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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Back then the internet was a bunch of coffee shops. Not literally, of course - but for me it was about 30 people on messenger, my favorite chatroom, a random message board, a small but far flung group of people on LiveJournal, and sometimes even my Neopets guild.
    Each was my own retreat. The weird and funny stuff we shared there was created and shared because people had a passion for whatever. It also was great in that you could learn about something, and share it with another group that had not seen it yet.

    Today the internet is the infinite cul-de-sacs of meme pages, political messaging groups, and disinformation rings on Facebook, along with approximately 6 people that keep showing up from your friends list of hundreds. Or it’s the screaming gladiatorial stadium of Reddit, where the sheer volume of noise smothers any particular voice. Maybe it’s the infinite lawless Walmart of X or even the carefully manicured Target that is BlueSky.
    From mining your attention, to hawking trinkets amidst the spectacle, or attempting to sell a little bit of everything to anyone, the new internet lacks third places. It’s all business, all the time, and you can feel it. Every meme is created to engage with that platform’s broadest audience. Everything is homogenized and lacks uniqueness. All the content has been aggregated and reshared, and in the endless and futile search for validation from the algorithm.

    And that’s why I like Lemmy. It’s a digital third place.






  • The first time I ever experienced this was in a printshop with a bunch of older guys who were definitely not computer illiterate, but all gathered around the monitor for the server that ran our RIP/platemaker to watch commands appear in the terminal when I remoted in from my computer to do something or other. (They would go into the room and work directly on the machine, but it was loud in there and smelled funny, so I remoted in.)

    They made jokes about me being a hacker, and although being distinctly boomer-ish, it was high praise coming from some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.
    (I’ve worked with more accomplished people, and more highly educated people, but not with folks who had built a successful business that dealt with a variety of complex tech from the ground up with their own knowledge and effort. It was a bit charming to have them wowed by such a simple thing.)



  • I work on a small team and recently realized my boss is falling victim to survivorship bias. Another colleague and I handle our work, which is mission critical to the org, competently and fairly opaquely, only raising issues as they arise. However some other members of our team have less critical but more visible work that they tend to bungle. The department invests hiring dollars, training efforts, and materials purchases in service of remediating those issues. But my colleague and I are both burned out, eyeing the door, and fully aware there’s no one who understands what we do or is capable of doing it within our organization - aside from each other, but our respective scope of work is non-overlapping and there’s truly not wiggle room to cross train or support each other’s work. I’ve said all I know to say to leadership about this issue but they seem willfully ignorant.

    When one of us goes, I think the other will follow quickly. Hiring takes almost 2 months at my work, so the gap/lack of knowledge transfer will make for a huge shit show.



  • But then, as now, it won’t understand what it’s supposed to do, and will merely attempt to apply stolen code - ahem - training data in random permutations until it roughly matches what it interprets the end goal to be.

    We’ve moved beyond a thousand monkeys with typewriters and a thousand years to write Shakespeare, and have moved into several million monkeys with copy and paste and only a few milliseconds to write “Hello, SEGFAULT”



  • I wish I had approximately double the hours in a given day, and also vastly more coding skill to help in meaningful ways.

    It seems sort of odd that comments or messages reported for spam don’t offer any tools. Even a simple url pattern match that gives mods/admins the ability to click a checkbox to remember the link and take some predefined action in the future would be a rudimentary but effective option.

    I mean, heck, it’s the fediverse. In my fantasy implementation of an anti-spam approach, it would be possible to federate these lists of untrusted links and assign consensus-based confidence scores for links generated from moderator actions across instances. (With options for instance admins to tailor their own trust scores of other instances, so that each instance can choose for themselves who they trust, just in case a couple rogue instance admins try to poison the spam filter.)
    Same concept can be applied to banned accounts, although in that circumstance, I’d suggest they find a way to mask the email address when sharing it. Not that folks won’t just spin up a new email. But, you know. Something is better than nothing.

    Hopefully that makes sense. I’m losing my mind with sleep deprivation.