lily33

I know it's a feature, and I know people on Mastodon care about it. And because of that it's not for me. That's fine. My point was, exactly because Mastodon is not for everyone, there's no need to be derisive of the people who "flock to yet another corporate social media honeypot."

Well, if you want me on Mastodon, implement a personalized recommendation feed. Until then, corporate platforms are the only option.

Well, people like to think that the fediverse is a genuine threat to Meta. And they like to feel they're doing important work defending it from Meta. So this will indeed pop up again, and again, and again.

Let's be fair, it's actually about all those people whose password is "password". But it is annoying to those who use 15-character random strings for passwords.

All that talk about "safety guardrails" is essentially a call against open source - when models are open, people can always remove them. That's the price of freedom. And we have seen time and time again how the benefits outweigh that price.

I wouldn't say there's a place to start. Once you start using programs that are configured through config files, learn about those config files in particular. Eventually, you might find that you prefer editing config files even for programs that have GUI settings - then you dive in more.

Regardless, once your config files become complex enough that you can't quickly rewrite them if necessary, start looking for a dotfiles manager, tracking them in git, backing them up, etc...

Actually, there are many programs that are designed to be configured by editing the config files. It's not a "very unusual" case.

I don't know why you would expect a pattern-recognition engine to generate pseudo-random seeds, but the reason OpenAI disliked the prompt is that it caused GPT to start repeating itself, and this might cause it to start printing training data verbatim.

I generally back up the whole ~/.mozilla, and if I restore it after reinstall, everything is as it was. I've not tried isolating only the profile, seems pointlessly complicated.

Actually, both Arch and NixOS are pretty reliable, and won't just break out of nowhere, leaving your computer unusable.

Well, for starters:

1. Platforms. I don't believe that the people who create, or invest in, large internet platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Uber, Booking, Upwork, etc, have a natural or moral right of ownership to said platform. They should certainly receive returns on their investment - but they shouldn't have full operational control. Instead, as the platofrm grows, operational control should slowly transition to its users. eventually, they should have the final say on, in the case of YouTube. what content in acceptable, what procedures should be used to remove unacceptable content, how to appeal, etc.
2. Employment. One of the big issues I see is that employees are under someone's direct control for 1/3 of each day, and have to do what their boss says. And while they technically consented to that relationship, I don't see that consent as freely given, because for most people there isn't a viable alternative. This could be done through more worker cooperative, or encouraging freelancing. Even for people who decide to remain in traditional employment, they should have more official control than they do now.
3. AI. It seems many people here hate AI, but AI does have the potential for large productivity gains. And while, in the past, productivity gains have note resulted in less work, but rather higher GDP, we could always force the issue. After all, people did it ~100 years ago, and the economy didn't collapse because of that.

That's not very deep. Closer to plain old logistic regression, really.