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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • A lot of communities have rules that posts need to be titled the same as the source article, which, while it prevents editorializing, it also brings all those ragebait headlines here. Plus I’d like to see Lemmy users’ opinions moreso than an article I could just read myself.

    If half our content is just reposted mainstream media, why would one expect our comment sections to look any different than the comment sections of those mainstream sites?

    I agree with the sentiment but disagree with the prognosis.

    In my experience, the ragebait articles around here are largely from the same sites. Rawstory, mediaite, dailybeast, some of The Guardian’s more indulgent pieces. I won’t presume to know why the posters post them, but they’re ragebait to start.

    I don’t even see “Big Media” like Reuters or local news or whatever get upvoted much. And as longs as the news sections aren’t mixed up with the opinion ones, IMO they’re more professional.

    The accurate title rule is great as long as posters pick more journalistic articles instead of opinion pieces or reposts. And if they don’t there’s no fixing that anyway.

    I’d probably prefer more of the political post to be thoughts/feelings and then discussion is backed up by decent articles

    And I straight up I disagree with this.

    There are tons of talking heads with opinions. But journalism rooted in sourcing is much harder. That should come first, or at least come with an opinion in the OP, and then the discussion can be built around facts.






  • I like Lemmy as a “zoo”

    I like seeing nuts and weirdos and niches and stuff when I scroll by. It feels like the old internet. And I also find that lemmy.ml has good discussions outside tankie politics, so I don’t want to block that out.

    Problem with the main political subs is that they’re so big they flood post sorted by Active, Rising, or New Comments. Their tabloid garbage crowds everything else out.


  • It’s addictive. It’s not like I haven’t steeped in it either.

    This is what I keep hammering; people can’t help themselves, especially under stress. Perverse engagement incentives need to be fixed structurally to give us a fighting chance, otherwise Lemmy/Piefed will end up like Voat and all the other Reddit clones.




  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldwe need more users
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    2 days ago

    Lemmy doesn’t assume anything. Sorting is done by votes or activity from all communities; the intent is for the user to subscribe to communities to curate their feed. But blocking works too.

    I don’t know precisely how Reddit works now, but it used to be like that as well. There was no interest algorithm, no suggestions, other than a bit of vote count nonlinearity. It just had the quirk of defaulting to a few select subs in “hot,” instead of “all” like most Lemmy/Piefed instances do.


  • Yeah. The .world news community mods don’t seem to care about clickbait, misinformation, calls for violence or doxxing or rape, as long as they’re the “correct” politics. Calling for Ivanka Trump to get shot? Serious deepfake meme? Perfectly acceptable, apparently, in spite of the admins’ pushback.

    But make a comment like yours, and the moderation is… that.

    I haven’t even blocked the tankie communities or anything, but I had to block /c/politics, as they’re so active they pollute my feed.

    I’m fine with leaving that part of Lemmy permanently blocked though.


  • Yeah. We have monkey brains, and overcoming intertia is hard.

    I think the site could be better structured to address this, specifically by organizing communities into a “taxonomy,” so posts from niche interest automatically filter up into bigger subs. Thus, participation would feel easier/more enaging, and folks would have more focused and active niches to participate in.

    Making that suggestion on the Lemmy/Piefed repos is on my messy todo list.


  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldwe need more users
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    2 days ago

    …I am drifting away from Lemmy myself.

    Political communities are echo chambers like Reddit, in a different color. Discussing tech or helping others is better, but still feels like talking in circles.

    Wholesome subs like /c/SuperBowl are sublime, but I mostly lurk there.

    Information hygiene is awful. Big subs upvote tabloids and Tweets to the sky, as long as they align with their beliefs. I just saw a discussion on a not-obviously AI generated photo with the community sentiment of “misinformation? Who cares. It’s a pro-lefty meme, so spread it.”

    Anyway, all this scrolling and impulse commenting eats time. I get the same feeling of shouting into a black hole that I get on corporate social media.


    Much of this is my fault, though.

    I have several niches I intend to make original posts for, but never do.

    It’s somewhere in the giant pile of my IRL executive dysfunction :’(





  • It would depends on how much infrastructure they can pass to receive them.

    Ideally it would be “unlimited.”

    Immigration is just good for the US economy because they tend to skew young and (to be blunt) low wage when they get here, and just look at how far immigrants go here. In most countries, it’s supposed to be a cornerstone of US culture, and the country is freaking huge.

    Integration? America was originally a hodgepodge of homesteads; that’s the idea.

    The limiting factor is housing, schooling, occupation, just having somewhere for them to go and live.

    TL;DR: As many as possible as long as they aren’t forced into poverty.


    …Hence, I find it incredible that we, as a country, collectively decided to squander that massive strategic advantage for… what?

    It just doesn’t make any sense, even if you set morality aside. Or truly believe in the propaganda that they’re responsible for most crime, which is nonsense.


  • I don’t want to leap into your throat, but have you tried a clean install of a different distro on a USB? And I mean clean; no reusing your home partition, no weird configs until you test out-of-the-box settings.

    One thing I’ve come to realize is that I have tons of cruft, workarounds, and configurations in my system that, to be blunt, screw up Nvidia + Wayland. And my install isn’t even that old.

    Hunting them all down would take so long that I mind as well clean install CachyOS.

    I haven’t bitten the bullet yet (as I just run Linux off my AMD IGP, which frees up CUDA VRAM anyway), but it’s feeling more urgent by the day.


  • It’s not so much about English as it is about writing patterns. Like others said, it has a “stilted college essay prompt” feel because that’s what instruct-finetuned LLMs are trained to do.

    Another quirk of LLMs is that they overuse specific phrases, which stems from technical issues (training on their output, training on other LLM’s output, training on human SEO junk, artifacts of whole-word tokenization, inheriting style from its own previous output as it writes the prompt, just to start).

    “Slop” is an overused term, but this is precisely what people in the LLM tinkerer/self hosting community mean by it. It’s also what the “temperature” setting you may see in some UIs is supposed to combat, though that crude an ineffective if you ask me.

    Anyway, if you stare at these LLMs long enough, you learn to see a lot of individual model’s signatures. Some of it is… hard to convey in words. But “Embodies” “landmark achievement” and such just set off alarm bells in my head, specifically for ChatGPT/Claude. If you ask an LLM to write a story, “shivers down the spine” is another phrase so common its a meme, as are specific names they tend to choose for characters.

    If you ask an LLM to write in your native language, you’d run into similar issues, though the translation should soften them some. Hence when I use Chinese open weights models, I get them to “think” in Chinese and answer in English, and get a MUCH better result.

    All this is quantifiable, by the way. Check out EQBench’s slop profiles for individual models:

    https://eqbench.com/creative_writing_longform.html

    https://eqbench.com/creative_writing.html

    And it’s best guess at inbreeding “family trees” for models:

    inbreed