Endymion_Mallorn

I’ve missed Sodaplay and Sodaconstructor!

I would say that I have used an LLM for productive tasks unrelated to work. I run a superhero RPG weekly, and have been using Egyptian & north African myths as the origin for my monsters of the week. The LLM has taken my research and the monster-creating phase of my prep from being multiple hours to sometimes under one hour - I do confirm everything the LLM tells me with either Wikipedia or a museum. I can also use an LLM to generate exemplary images of the various monsters for my players, as a visual aid.

That means I have more time to focus on the “game” elements - like specific combats, available maps, and the like. I appreciate the acceleration it provides by being a combined natural-language search engine and summary tool. Frankly, if Ask Jeeves (aka ask(dot)com) was still good at parsing questions and providing clear results, I would be just as happy using it.

Thank you for a respectful and thoughtful reply. I understand your perspective, though we disagree. I just don’t think we’re in a condition as a country where we can really go for the nuanced approach. The country needs to take broad decisive action to bring back American labor and services.

As long as the focus is on price, we need to make the price of importing higher than the cost of domestic production. This isn’t about whether the quality of Norwegian goods or Bangladeshi goods is higher. It doesn’t even matter if American goods are of lower quality than those Bangladeshi ones. It’s about whether it was made in America by American labor, and thus supports an American labor chain. That’s really where my focus is at this point. The environmental concerns are secondary, but important - simply that it takes fuel and money to bring those goods to our shores.

There are unemployed Americans, while goods and services are being imported from abroad. That shouldn’t be considered an acceptable outcome. I don’t particularly care about workers from foreign nations, sad to say. In abstract, yes, I would like for everyone on Earth to have a good job and a good life, but our government (and our people) need to focus on the needs of Americans first.

As far as the difference between natural Ethiopian coffee and monoculture Hawaiian coffee, right now I care whether or not the Ethiopian coffee plantations employ American workers on American soil, paying taxes to us and supporting the businesses within their community. The rest is really just a matter of degree at the moment - optimally we’ll sharply reduce imports for both the social and environmental benefits. We shouldn’t be worrying about whether our companies can pay Ethiopians a fair wage right now - that’s the problem of the Ethiopian government and local Ethiopian companies. We need to worry about the fact that there are Americans not working and not receiving a fair wage. We need to clean up our own house first and shorten our reach, before we can reach back out into the world.

Circling back around to the retaliation, that’s fine by me too. I almost want to see retaliation, actually; it saves us from putting up export tariffs. It’s not a ‘trade war’, it’s the desired outcome, to limit trade outside of the United States. I want it to be expensive for us to export goods, services, and labor. Companies here in the US should focus their production on serving the needs of our own people first.

Given the massive debt we’re running right now, the way I see to do that for the time being is to economically punish behavior we don’t want to receive money, rather than spend money and incentivize what we do want. That gets more money into the government that doesn’t directly come from individual income, property, or sales taxes; the debt can be paid down by irresponsible companies who aren’t willing to adjust to the America first paradigm.

I’m going to be working on only buying domestic goods going forward. Yes, it will increase the cost of goods overall, but that’s a given when we’re going from an unreasonably cheap standard to one built for supporting our own people. I’ve already been careful to mostly focus on domestic produce and goods, all that the tariff package will do is encourage me to continue on that journey.

Oranges grown in Argentina and flown in (with all the damage that planes do) should not be cheaper than those grown in Florida. Mexican chiles should cost more than the ones from New Mexico and Arizona. Coffee from Ethiopia or other places around the world ought to cost more than from Hawaii or elsewhere in the USA. That’s just the plants - never mind the meat, the fish, the dairy, or the hard goods.

I don’t want to buy cheap shirts made in Malaysia or the Philippines. I want to buy good quality clothing from American companies from American retailers on store shelves. I want that to be the standard everyone lives to. Whether we like it or not, tariffs are the only way to change the aggregate behavior. I don’t want half of my stuff to be plastic crap made in China under their torturous labor laws. I want to be surrounded by quality goods made here in the USA by American workers. I entirely support the tariffs and their higher-order effects, even the increased costs. In fact, I think the projected values are too low, because it might still be cheaper to import. We need to enforce tariffs that make it cheaper to produce and build here in the USA, with Americans working to the benefit of Americans.

Getting into the ‘plastic crap’ also, I don’t want America to ‘recycle’ plastic by shipping it abroad and going with the policy that says that if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. I want us to actually work to recycle our plastics, to reuse every scrap we can, because it should be cheaper to recycle and reuse domestic product than it is to import new or to export that which should be recycled.

So sure, I expect to see higher costs. I expect that my dollar will be stretched thinner for a time. But if the government stays the course to enforce high tariffs, and then uses the payments from irresponsible companies who import rather than employ Americans to pay off the national debt, we’ll all be better off.

PS - I want export tariffs too, so that it’s more valuable to sell domestic goods to Americans than to market them abroad.

If it doesn’t have a VGA port, I don’t use it.

This is just telling me that my loyalty to FAT(32) is valid.

When I say “feed”, I mean the general homepage I see when I log into my account, rather than my Subscribed, Following, etc. views. I understand your concern, but if other related communities don’t suit you, then you’re free to block them as they come up. I think a ratio of 4 “in-bubble” to 1 “related” post would be fair. Maybe there could even be a slider somewhere depending on your software.

One of the few reasons I’ve never minded that part of the presentation on larger social media sites is that they operate on an opt-out model compared to the fediverse’s (current) opt-in model. But I think there’s enough transparency in “you like memes@fedia.io, here’s content from other groups we know with names containing ‘memes’”.

I may have to try out Quiblr, but I strongly prefer kbin/mbin to Lemmy, because I enjoy interacting with both the microblog side and the thread side of the fediverse on a single account. If mbin ever gets a video tab (for Loops & PeerTube), I’m going to jump for joy.

At the time it released, 99% of my software was DOS-based, and in fact I had 1 game that I distinctly remember (Sonic CD) which only ran on Win9x, and could not run on any version of NT. I had no problems with Me, and kept a copy of it on my main PC until XP SP2.

Given the way things are in my perspective, what I want on mbin & lemmy is somewhere like a mix of 1 & 2, with 3 as a solid option. I know that the torches and pitchforks are about to come out, but I’ll try to outline the way I see it.

When I’m in a meme-scrolling mood, I have to look up meme magazines / communities to start (Method #3). Fine, that’s working as intended. Obviously that will lead naturally to Method #1; as I subscribe and gradually follow other posters, my bubble will grow.

But what I want for the ‘threadiverse’ is a more unified suggested page. If I’m in, let’s say, memes@lemmy.world, I’d like to also have my feed show content from memes@fedia.io, or lemm.ee, or whatever other threadiverse instances that my chosen instance is federating with. I’d also like to see “subject memes” on my meme feed as a default - Science Memes, Star Trek Memes, etc… That falls under Method #2 - because I want the software to predict that because I’ve subscribed to memes@*, and interacted with content from memes@*+1, that I will also like *memes*@*. Obviously this could also be a matter of tagging and magazine integration, but that’s something that would help the fediverse feel more united and less daunting for people.

Obviously dealing with the microblog side, mandatory tags or some form of community selection would be great to help out. It would be nice to see more microblog entries from Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma, etc., sorted into magazine-like collections by tags.

Win10 is not that bad. And Me was never as bad as Vista or (especially) 8. Also, Linux is not a linear curve, it’s stepped.

Thank you for this research. It always helps to keep up-to-date and make sure people are aware that projects they might put sensitive info into are abandoned.