Worked through my obsessions a bit and let go of them. In the following weeks I asked three women out and got shot down each time instead of thinking about doing so for a month and being a creep.

Unironically, good on you. That’s character progress and it takes a lot of courage and self-confidence to accept rejection in a mature way and keep trying regardless. For what it’s worth I as an Internet stranger think we should help more people do the same sort of things.

Her name is [kept to myself because I’m a gentleman who doesn’t kiss and tell]. I hope I, in turn, am not someone’s most alarming thing but it’s possible :P

I’d say it’s sometimes ok, sometimes necessary for brevity, and sometimes accurate. Accurate = “All people need oxygen, water, and calories to survive.” Good for brevity = “Generally speaking, people enjoy good food and good company so those situations are good for forming relationships.”

Consequences of generalizations have a lot to do with how tolerable they are. If I say, “most people like pizza” there’s not much harm if several million people don’t. If I say, “all or most people of this gender/ethnicity/religion/whatever have X problem” that’s a lot more problematic because it can easily lead to a consequence of harmful prejudice. When it comes to matters of ethics, beliefs, accusations etc. it becomes very important to handle cases individually as much as humanly possible.

C’est Bon!

Parasite, not predator.

I haven’t seen it (don’t watch almost any anime), but I tracked it down. Here’s the link timed to the start of the conversation: Azumanga Daioh Episode 4 Subbed - Pool Pool Pool (HQ)

Reddit doesn’t function like a real business (i.e. most of the work is unpaid volunteers, users and especially mods). There’s no genuine site-wide code of ethics beyond what will actually get them criminal charges. The written rules don’t matter - many moderators are unpaid bullies who permaban if their feelings are hurt and ignore questionable content they agree with. That system of banning users based on opinion kills discussion of “unapproved” views and sorts people into forums where their favorite opinions (and often outright hatreds) are popular. Loathe a particular race/gender/political ideology etc? Just find a subreddit where the mods agree and you’ll be fine saying some truly terrible stuff. Read the bloodthirsty posts on r/worldnews and tell me if the site-wide rules on not promoting violence or racism apply. For these reasons and more I don’t think anyone should be buying into their IPO because they aren’t a reliable business.

I don’t know if Lemmy is different because I’ve been here for less than a month, but at least here it feels like you can have different opinions and the worst that happens is you eat downvotes. Plus a lot of the really unethical takes are usually checked pretty hard in my (limited) experience by the users, which doesn’t happen when the only other voices are basically guaranteed to agree with you (a la most of Reddit).

The rest of this is just my Reddit survivor tale so if you don’t care stop here. I got invited to the IPO on the same week I got a 3-day site-wide ban after appealing a subreddit permaban for a fairly popular comment that the US should stop funding Israel and give the money to Ukraine (on a post about how the US is having trouble finding money for Ukraine). In those words, no hate speech or racism etc. When I asked why I was banned I got a 4-word insult as the only communication back. I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist, but it sure felt like I was being deliberately censored/punished for high-ish profile “dangerous” anti-Israeli opinion. May not be the case, but it was my first site-wide ban ever for a comment that broke no written rules.

My Reddit account is 13 years old and in 2023 I think I made about 100k karma, primarily with comments about history, education, and in one case a post about how awesome sperm whales are. My experience mirrors what I’ve read happens to others enough that Reddit has lost my participation (I’ve only posted 2x in the last 3 months, down from a few times daily) and my faith. I only go back to check on specialist communities (video game tips etc) and almost never participate anymore. Frankly I hope it either changes to allow for discussion or dies.

Wow, I never knew about that and it’s not just a small fee either. This 2020 article has it at 9,500 Euro/10,300 USD. “Some observers worry Nature’s €9500 publishing fee is so high that it threatens to divide authors into two tiers—those at wealthy institutions or with access to funds to pay, and everyone else.”

It’s already hard enough getting funding in some fields of science without that kind of added expense to put your data out there. Definitely sounds like you’re right to call them out.

It’s interesting reading quotes from that article like: “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.” and “After you’ve been dead for 100 years, are people going to be able to get access to the things you’ve worked on?”

It reminds me of problems the US military is having with refitting/upgrading old ICBMs. From the 2021 article, “Minuteman III Missiles Are Too Old to Upgrade Anymore, STRATCOM Chief Says”: "Where the drawings do exist, “they’re like six generations behind the industry standard,” he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. “They’re not alive anymore.”

It’s sounds like the danger is we’ll be able to access the science (or just trust it’s true) but in some cases we’ll be unable to retrace our steps.

It’s 100% going to change the way art and film is created. Right now OpenAI has restricted access to Sora, but that won’t last. I wonder if being a trusted reviewer is going to become more important than creation, just because so much media is going to become available on a basically daily basis. People will want to know what’s worth watching when presented with a library of hundreds of “AI home movies”.

You were right, I checked and I screwed up. I watched a bunch of Sora videos and got mixed up about which ones were new (thought I saw some of the new ones on the official site). I’ve updated the link to a YouTube video reviewing actually new Sora vids. Apologies to all.

I agree. I’m talking about how quickly we’re going to have strategies in place to deal not how quickly we’ll have it all figured out. My guess is we have at best a year before it’s a huge issue, and I agree with your take that figuring out human vs. AI content etc. is going to be an ongoing thing. Perhaps until AI gets so good it ceases to matter as much because it will be functionally the same.

I 100% agree the genie is out of the bottle. People who want to walk back this change are not dealing with reality. AI and robotics are so valuable I very much doubt there’s even any point in talking about slowing it down. All that’s left now is to figure out how to use the good and deal with the bad - likely on a timeline of months to maybe one or two years.

This is Kyle Hill’s video on the predicted impact of AI-generated content on the internet, especially as it becomes more difficult to tell machine from human over text and video. He relays that experts say within a year huge portions of online content will be AI-generated. What do you guys think? Do you care that you may soon be having discussions/arguments with chatbots more often than not on popular platforms like Reddit, X, YouTube, etc?

“Pure glory?! You can talk about pure glory after you get on my level and cause at least 1 billion in damages.”