• 2 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Yeah, I am comparing linear distance to surface area, but if we call that 66 mile distance a diameter, were talking about roughly 3500 sq miles…which is a rounding error compared to the vastness of the south china sea.

    The south china sea is longer than it is wide, but even at its narrowest width between Phillipines and Vietnam, it’s over 550 miles across. That’s just incomparable to the distance between Florida and Cuba. Anything between Florida and Cuba is figuratively parked right in USA’s backyard.

    I legit tried to find the exact location of this latest aerial encounter between China fighter pilot and allied forces aircraft (because you’re right, that’s relevant) but couldn’t find it…the info must either be classified or intentionally censored.




  • If your chosen mobile app doesn’t offer the feature, then you can’t. Every app that does offer the feature does it differently, so it’s impossible for me to give you a single guidance that works on every mobile app.

    I assume you do have access to a web browser on mobile though, so open your web browser, navigate to the instance hosting the community and/or your own home instance, and then depending on the layout used by your device the modlog will be a clickable link in the sidebar to the right, or will appear as a link near the bottom of the page after scrolling to the bottom.



  • Yes, and even more chance of that happening today than 5 years ago. Reason: because of the modern day prevalence of the ‘fake reply’ SPAM and Phishing emails. Spammers and phishers are now drafting fresh messages mocked up to look like replies in existing email threads…older spam detection used to let these types of messages slip through because they thought they must be legitimate replies, and so naturally spammers started exploiting that to slip past detection. Modern detection no longer gives apparant replies a free pass.


  • I must be completely “dull witted” then. When I first started looking into lemmy, I went to the official “join-lemmy.org” website, clicked on “join a server” and picked one of the top listed recommended results. It just happened to be a VERY small and VERY new instance. But as a completely stupid dull witted new user who knew literally nothing about lemmy, I didn’t know any better.

    After joining that instance and looking for communities on it, I only saw the local communities plus a few non local communities from larger instances and I legit thought that’s all there was on lemmy. I mean, it was clear I was seeing the local ones, and it was clear I was seeing some nonlocal ones, who why tf would I expect that I wasn’t seeing everything?

    Your perspective is tainted by the fact that you know how it all works. People new to lemmy don’t, and I’m telling you that the onboarding and community discovery process is dogshit. I beg you to try considering things from the perspective of a newer user.


  • I tried mutualaidhub.org - and found another one that is about 45 miles from me so I went to their site to check it out. From what I can tell, it’s nothing more than a hyper-localized version of gofundme.com. It seems most of these things are just links to facebook groups. I don’t think these things are as organized or as helpful as your original post made them out to be.

    Also, for the record, I’m not actually looking for assistance. I’ve honestly never heard of this thing until your post and just am trying to learn more about them, what they do, who and how they help, and maybe find something I could contribute. These things do not seem like a very viable alternative to traditional social services.


  • That’s not exactly how it’s working in practice.

    Sure, for the top 5 lemmy instances, that’s kind of how it’s working. But for all other lemmy instances, when you load their communities and filter by “all” instead of by “local”, you are only seeing the communities that specific instance has become aware of (by virtue of that instance’s members manually subscribing to foreign communities on foreign instances).

    Since the very nature (by design) of lemmy is to be fragmented, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that users of most instances will never even become aware of that the most popular foreign communities are for the topics they are interested in, without resorting to 3rd party search tools and community trackers/locators.

    The very design of lemmy actually actively promotes fragmentation…fragmentation not just among the user base, but among communities of identical topics as well across different instances.

    The only way it would be ‘solved organically’ as you say, is when fragmentation is minimized by just having a few super-massive instances – but that seems to be counter to the fundamental ideals of lemmy itself.

    Personally, I think this is a huge usability problem that needs some better technical solutions.


  • I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but

    If you only recently heard about them, then why wouldn’t you logically conclude that a plausible answer to your original question might be that more people don’t join them because people haven’t heard of them?

    This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?

    People haven’t heard of them.

    Also, using the mutualaid.wiki resource you cited - I decided to look up what was available in my state and the only couple of groups seem to focus on Covid-19 related things…leaving me even more confused about what you’re talking about.


  • The problem is when it’s a community type that significantly benefits from synergy. Specifically - those types of communities that provide more of a Q&A type culture rather than just a broadcast type culture.

    Take a software development question. If I post that question onto a small community, I probably won’t get an answer. If I’m a member of a dozen small communities covering the same topic, I might have to spam that question across a dozen identical-topic communities in order to get the answer. If those dozen identical-topic communities were just one organized community with 12x the membership, that singular community would be orders of magnitude more effective…due to the synergy.



  • To take it a step further, the end site that causes the ad to load should also be jointly liable. They are the entity that makes the partnership with the ad network, they are the one benefitting, and they are the one making ads a requirement to use their site. It’s the end site that pushes the requirement for the user to see ads to use their site, and so they should inherit some of the responsibility for ensuring those ads are not harmful.

    if you force me to view ads to use your site, then you should be forced to vouche for the integrity of those ads.


  • Like any kind of contest, finding rules violations is hard and not foolproof. It’s like sports that forbid using steroids - competitors do regularly take those substances while training, then quit taking them for competition and go uncaught. Competitors who are discovered later to have been violating rules are stripped of titles.

    That said, I don’t think it’s a very controversial concept that a beauty pageant shouldn’t be a contest about who could afford the best surgeons. Well - as I said earlier I think beauty pageants are absurd to begin with, but if they have to exist I don’t think it should be a contest between surgeons.



  • The difference is that when the robot reads that book, it maintains a verbatim copy of that book as part of it’s training material indefinitely and can reference and re-reference that material infinitely. That is not how it works when a human reads a book.

    The ‘copy’ that the AI retains indefinitely is a verbatim copy of the original work, and the entire point of “copyright” is to control how and where copies are used.

    Yes, there are ‘fair use’ exceptions to copyright. I don’t think you realize it, but your argument is less about whether this violates copyright (it absolutely does under the textbook definition) and more about whether there should be a fair-use exemption for AIs; you seem to think yes, I would disagree.

    I’d also argue the AI example qualifies as it as ‘derivative work’ based on the original, which STILL would require honoring copyright laws and compensating the creators of the original works. Basically, before reading the book it was just “AI”. After reading the book it has become “AI + book1”, a derivative work, and on and on and on.


  • I think it would have been fair to have a rule saying “no surgical modifications”… because doing things like facelift, nose-job, breast/buttox implants, cheek lifts, wrinkle removal, etc, are obviously unfair advantages (in a beauty contest) for those who have the money pay for it; and having a generic blanket rule like that would have accomplished the same thing they were trying to accomplish without being so blatantly transphobic… so a rule like what they have only proves that they are both despicable AND dumb. The entire notion of beauty pageants is outdated and stupid if you ask me.


  • What I hate most about a lot of series is that they come up with a good beginning and a decent middle, but no end. And so if it gets popular enough they just try to coast on the decent midddle indefinitely until loyal viewers get bored and the writing becomes monotonous, millking the life out of it. So many good shows devolve into this that it’s hard for me to want to invest my time into any new series.

    I think mini-series is the better format where they have a defined beginning, middle, end from the start. This is essentially thd packaged format of a movie, just longer.