bilb

Not very well! But things can improve, and I appreciate the gesture.

I thought Servo was basically dead since the layoffs at Mozilla in 2020, but your comment caused me to look into it and evidently funding was found to resume development on it at the beginning of last year. That's good news! (to me!)

You know, instance admins can find out who is downvoting and upvoting by checking the database. It doesn't have to be a mystery if you stand up your own instance. You don't even have to use it primarily, just get it federating your comments.

If there's a technological solution, maybe it's to allow admins to make moderatorship automatically expire, leaving the community up for grabs, under certain circumstances. The ability to exempt communities and/or users from this might be helpful.

Otherwise you just gotta ask the admins. Lemmy.ml has a community specifically for requesting dormant communities, for instance, and unless things have changed that's how it worked on Reddit.

I think it's perfectly capable of being used to make a compelling game, but Starfield seems to be a game for which the strengths of the engine AND the strengths of the writers and designers at Bethesda are completely mismatched.

The problem, as I'm sure you know, is that a home server is not fit for purpose for the vast majority of people. Managing that is a fun project for some, but a complete non starter for most.

Personally, it's the implausibility of 2 that makes all of this seem like no big deal to me. In fact, I think federating openly with Threads might signal to Threads users that they can use alternatives and not lose access to whomever they follow on Threads, thus growing the user-base of other federated instances.

I think people who are going to use Threads for Meta-specific features are likely going to use Threads anyway, and if any of those features are genuinely good (i.e. not simply Instagram and Facebook tie-ins) they will be replicated by the various open Fediverse projects which already differ from one another in terms of features.

The moderation issue is entirely different and there are some instances that have an understanding with their users about protecting them from seeing any objectionable content or behavior as defined by whatever culture they have. Defederating from such a large group of people makes sense, perhaps even preemptively, no different from when they defederate existing large instances now.

I'm not personally in favor of preemptively blocking threads on my instance and I don't find the EEE argument at all convincing in this case. But other instances doing that is no problem at all, it's fine!

Stochastic Parrot

For what it's worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot

The term was first used in the paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜" by Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell (using the pseudonym "Shmargaret Shmitchell"). The paper covered the risks of very large language models, regarding their environmental and financial costs, inscrutability leading to unknown dangerous biases, the inability of the models to understand the concepts underlying what they learn, and the potential for using them to deceive people. The paper and subsequent events resulted in Gebru and Mitchell losing their jobs at Google, and a subsequent protest by Google employees.

Absolutely nothing about this guy requires Russia to explain.

I heard they were all child murderers! 😱