLMs are falling down even at this job. They seem to have some yse in academic qualitaruve coding, but for summarizing novel or extended bodies of text, they struggle to actually tell people what they want to know.

    Most people do not give a shit if text contains a reference to X. And if they do, they can generally just CTRL+F “X”.