It doesn’t matter how well “the economy” recovered from Covid, when you see stuff like this:

https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/

Trump isn’t going to fix that, but Biden already didn’t, and FPTP means you get your pick of those two options.

IMO that’s way off base. People want change. They know they’re getting screwed, and the grifter is promising change. He’s lying and I think most people know that, but the fact that they’d take a convicted felon over what the DNC offered up is a crushing repudiation.

Bernie would’ve mopped the floor with Trump, because he also offers change. Someone like Obama would’ve too, even though there was a paucity of actual change during his terms.

We need to drag the DNC kicking and screaming off of the corporate dick it’s sucking, and get it left enough to offer real change, and people will vote for it in droves.

You’ll like this poem:

https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

The start of it:

Gerard Nolst Trenité - The Chaos (1922)

Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

The way I’m imagining it, it wouldn’t be microblogging, but I’m probably not describing it well. You’d still have communities with threads, unlike Mastodon. You’d just wouldn’t have people posting “to” those communities (unless maybe you intentionally wanted to).

It’s mostly a way to get at the same thing as merged comment threads, just in a way that feels like it would have fewer edge cases to me.

IMO copying communities from Reddit as-is was a mistake long-term, but was maybe necessary short-term so that people wouldn’t be confused. If I had my druthers, I’d make a new system where communities are uniquely identified purely as !UUID@lemmy.instance (though still with a human-friendly display name). You don’t get to create a community that namesquats something like !gaming@lemmy.world. All posts would be made with hashtags like Mastodon, and then each community would just configure “Include all posts with this tag in our community”. The big issue then is who moderates tags? I think a system like Bluesky has would work well, as you mention. People can moderate tags and other people can follow their work, or not.

If that was combined with seamless account/community migration, that would solve a lot of moderation issues. If you mod a community and the admins suck, just move it to a new instance. If the mods of a particular community suck, start your own. They won’t be able to monopolize a common name, so it’s much easier to get traction.

On the long-ago internet, there were many, many different software options that supported the same protocols, and they were also a lot more configurable generally speaking

Lemmy is pretty good about that, actually. It’s interoperable with Mastodon via ActivityPub, and there’s other projects like MBin that work nicely with Lemmy.

Neat! Do you pick one instance to load comments from? I notice that this comment isn’t showing up immediately, so wondering if there’s federation delay or the like.

You’re both on .world, which isn’t federated with hexbear, which is the most annoying instance. They’ll brigade other communities, for example the recent thread over at https://jlai.lu/post/11504685 (view it from that instance to see the hexbear comments)

I browse all sometimes from an instance federated with hexbear and I roll my eyes quite a bit whenever I do

Not sure, sorry. I don’t really use Mastodon all that much, maybe somebody else knows?

Neat, thanks!

It would be nice if communities that are similar enough could “share” a comment thread, so you don’t end up with comments scattered over many different communities for the same link. The mods could toggle something in the settings and say “This other community is good and we’ll be OK sharing posts with them”. You also wouldn’t have to explicitly crosspost.

Some apps will collapse those into a single post, but not all of them, and not all the time. It would be nice if that were better.

It would be nice if there was a way to handle instance/user migrations. If an instance gets their domain name taken away, there’s no way AFAIK for the admin to say “Here’s our new location, with a verifiable signature”. Likewise there’s no way for a user AFAIK to move their account with a verifiable signature that the new one is still them. Ideally this could all happen automatically with signatures getting synced automatically and all that.

I’m sure it would be a lot of work and no idea if ActivityPub would get in the way, but it would give people a lot more assurance that they didn’t pick a server that will screw them over by going down.

Maybe a good speaker helps. I’ve tried them before and they’re good background noise for flights, but that’s about all I’ve gotten out of them.

The whole “it’s just autocomplete” is just a comforting mantra. A sufficiently advanced autocomplete is indistinguishable from intelligence. LLMs provably have a world model, just like humans do. They build that model by experiencing the universe via the medium of human-generated text, which is much more limited than human sensory input, but has allowed for some very surprising behavior already.

We’re not seeing diminishing returns yet, and in fact we’re going to see some interesting stuff happen as we start hooking up sensors and cameras as direct input, instead of these models building their world model indirectly through purely text. Let’s see what happens in 5 years or so before saying that there’s any diminishing returns.

Gary Marcus should be disregarded because he’s emotionally invested in The Bitter Lesson being wrong. He really wants LLMs to not be as good as they already are. He’ll find some interesting research about “here’s a limitation that we found” and turn that into “LLMS BTFO IT’S SO OVER”.

The research is interesting for helping improve LLMs, but that’s the extent of it. I would not be worried about the limitations the paper found for a number of reasons:

• There doesn’t seem to be any reason to believe that there’s a ceiling on scaling up
• LLM’s reasoning abilities improve with scale (notice that the example they use for kiwis they included the answers from o1-mini and llama3-8B, which are much smaller models with much more limited capabilities. GPT-4o got the problem correct when I tested it, without any special prompting techniques or anything)
• Techniques such as RAG and Chain of Thought help immensely on many problems
• Basic prompting techniques help, like “Make sure you evaluate the question to ignore extraneous information, and make sure it’s not a trick question”
• LLMs are smart enough to use tools. They can go “Hey, this looks like a math problem, I’ll use a calculator”, just like a human would
• There’s a lot of research happening very quickly here. For example, LLMs improve at math when you use a different tokenization method, because it changes how the model “sees” the problem

Until we hit a wall and really can’t find a way around it for several years, this sort of research falls into the “huh, interesting” territory for anybody that isn’t a researcher.

Gary Marcus is an AI crank and should be disregarded

Yeah, it’s not impossible, but it’s much harder and you get a lot less info. You can also counteract the JS-less tracking with Firefox’s privacy.resistFingerprinting, or by using the Tor Browser, which enables a lot of anti-surveillance measures by default. Here’s also another good site for discovering how trackable you are: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

They’re also working with browser developers to push htmx into web standards, so that hopefully soon you won’t even need htmx/JS/etc, it’ll just be what your browser does by default

A lot of the web is powered by JS, but much less of it needs to be. Here’s a couple of sites that are part of a trend to not unnecessarily introduce it:

http://youmightnotneedjs.com/

https://htmx.org/

The negative implications for Google requiring JS is that they will use it to track everything possible about you that they can, even down to how you move your cursor, or how much battery you have left on your phone in order to jack up prices, or any other number of shitty things.

Could very well be a mobile thing. I was pretty annoyed recently when logging into gcal for work on my phone, it refused to let me sign in without giving them my cell phone number. When I switched to wifi, it stopped bugging me, so clearly they pay attention to that sort of signal.