Mesa

Thanks, I'll try those out.

Functionally, I don't. Just because Mastodon is Fediverse won't make me "Tweet" more. Same thing here. In fact, I use Lemmy less than I used Reddit. Element does not measure up to what Discord does at the moment.

So outside of my beliefs of what the internet should be and the alignment of my choice of platforms with my beliefs, I'd rather be using the thing with the widest userbase and/or the best functionality. However, I no longer believe in Reddit, Discord, nor hardly any other big tech products; and so, here I am.

I do like the idea of federation, and I wish it were the norm for society when it comes to choice of product. But we're at a point where many people my age don't even know you can host your email outside of Google, and it's not really their fault. If I could wave a magic wand and snap every service to a federated nature, making everyone who uses the internet accustomed to using the federated web, I would do so in a heartbeat.

That said, does anyone know of a good chat service that actually has desktop audio on screen share? Preferably federated and similar to Discord, but obviously that's really specific.

I love me some good navel oranges. So, on a good day, yes.

The type of breakfast people in movies would eat one bean sprout from and off they go.

I think this comment in this thread answers your question or, at least, other questions of a similar sentiment.

Arguing that AI art is bad by pointing out its material flaws is largely unproductive (I'd even argue that it's counterproductive) because those flaws are theoretically surmountable. This post is a great example of that, and it highlights the reason I actually hate the presence of AI-generated work amidst the artistic world. It causes humans to hallucinate errors in normal artwork, and it normalizes this wack idea that perfection exists in art. It pollutes our intake of artwork and makes it exhausting to explore unfamiliar artists. As a personal anecdote, I used to love finding tracks on YouTube with less than 300 views and a weird thumbnail. It used to be an instant click. Now, it always feels like there's an 80% chance that it was soullessly generated almost entirely with AI—and so I click those videos less.

It's not because AI generated music sounds bad, or because AI generated images look bad. Sometimes they look great. But I don't really give a shit that it looks great if there's no human context behind it that I can ponder. AI work removes the value of discussion to me. Fuck that.

I've seen discussion about the idea of "the curtain is fucking blue," as it relates to the crisis of thought-terminating cliches; and the scariest thing to me is that, with AI work, the curtains are actually just fucking blue.

This leads me into a whole rant about how "Death of the Author" is so frequently misappropriated, and how it relates to the role of AI in the art world, but this comment is long enough.

Your suggestion of promoting AI-generated product as expression and their idea of poisoning the AI well are not the same.

A dialectical discussion can and often does include "no, your suggestion is counterproductive and undesirable."

"It's a doggy dog world."

If only...

Why would YouTube not count as social media?

Pre-rebuttal in case you go in this direction: Being a social media platform and being a video sharing platform are not mutually exclusive.

I still have an Instagram account because that's where my friends / past friends are. I've backed up and removed all my posts, and even when I was "actively posting," I hardly used it. Now it's only for communicating with people with whom I have no other way of speaking.

I still use YouTube, and do, in fact, use YouTube Premium. I'm on a family account, and while there are decent clients that I situationally use, there is no real alternative for the platform itself due to the nature of user-generated content platforms.

I no longer use my Reddit account, but I do read threads when they come up in search engine results, and many times, I do specifically narrow my search to the Reddit domain. Too much information there to completely ignore.

My Discord account is still active, although I have successfully managed to get my best friend off of there, which was like 99.5% of my Discord usage. But unfortunately because the informational age of the internet is dying, many products and games choose to use Discord for official support, which means that information is no longer indexable and only exists in the neutron star that is Discord.

So when people ask if I use mainstream social media (I can count on one hand how many times this has been asked), my quick answer is just "YouTube."

Not sure if this is semi-common knowledge or not, but:

I'm sure everyone is familiar with at least one of the geographical adjectives for the cardinal directions: Oriental, generally meaning eastern.

Similarly, you can probably see the connection for the North: Boreal. As in Aurora Borealis.

Known to a lesser degree, there is Occidental, meaning western. I don't have a connection for this one off the top of my head.

And finally, for the sake of this comment, there is the term for the South: Austral. Of course, this is where we get "Australia."

As such, the magnetic light show of the Antarctic is not aurora borealis. It is, in fact, aptly named aurora australis.

Another fun side note: There was allegedly support for the idea of naming Canada Borealia. I personally like this idea, because it tickles my inner 12 year old.

Almost every VOCALOID / vocal synth cover, as long as the tuning / overall quality is good.

Around #65b2fa