There’s a pretty big difference between chatGPT and the science/medicine AIs.

And keep in mind that for LLMs and other chatbots, it’s not that they aren’t useful at all but that they aren’t useful enough to justify their costs. Microsoft is struggling to get significant uptake for Copilot addons in Microsoft 365, and this is when AI companies are still in their “sell below cost and light VC money on fire to survive long enough to gain market share” phase. What happens when the VC money dries up and AI companies have to double their prices (or more) in order to make enough revenue to cover their costs?

Good luck, I’m hoping that I can get a worker’s visa through my employer to move to the UK myself.

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This is gonna turn into the gamer version of “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy” isn’t it

y’know what, I was gonna do this quietly, but I’m drunk, and so this feels like a time to make bad decisions:

When Yiffit closes at the end of this year, it’s probably going to be the end of my time on Lemmy. The reasons are varied (it’s mostly the tankies) but fundamentally, it boils down to the simple fact that I’ve realized that I come here not to enjoy myself or relax, but because I want to be angry at something. And boy howdy, does Lemmy give me something to be angry about (the tankies).

I’m gonna level with the rest of this platform. As it stands right now, this platform consists of the following:

• ~60-70%: Reposts of whatever meme is in the vicinity of the front page of /r/all on Reddit

• 15-20%: Politics (including some of the worst takes I’ve ever seen on the Internet) and memes about the awful takes

• 9-14%: Memes about Linux

• ~1%: Actual original content that interests me

So with all that, why would I stick around here? If the shit I see here is mostly crap reposts from Reddit and shit that I either don’t care about or actively dislike, why don’t I just… go to Reddit and browse read-only without an account, like I’ve found myself increasingly doing over the past 6 months or so?

And as for actually interacting with this place, fundamentally, most of my engagement with a platform comes from the comments. And holy fuck are the comments here absolutely fucking awful. It puts me in a mindset where when I go to this website, I’m mentally preparing myself for a session of “upvote the sane takes, downvote the unhinged bullshit, and debate whether it’s worth replying to the particularly unhinged takes and getting into an internet slapfight (hint: the answer is usually no).” And that’s fine to do for a while, but…

I’m tired, boss.

I’m tired of being angry and scared all the fucking time. I’m tired of arguing and exposing myself to the kind of toxic shit that you would normally hear from the angry drunk on the corner who hasn’t showered off the vomit from his last hangover, and you could safely ignore. And for a place that is supposedly mostly populated by leftists (y’know, the groups you would expect to be relatively accepting of minorities and adopt a “live and let live” mindset), holy FUCK I have seen more hate for furries in the ~16 months of using Lemmy than I did in a decade of using Reddit.

And that’s the other problem with this place–the moderation absolutely fucking sucks. On the one hand, you’ve got literal stalinist admins running Those Instances (.ml, lemmygrad, hexbear, etc.) issuing instance-wide bans for the mildest of lukewarm “maybe harm reduction is good actually” takes, and on the other hand you have mods and admins on the not-fucking-nutso instances so traumatized by Reddit moderation that they’re wringing their hands over “well we don’t want to have the appearance of impropriety and power abuse” while literal, 90s-style BBS trolls run rampant, flooding the platform with shit and making the comments even more toxic than they already are.

Coming from someone who is has a few years of moderation experience, here’s a dirty little secret of moderation: You cannot have an absolute, 100% objective standard. The instant you shackle yourself to the standard of objectivity, you open the door for trolls and bad-faith actors to push their discourse up to the very edge of the rules, testing the boundaries, reveling in the game of “how much can I shit all over your community while staying within the rules?” You HAVE to leave yourself at least some wriggle room to ban someone because they’re a shithead without a 5-page essay justifying why, or you’ll find yourself powerless against the inevitable onslaught of galactic martial artists. You should absolutely have methods to appeal and review moderator actions, and I do support transparency whenever possible, but moderation is fundamentally walking a tightrope of very unpleasant judgment calls that will inevitably piss off someone (if nobody else, the person who you banned and the people who want to see your community burn for their amusement).

Similarly, I think I’m going to wind down my presence on Mastodon for similar reasons. In my time there, I’ve been exposed to some of the pettiest, Mean Girls-esque, high school bullshit drama I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve seen friends scramble to find new instances because some rando neither of us heard of mouthed off to the wrong asshole and got their instance put on a blocklist, I’ve seen groups of people that normally I would love to chill with, swap stories over beers, and generally get to know accuse one another of being racist and/or transphobic, with an astounding lack of grace, forgiveness, and willingness to understand one another’s perspective and actually fucking listen to people. Similarly to my experience with Lemmy, it’s mildly amusing to read up on the latest drama, but one can only spill the tea for so long before they get tired of cleaning up the mess and actually want to drink the goddamn tea.

I’m not sure what I’ll do next, but I think I’m generally done with the Fediverse. Say what you will about corporate, centralized social media–and holy FUCK is there a LOT to complain about–but at least their moderation is less susceptible to the kind of bullshit I’ve talked about here, so maybe I’ll make an account on Bluesky–it seems to have reached a critical mass of furries so maybe I’ll be able to find a home there, at least for a good few years.

So yeah. I might get downvoted to hell for this, but I don’t really fucking care at this point. It’s all gonna be gone in a few months, and so will I.

Yup, being nice and polite to the people helping you is the single biggest way to get them to look the other way or have them bend the rules for you. The instant you start playing the asshole card, you usually get strict by-the-letter policy.

It’s amazing how many people forgot about the classical “get a rise out of everyone with shitty arguments” troll, or forgot that the way to deal with them was to ignore and ban on sight. Fuck, I was practically in diapers when Usenet and BBSes were a thing and I still remember “don’t feed the troll.”

As others have said, it’s a very snowbally game. The various characters all grow naturally stronger over the course of the game through gold (to buy items) and experience that you earn by killing minions. The problem is that killing an enemy player and destroying enemy towers grants a lot of gold and experience, so if you fuck up and die (or if you get ganged up on by the enemy team) you can end up making your opponent much stronger. Even if you live and are forced to return to base to heal, the opportunity for free farm or destroying your tower (which also makes it riskier for you to push forward) can make your opponent a lot stronger than you, which lets him kill you easier, which makes him stronger. This can also spill over to other lanes, where the opponent you made stronger starts killing your teammates and taking their towers.

There’s ways to overcome this snowball–players on killstreaks are worth more gold when they die, you can gang up on a fed opponent and catch them out to nullify their stat advantage, and you can try and help other lanes to get your team stronger. The champions also have different scaling levels, and some champions get a lot of front-loaded baseline damage while others scale better with items, and a select few champions have theoretically infinite scaling (but are generally much weaker in other areas to compensate). Worst case, this means your team can play super defensive and try to wait out the advantage until they catch up and then win from there. The problem is that all this requires A) communication and the ability to quickly adapt from your teammates, B) the opposing team screws up and doesn’t press their advantage, and C) your team is willing to try (which may require dragging the game out for over an hour). Needless to say, this is not always the case, and this design makes it very easy to blame another player for the loss (warranted or not).

Brought to you by the American National Automation Laboratory Corp?

I mean, you don’t have to go full-blown fursuit and conventions if you don’t want to. Most furries never actually bother with fursuiting–speaking from personal experience, it’s hot as shit (especially outdoors or in summer), you can barely see or hear anything, and if you wear glasses they’re prone to getting knocked off your nose or fogging up so badly that you can’t see anything. Many fursonas exist exclusively in artwork or stories–either commissioned or self-drawn–and even that’s optional.

You don’t even have to actively participate in the community if you don’t want to. Many furries are passive members who just follow artists, lurk in streams or group chats, occasionally leave a comment on a submission, and generally exist in furry spaces. Literally the only requirement to be a furry is to say you’re a furry!

Honestly, don’t stress yourself out over it, and keep an open mind. It might not be your cup of tea, and that’s perfectly fine–there undoubtedly is a large sexual aspect to furry, and lots of folks (especially folks who are cisgender, heterosexual, have a less relaxed view about sexuality, etc.–not to say that you can’t be a straight male furry, but there are a LOT of gay/bi furries) may find it to be a dealbreaker. Ultimately, furry has its roots in the nerd and geek communities, back when being nerdy or geeky was something to be bullied over, and it still shows it today.

Furry is a community that has a disproportionate number of LGBT+ folks, neurodivergent folks (especially people on the ADHD/autism spectrum), and other marginalized groups. Among many things, this means it revels in being proudly and unabashedly weird, both as a celebration of itself and as a defense mechanism against becoming overwhelmed by the kinds of business interests that would love nothing more than to push out all the sexuality and weirdness to provide a safe space for advertisers to shovel their slop down our throats.

If that sounds like something you’d enjoy being a part of, then I’d suggest checking out some places like the furry_irl subreddit, looking up streamers under the furry tag on Twitch (Skaifox, WhiskeyDing0, etc.), maybe make an account on FurAffinity, and look up furmeets or conventions in your area you can attend. You might not like it, or you might find yourself joining the best community I’ve ever been part of.

Yeah, definitely. Furry encompasses basically anything that’s a non-human anthropomorphic creature. I’ve seen fursonas based on birds, sharks, dolphins, turtles, rhinos, dinos, frogs, hippos, orcas, dragons, reptiles, plant creatures… hell, there are alien species like sergals and avalis, anthro/machine hybrids like protogens, and even entirely robotic characters.

It’s just called furry because furred species are the most common, and the original community that splintered off from sci-fi conventions in the 70s and 80s and grew through fanzines pre-Internet largely used furred species for their characters. (“Fun” fact, the early community had a lot of skunk characters, which is why one of the first derogatory terms for furries was “skunkfucker.”)

Oh yes, let me just contact the manufacturer for this appliance and ask them to update it to support automated certificate renewa–

What’s that? “Device is end of life and will not receive further feature updates?” Okay, let me ask my boss if I can replace i–

What? “Equipment is working fine and there is no room in the budget for a replacement?” Okay, then let me see if I can find a workaround with existing equipme–

Huh? “Requested feature requires updating subscription to include advanced management capabilities?” Oh, fuck off…

Believe it or not this is exactly how most furries make their fursona

I keep thinking of the anticapitalist manifesto that a spinoff team from the disco elysium developers dropped, and this part in particular stands out to me and helps crystallize exactly why I don’t like AI art:

All art is communication — dialogue across time, space and thought. In its rawest, it is one mind’s ability to provoke emotion in another. Large language models — simulacra, cold comfort, real-doll pocket-pussy, cyberspace freezer of an abandoned IM-chat — which are today passed off for “artificial intelligence”, will never be able to offer a dialogue with the vision of another human being.

Machine-generated works will never satisfy or substitute the human desire for art, as our desire for art is in its core a desire for communication with another, with a talent who speaks to us across worlds and ages to remind us of our all-encompassing human universality. There is no one to connect to in a large language model. The phone line is open but there’s no one on the other side.

Yeah, suuuuure you weren’t.

Note that the proof also generalizes to any form of creating an AI by training it on a dataset, not just LLMs. But sure, we’ll absolutely develop an entirely new approach to cognitive science in a few years, we’re definitely not boiling the planet and funneling enough money to end world poverty several times over into a scientific dead end!

You literally were LMAO

Other than that, we will keep incrementally improving our technology and it’s only a matter of time untill we get there. May take 5 years, 50 or 500 but it seems pretty inevitable to me.

Literally a direct quote. In what world is this not talking about LLMs?

Did you read the article, or the actual research paper? They present a mathematical proof that any hypothetical method of training an AI that produces an algorithm that performs better than random chance could also be used to solve a known intractible problem, which is impossible with all known current methods. This means that any algorithm we can produce that works by training an AI would run in exponential time or worse.

The paper authors point out that this also has severe implications for current AI, too–since the current AI-by-learning method that underpins all LLMs is fundamentally NP-hard and can’t run in polynomial time, “the sample-and-time requirements grow non-polynomially (e.g. exponentially or worse) in n.” They present a thought experiment of an AI that handles a 15-minute conversation, assuming 60 words are spoken per minute (keep in mind the average is roughly 160). The resources this AI would require to process this would be 60*15 = 900. The authors then conclude:

“Now the AI needs to learn to respond appropriately to conversations of this size (and not just to short prompts). Since resource requirements for AI-by-Learning grow exponentially or worse, let us take a simple exponential function O(2n ) as our proxy of the order of magnitude of resources needed as a function of n. 2^900 ∼ 10^270 is already unimaginably larger than the number of atoms in the universe (∼10^81 ). Imagine us sampling this super-astronomical space of possible situations using so-called ‘Big Data’. Even if we grant that billions of trillions (10 21 ) of relevant data samples could be generated (or scraped) and stored, then this is still but a miniscule proportion of the order of magnitude of samples needed to solve the learning problem for even moderate size n.”

That’s why LLMs are a dead end.

Or they’ll do shit like put Harris on full blast for not providing “detailed policies,” and then moving the goalposts to “but how do you pay for it” when she does, and nitpicking every word of every sentence she says. Meanwhile, Trump will cancel interviews, go up on stage at rally, spew a word salad response, and the NYT will bend over backwards to reword the salad to make him look better, while casting his decision to dodge a second debate as “smart” and avoiding any form of scrutiny as “efficient use of campaign funds.” At best, they’ll halfheartedly throw in a fact check like “his plan to fix inflation by levying tariffs will increase inflation” but they don’t dare portray him as the senile, hate-filled lunatic he is because they’re terrified of angering their right wing audience (who are already shifting away from legacy media anyway to reinforce their bubble). They also do this because virtually all forms of legacy media have been coopted by the billionaire sociopaths that would very much like a second Trump term to give them another tax cut and the “freedom” to pollute our world and grind the heel of their boot into the face of the working class so that they can race to become the first trillionaire.

Let me clarify since apparently you’re too fucking dense (or realistically, willfully obtuse for the purpose of trolling) to get the point:

There’s not a single store, anywhere in the world, that will allow me to directly exchange gold for goods. At best, they will convert that gold into dollars using a third party exchange, and then conduct the transaction using dollars. If you’re comparing crypto to gold, silver, or the commodities market, then that means cryptocurrency has failed at its stated goal of providing a digital currency.