It has changed a bunch, but I don’t mind it. It has gotten larger, and with that comes a greater number of trolls and spammers. I don’t see as much tankie discourse nowadays. There seems to be more political content, but that’s likely a reflection of the world.

Communities have become more concentrated — after the Reddit APi debacle, it was common to find the same community across many instances, and these were often inactive or sparsely used. Now many of these have been consolidated into fewer, more active communities.

Some communities are niche enough that you can easily read over a week’s worth of posts in one small burst, but remain active due to the dedication of moderators who do things like weekly threads.

There are frequently recurring big names who post frequently. These people aren’t necessarily the same as at the beginning, because there are still a few individuals who make up a majority of posts. I worry for these people sometimes, because it must be a lot of pressure to know that if you stopped posting, the community may wither away. Some of these communities are just silly little meme comms, but I imagine people still feel a sense of ethical duty towards these things.

The rules pages for communities are much better now. It’s easier to know where you stand in different communities, especially in areas where there may be overlap between the communities’ scopes — there has been gradual iteration that has helped people to understand how things relate to each other

When I first got here, I was struck by how much it reminded me of my early time with Reddit. It was much easier to have productive conversations with people. I felt sad because it highlighted how bad Reddit had become. It has always been a bit of a toxic cesspit of a site, in some ways (when people ask me what pseudonymous social media site I used most as a teenager, I am often embarrassed to admit that it was Reddit), it had a lot of good going for it — people engaging in genuine conversation despite everything. I can get that a lot more reliably here.

Things have changed, but Lemmy is still capable of fulfilling my desire for genuine conversations with random internet people. I often write long comments, and I often feel that my time was well spent. Sometimes I non-judgmentally call out people for being unpleasant in their comments, and it leads to productive conversations. I honestly live for that shit, and Lemmy reliably helps me to scratch it. I am better able to navigate the site to find what I am craving.

I wish there were more posts and comments sometimes, but I recognise that this is a bit of a monkeys paw wish, in that a greater userbase will degrade the experience further. Nothing lasts forever though. When Lemmy dies, whenever that ends up being, I will have been glad for my time here

Commenting to follow

This was at an Unknown Mortal Orchestra (a psych rock band) gig at an old and fancy venue. At one point, the lighting was such that members of the band were silhouetted against the upper ceiling; it was also cycling such that different band members were casting shadows. The image doesn’t capture the phenomenon very well, but it’s enough to invoke the memory in me, as well as the awe I felt at seeing it.

Although I would gently suggest that if there are many things that you have said you’re going to fix but haven’t yet, perhaps the person isn’t reminding you in a “hurry up and do the thing” kind of way, but in a “honey, are you doing okay? You try to do so much for us, and whilst I appreciate it, I do worry about how you’re coping. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, I’d rather you tell me “I’m not going to fix that thing for the foreseeable future” than to run yourself ragged”

I’m really glad to hear this. FIFA might still be arses about it, but by New Zealand’s team being good sports about this, it will make it easier to hold FIFA accountable

Edit: also props to Mexico for making it clear they’re open to host also

Eh you can do better, have another go at it.

No, thank you.

For someone who is excited to go and have fun playing with this tech that’s apparently everything you’ve been waiting for, you seem weirdly eager to get angry over other people being angry?

That’s okay, because a sincere comment of gratitude functions as a super-upvote anyway. It’s like Reddit Gold, but with more human connection, and less capitalism

Yeah, I knew that, it’s super cool, and it came to mind as I was writing my earlier comment.

What’s neat about the website stuff is that even if it’s not as good now (idk, I haven’t looked), that value they created is still there in the older case study — there were so many good resources. I was the disability rep in a few student societies, as well as in a few volunteer orgs after uni, and we referenced the guidelines a few times. Good resources like that are especially useful in those contexts — because they helped turn “that would be nice, but we don’t have the resources to implement accessibility in our materials” into “okay, let’s put our money where our mouth is and do our best to make something as accessible as we can”

Yeah, I hate the word “crisis” here.

Yeah, it’s a big “worst person you know actually makes a good point” moment

Evangelising the Fediverse on Reddit is not for me, but respect to anyone who does try that (I save my evangelising for my irl folk. I’m wearing them down)

Despite being so shit in many different respects (a chronic use of external consultants and contractors means the UK seems less likely than other European countries to make progress on a sovereign tech stack), the UK is pretty good with its data. There’s a surprisingly amount of data that’s released and is in a sensible format.

During the teachers strikes last year, I ended up using playing around making visualisations using the data about the number of teachers in various parts of the country, and I was pleased to see how much there was there and how clearly it was documented. There are very few things I’m proud of the UK for, so I am glad to have this as one

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Eid Mubarak, America.

I’m not glad for this war, but given that it is happening, I gotta admit that I am glad to see US hubris challenged so thoroughly

“About not delegating your brain to machines, that’s a fair point, and I would encourage people to consciously choose where to use machines and where to use their brain”

Yeah, big agree on this front. We should be using technology as a tool to aid us to do the stuff we care about, rather than letting ourselves be made subordinate to the tech itself. For some people, that kind of agency means using an open source system like Listenbrainz, and for some, like the person you’re replying to, that means continuing to discover music in their own way. Both of these approaches are fine — indeed, the whole point of building tech that serves as tools is that if our experience tells us that we have a task that wouldn’t benefit from the tool, we can just leave it in the box.

Personally, I enjoy going for a combination approach — I sometimes use listenbrainz as a catalyst to help me discover new stuff beyond my experience, but once I have a few new artists I’m interested in, I then go and do some manual digging around them. I don’t need to do this manual work part of it, but it’s a key part of my enjoyment of the music discovery process — so I can somewhat relate to the person you’re replying to’s preference

Yessss! I am so jazzed to see other people in this thread who love Listenbrainz as much as I do.

I will always love it because it was my first ever contribution to open source software. It was only documentation, because I’m a mediocre programmer, but documentation is a big deal for projects like these.

What I really liked about contributing is that I felt a real sense of contributing to something bigger than myself. I mean, I feel that with the fact that my listening data gets added to the pool itself, but I felt it even more so when helping with the documentation.

It was only something small, but I liked the idea that I was helping future tinkerers experience a little less frustration than I felt when I struggled with the outdated documentation. It made me happy to think that I was facilitating more people to tinker. I may only be a mediocre programmer, but that just means I am well placed to help pave the way for people more skilled than I am. This is the kind of project that I want to exist in the world, and so helping to support it genuinely makes me feel a little more hopeful in the face of this increasingly enshittified world

Yeah, it’s pretty low on the social side of things. However, having watched the massive progress the project has made over the last few years makes me hopeful that it’ll continue to improve. They seem to be quite smart about how they go about developing new features, which is wise for an open source project. It’s been pretty cool to watch how good their recommendation algorithm has been getting though, compared to when I first joined

I felt a bit weird about it at first, but the one thing keeping me tied to Spotify was how useful it was for discovering new music (though even that had been degrading by the time I cancelled it).

If you’re someone who either prefers to listen to music that they already know and love, or someone who enjoys discovering new music through manual effort, then Listenbrainz isn’t for you

However, if you’re currently relying on the recommendations of a service like Spotify, then it’s at least worth considering. For me, I became a lot more at ease with Listenbrainz when I realised that this kind of music recommendation simply isn’t possible without other people’s data — and that part of the “price” for being able to access recommendations built from that data is that my listening history gets added to the pool of listening data used by the recommendation system.

If it’s Spotify’s pool that I’m contributing to, then I feel like I’m getting a pretty bad deal, because they hoard that data like a digital dragon, and then use it to further entrench their monopolistic position in the market. I don’t like that — it makes me feel complicit in the grossness.

Whereas with Listenbrainz, I’m contributing to a data commons of sorts. Listenbrainz’s recommendation algorithm has gotten so much better in the couple of years that I’ve been using it, and that wouldn’t be possible without a growing pool of data. Independent researchers and developers are able to benefit from it, and the more people we have making stuff in this space, the more we chip away at Spotify’s power.

Like I said, having my data be so public does make me feel a tad uneasy, but with data like this, it tends to only be valuable in bulk (meaning the system doesn’t care about any individual’s sad drinking songs), or hypothetically, to individuals who are excessively concerned with another individual (such as stalkers, I guess). However, that last point doesn’t concern me, because I made my Listenbrainz account under a username that’s unconnected to any of my others, and my profile shows no indication of who I am on Spotify.

I’m sure that someone dedicated and skilled enough could retrieve my Spotify account name from the system, because I linked my account way back when I did have Spotify, but I trust Listenbrainz with my data a hell of a lot more than I do Spotify. Spotify definitely have way more money to hire cybersecurity folk to prevent exfiltration of user data, but they’re so opaque that even if there were a breach, I wouldn’t trust them to tell me. I’ve been following Listenbrainz’s development for a while, and they’re pretty cautious and transparent with how they go about things.

To be clear, I’m not formally affiliated with Listenbrainz in any way. I have contributed to improving documentation a few times (because that’s usually the best way I can support open source projects, as a mediocre programmer), but that stems from the same thing that made me write this comment: I just really like what they’re trying to do, and I think the world would be a little better if more people joined it. (also, I am just a huge nerd for metadata schema, and the affiliated musicbrainz project has so much cool stuff for me to learn about)

When people are complaining about AI, it’s often the scale of it they have beef with: the fact that it’s being shoved into their face everywhere they look, mandated for use in their job by management, even if it does not make them more productive. A consequence of it being shoved everywhere are the larger problems that make people angry, such as the excessive resource use by AI data centres.

I agree that LLMs are here to stay — I understand enough about how the tech works that I know that there is tremendous potential for their use (I originally got into learning about machine learning because I wanted to better understand AlphaFold, a protein structure prediction model made by Google Deepmind (not sure I’d count this as an LLM, but under the hood, it works pretty similarly)). However, the problem of AI is more about how the technology is functioning at a societal level than a purely technological problem.

I believe that the current societal impact of the AI boom far exceeds the actual technological impact of LLMs. Whilst I get your point about the dotcom bubble analogy, I think that in that case, the ratio of “harms caused by the dotcom bubble” to “genuine societal impact of the technology once the bubble has popped” is much smaller. I grant that we have the benefit of hindsight with the internet, because the tech has had so much time to mature and become integrated with society, whereas we’re still in the middle of the AI hype bubble, but I don’t believe that LLMs/AI are capable of being anywhere near as transformative to society as the internet. There may be niche fields that are overturned or even functionally destroyed, but there are few genuine use-cases of LLMs. They’ll still exist after the bubble has popped, and they’ll have their uses, but I don’t believe they’ll be anywhere near as ubiquitous as they are now.

Regardless of whether you agree with me on this, one thing we are in accord with is that the bubble is bullshit and harmful. Personally, something that frustrates me with it is that I am genuinely curious to see genuine progress in the real use cases for LLMs — I’m open to the possibility that in 10-20 years time, my predictions in my previous paragraph may have been proven to be wrong. However, the bubble is just delaying that kind of meaningful integration into society, as well as hindering areas of research that could improve LLMs

(as well as crowding out other areas of AI research that are based on different architectures and methods, which may get us much closer to the sci-fi sense of AI than LLMs ever could. Song-Chun Zhu is an example of a researcher who used to work in this field of AI, but got burnt out by how the economic pressures on research meant that it was hard to do research that wasn’t based on this one dominant method. He’s one of many who is nowadays more interested in researching AI in a “small-data for big tasks” paradigm)