I disagree that Reddit would gain in value over time if they kept banning automation, because it is increasingly difficult to avoid AI-generated material polluting your dataset, no matter how much you avoid automation and try banning it. Inevitably, some AI-generated material is going to get in.

It’s a problem in two ways:

1. The vast vast majority of data on Reddit has already been sold, so you can’t rely on that data for future revenue
2. The remaining data that’s current is polluted by AI and is therefore worth less than the historical data because the more AI pollutes your dataset, the more likely it is to lead to Model Collapse, where an LLM is poisoned due to unverified data generated by other LLMs

I am firmly of the belief that sites like Internet Archive will be some of the most valuable companies in the AI space, because they hold an immense amount of untainted data created prior to 2019.

Is there some magic to rotating a PDF? I just opened one and there’s a button in Firefox saying “Rotate clockwise” and “Rotate anticlockwise”. Are we talking something rotating and then saving the PDF so it stays rotated or just rotating it after it’s already loaded? Or is this about rotating the PDF so it can be printed out?

I’m not sure why anyone would ever buy Reddit stock. There is no money to be made in Reddit. They failed to make any money before they went public, and they’re failing to make any money now.

They tried the whole NFT thing, failed. They’re trying to sell the data to AI companies but once that’s sold they can’t sell any more of it because the benefit of Reddit data was historical data unpolluted by AI, but new Reddit data is polluted by ChatGPT posts and is therefore worth less.

It’s not even about banning people, it’s about the fact that Reddit was never a sustainable business model from the start, at least not in the traditional capitalist sense where you’re actively trying to make a profit to please shareholders.

The only benefit to owning Reddit stock is if you have voting shares and can manipulate the algorithm to benefit you in some way. Suppress some voices, amplify others to back what you want to do etc. but you need money to burn in order to achieve that because you aren’t going to be making money directly by owning Reddit stock and manipulating public opinion takes time.

Don’t worry just let my dad do the gardening. He killed the mint, the rhubarb, the blueberries, the redberries and the apple tree with his genius ideas!

The funny thing is you can still buy Office standalone but you have to actively go looking for it and Microsoft doesn’t advertise it because 365 subscriptions make more money.

Microsoft doesn’t want you buying standalone versions of software, but they still have to sell it because there’s still a market for it.

The one thing I don’t like about oldschool forums is that I have to make an account for each one. With each account comes a new place where your email address is registered, and a new password, with each password comes a new avenue for attack if you’re shitty about web security and use the same password (or a variation thereof) for everything. If you use a password manager you’re fine, but I don’t want my email being put everywhere.

There needs to be some kind of SSO that’s open source (like Google but not Google), so I can log into any forum that implements it, but with that comes the cost of running an identity provider and I don’t think forums are going to want to pay for that in addition to their own costs. Maybe some sort of distributed system or something where each forum donates a little bit of compute power to running the IDP, I dunno…

Discord, Reddit and Lemmy are bad choices for forums. If you want ANY useful information to stick, put it on forums you know are gonna get indexed and archived reliably. Reddit is indexable but there’s no guarantee the page will still be there when you search for it through Google.

Discord is completely unindexable so any information that exists on a server that gets deleted is lost forever.

Lemmy is a half-way house. As far as I know it’s kinda indexable but not really.

There’s more employees than just the border guards themselves. There’s the HR, the IT, Accountants, Legal etc etc. Block all of them. If those services are contracted out, ban their workers as well. Might be a bit troublesome with companies like Amazon or Microsoft, but since you’re banning individual workers rather than whole companies it might work out a little easier.

Make it so the deal is “If you associate with this company and you aren’t a Canadian citizen, you are personally not allowed to enter Canada”

At this point Canada should be playing hard ball. Ban all visas from anyone working for those companies, or anyone who delivers services to those companies for as long as they work for those companies. If they lie about who they work for, the ban is permanent and they personally are not allowed to set foot in Canada ever.

…Neither of those time periods are cushy. The Old Republic is a constant war between the Sith Empire and Republic, reaching far into the core worlds. I wouldn’t call that cushy for the average dude. You’re either enslaved by the Sith, enslaved by the Hutts, or conscripted by the Republic.

Post-OT in Legends wasn’t exactly nice either, what with the Yuuzhan Vong War which killed an estimated 300 trillion people and multiple planets completely destroyed. You’d actually be better off in the Galactic Civil War! At least then only one planet blew up.

Thing is, unless you live in the core worlds in any time period, and even then a relatively rich part of the core worlds, your life is gonna be pretty shitty in Star Wars. The Outer Rim is notoriously shit for anyone living there. Naboo might be nice, or Alderaan if you can actually find a place to live there and pick the right time period, so basically a couple decades before the prequels.

I have certainly found that to be the case with developers working with me. They run into a small problem so they instantly go to Copilot and just paste what it says the answer is. Then, because they don’t know what they’re asking or fully understand the problem, they can’t comprehend the answer either. Then later, they come to me having installed a library they don’t understand and code that’s been hallucinated by Copilot and then ask me why it’s not working.

A little bit of stepping back and going “What do I hope to achieve with this?” and “Why do I have to do it this way?” goes a long way. It stops you going down rabbit holes.

Then again, isn’t that what people used to do with StackOverflow?

I wouldn’t call that a particularly insightful observation. Ever since humanity settled down in agricultural societies there have been governments, and with governments come a monopoly on force, so obviously governments have killed more people than anything else. Any organisation of humans is gonna have at least some threat of lethal force backing it.

I got banned for making fun of Kemi Badenoch when she said autistic people are privileged. I said maybe she’s jealous that there are people that know more about trains than her. That was apparently enough to warrant a permanent ban.

More like the best choice. If you don’t want to be invaded, you need nukes. Any country that had nukes and gets rid of them is just asking to be invaded. Libya got rid of their nukes, got invaded, collapsed. Ukraine got rid of their nukes, got invaded, got abandoned by the US. Canada got rid of their nukes, Trump is talking about annexing the country. I guarantee Trump would be a lot more polite to the Canadians if they had something they could point right at Mar A Lago and go “Invade us at your fucking peril”.

It doesn’t matter how many nukes Russia has, or how many anti-nuke systems they have. Ukraine only needs to get lucky once. That fear will make Russia back off. It works for North Korea, it can work for Ukraine. The US is unreliable at best and a bunch of lying traitorous scum at worst, so there’s no point in relying on them for anything. The ONLY way a country can protect itself from invasion these days is to have a “I’m taking the entire world with me” button.

Ukraine should just build nukes, test one of them and then say to Russia “Get out, or the next one is landing on Moscow”.

I think it’s more “Butt as an alternative to algorithms” which I fully agree with. Butts are better than algorithms

Does it fight algorithm addiction or does it just utilise existing algorithm addiction to give you something slightly more informative?

I mean… Did they not say what their hobbies were before they met? How do you go on a date with someone without knowing anything about them?