No, you’re not, but you are wrong if you think anyone is capable of using a tool correctly 100% of the time.
QuaternionsRock
joined 2 years ago
Ah yes, I am aware. Gotta love open source :)
Were you under the impression that I said anything to the contrary?
Really? It spotted a missing push_back like 600 lines deep for me a few days ago. I’ve also had good success at getting it to spot missing semicolons that C++ compilers can’t because C++ is a stupid language.
I think it’s because texting became essentially free in North America long before it did in Europe. That, combined with the fact that it came preinstalled on EVERY phone (Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Palm, you name it), gave it enough inertia to stay dominant decades later.
But, I'm starting to realize that no amount of evidence is sufficient for folks who want to federate with Meta
This is an incorrect assumption, because
And somewhere in this very discussion some other person has given a very plausible overview of their potential EEE approach. I'll add a link to that comment later when I have time to find it again.
I would be very interested to read this! There are definitely limits to my optimism here. I think Meta is a horrible company and I don’t expect them to act in the best interests of the Fediverse; I’m just not yet convinced that them giving up what is essentially free and ad-free API access to one of their platforms cannot be used to our advantage. Threads federation could absolutely be catastrophic, but it’s also possible that it’s a good opportunity; that’s all I’m saying.
They will corrupt and exploit any environment they are a part of via any means they can.
Right, unless they can’t, though. Ideally the Fediverse should be resistant to this kind of influence without resorting to defederation. I’m also concerned that defederating from Threads will make more Threads users than Mastodon users.
We don't need to be able to predict every last detail of how they will do so to know it is true.
I mean, some idea of what they might do would be nice.
They have a track record of being awful, anti-consumer corporate citizens. WHY would we want to try to invite them in and try to contain them?
I couldn’t care less about Meta itself. My interest begins and ends with Threads users. There are a ton of people that would never give the Fediverse a try for one silly reason or another—predominantly, I would argue, the fear of the unknown—and this seems like it could be an opportunity to overcome that obstacle if leveraged correctly. The prospect of everyone and our parents using social media that is not completely beholden to Meta is exciting to me.
Again, maybe I’m wrong, but this whole thing is basically an experiment, isn’t it? I’d like to see what happens before reaching any conclusions.
Them:
I'm not trying to defend this price
You:
You are defending a company
Well done.
No fucking shit it’s an anthropomorphization, nothing that can be hosted on GitHub has true human qualities…
The point is that everyone knows what it means within that context of AI, and using other terminology would only serve to obfuscate your message such that the average person couldn’t understand it as easily.
Non-living things also don’t have “behavior” (“the way in which someone conducts oneself or behaves”, but—hey look! People started anthropomorphizing things so much that it got added to the dictionary! (“the way in which something functions or operates”.)
It may not be ideal, and convince some people that LLMs are more human-like than they really are, but the one thing you haven’t done is suggest an alternative that would convey its meaning as effectively to the masses.
What did I miss?
Maybe I’m just being naive, but this seems like an argument in favor of federating with Threads. One of the reasons Facebook and Instagram are so effective at driving engagement is that users have basically no ability to curate, sort, or filter the content that they see, especially since third-party clients are banned. You can’t even view most things without logging in.
The implementation of ActivityPub in Threads is a strange departure in this context - (federated) Mastodon users can view all of the content Threads has to offer without subjecting themselves to Meta’s arguably predatory curation algorithms. It almost seems like an escape for people who want to use a Meta-sized platform without Meta getting its grubby little fingers all over your mental wellbeing.
If people are worried that Threads will affect likes and comments (and therefore like/comment-based sorting algorithms) on other instances, it should always be possible to exclude Threads’s contribution to those metrics, no?
Yeah, I know it’s probably not the right word for this context, but downloading an app and creating an account is factually a huge barrier for entry, because people are lazy.