• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I’m going to add on to this: aside from every competitor having to build their own product from scratch, a vertical structure of leadership allows for an individual or small group to have massive resources invested into their ideas. Which are so very often deeply flawed ideas.

    Have you looked at Paint3D? Microsoft had a vision for a future where we interact with 3D objects in daily life and we would need a basic software to edit them, just like we use Paint to edit the images that we interact with. It’s kind of insane, i can’t even guess how many man-hours were spent on it by Microsoft developers.

    And absolutely nobody has ever used it.

    You can find more extreme examples, especially if you look outside of software (oh god the military); but Paint3D is one of the more accessible ones, any Windows user can check it out right now.



  • I was reading this like “this guy should be a furry, it’s what fixed me”

    And then you reveal that you’re a furry. Bro, that’s more than a saving grace, that’s absolutely the solution.

    Now in most contexts, just being a furry already makes you a subgroup, so you get so socialize off that alone; but when you’re in a furry space, it can get awkward integrating into a new group because the commonality you have is not as relevant. In those contexts, it’s easier to socialize in a sub-subgroup within furry. Like we have this group of 5-viewer streamers that all hang out with eachother on and offline. Being able to draw will make you popular just in general. And then there’s the dancers, hackers, programmers, gamedevs, suiters, activists, kinda subgroups within furry that make it effortless to integrate socially.

    The above is true online and off. As far as IRL things go, your local convention will be once a year and that’s probably not enough, if you’re in the US there should be a local scene that will make it a lot more regular. Online and offline feed into eachother.

    That’s all i can think of, if you’re a furry you have a chance to not be lonely for long



  • The best explanation i’ve seen is this:

    Places that put children under the authority of adults (schools, camps, etc) are appealing for child predators; but where most will kick them out when/if found, the Catholic Church makes it easier for them to stay in.

    This is because of a religious belief that God judges men for their sins, eventually rehabilitates them, and the job of mere mortals is to forgive and forget.

    I really like this explanation because it doesn’t flatter my atheist sentiment and provides a very neat and rational cause-and-effect relation, it’s a thing that’s specific about the Church compared to other institutions.

    Priests also take a vow of chastity, in people’s minds they’re supposed to be above sexual desire; and they have an extra aura of authority compared to the average teacher or summer camp instructor. Both of these things makes it harder for children and parents to question them.

    And once they do question them, the Church gets a similar behavior to other institutions where they’ll try to protect their reputation by burying the case. I’m not sure which positions are supposed to be held for life, i assume most of them, and so that makes firing someone (or whatever the right word is in this context) a bigger deal.

    Thems my attempted explanations




  • You’re coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don’t think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it’s designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).

    My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.

    Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It’s not even a business at all, i’m not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.

    Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we’re seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.



  • Here’s the thing that makes Minecraft’s world so much more dangerous: we have life-threatening creatures in the real world too, but they are living creatures bound to the laws of ecology; if you build a city without large herbivores, you can be sure that this city won’t have tigers in it, because they need those to live. A tiger would need to physically walk from the forest to the city, with ample opportunity of getting spotted. Hell, killing the last tiger is a safe way to never have to worry about them again, since they need to reproduce sexually, and if there are no tigers left in an area then no new ones will appear out of nowhere.

    Minecraft creatures, meanwhile, do appear out of nowhere. It doesn’t matter if you’ve depleted the world of every last zombie, new ones can spawn absolutely anywhere, even within the safest possible area, all it takes is a small corner of mild darkness. Or does it? Because i’ve had random mobs spawn in extremely well-lit built environments where i was convinced they couldn’t.

    Minecraft’s creatures cannot be definitively excluded from an area, nowhere is really safe beyond doubt even if the place is built entirely out of light-emitting blocks.

    Then again, people do live in areas with venomous snakes and scorpions, those have a similar “potentially anywhere” threat as Minecraft mobs, yet people seem fine. They don’t live in fear all the time. Then again again, snakes and scorpions are passive and only attack if you make physical contact with them, whereas Minecraft mobs actively look for you.

    So yeah, nowhere is truly safe in Minecraft, there’s genuinely always a possibility that you’ll need to defend yourself from some horror.




  • It’s not even a matter of bullying: NFTs disappeared because they were fundamentally not viable, and there’s a good chance that generative AI is also not viable.

    Generating an output is extremely computationally expensive, which is a problem because you need several attempts to get an acceptable output (at least in terms of images). This service can’t stay free or cheap forever, and once it starts being expensive, that’s also a problem in itself since generative AI is most suited to generate large amounts of low-profit content.

    For example, earlier this month, Deviantart highlighted a creator that they claimed to be one of their highest earners; they made $25k “in less than a year”, which is not much for the highest earner, and they did it by posting over NINE THOUSAND images in that time. They were selling exlusives for less than $10.

    The only way this makes sense is if it’s really cheap to generate that many images. Even a moderate price, multiplied by 9000, multiplied by the number of attempts each time, would have destroyed their already middling profit.