• 14 Posts
  • 204 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 8th, 2023

help-circle

  • I don’t think federation has to be an obstacle for non-tech people. They don’t really have to know about it, and it can be something they learn about later. I really don’t know if federation stops people from trying it out. Don’t people think, “I don’t know what instance to join, so I’m not going to choose any?”

    Personally, having no algorithm for your home feed is what I don’t like about it. Everything is chronological. Some people I follow post many times a day, some post once per month, some post stuff I’m extremely interested in sporadically, followed by a sea of random posts. Hashtag search and follow is also less useful because there’s no option for an algo.

    The UI seems fine to me. I guess I’m not picky about UIs. The one nitpick I have is on mobile, tapping an image will just full-screen the image instead of opening the thread.





  • Harris just offered little to get voters excited. Mostly ran as a status-quo candidate. Racial minorities, for the most part, are not happy with the status-quo. By being ignored, it allowed right-wing propaganda on media (social and traditional) to do its work. One thing I’ve heard is, “well, at least Trump sent me some checks.” Many people I’ve talked to weren’t happy with Biden’s involvement with the crime bill, or Harris’ being a DA that proudly prosecuted cannabis offenders. Some people I’ve talked to liked that Trump pardoned Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, and that woman who had an extremely long sentence for cannabis. One person I’ve talked to was upset about “libtards” removing black faces from grocery store products (using Aunt Jemima as an example). Some younger men I know (some racial minorities) have started going deep into the Jordan Peterson, Fresh and Fit, Andrew Tate, etc pipeline, which I’m guessing is rooted in sexual insecurity.



  • 31337@sh.itjust.workstoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldUS Democracy
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    9 days ago

    Things are quite different. While Trump was in office, he did multiple things that were worse than what Nixon did, and was never forced to leave office. I think our institutions were stronger back then. We didn’t have a very good democracy when Hoover was president, and it took many decades for the Voting Rights Act to get passed (which has recently been weakened by SCOTUS, and will probably be weakened much more). I think we’ll regress quite a bit. Republicans obviously want more of an autocracy/oligarchy. I think it’s a very real possibility we have Russia-style “elections” in the future, and I don’t even know how you come back from that. Assuming democracy isn’t completely destroyed, it may take many decades of fighting and changing the minds of the people who aren’t disenfranchised to get back to where we were. Hell, even civil war is on the table if Trump follows through on some of his more egregious promises (i.e. if he deems Democratic state governments as the “enemy within” and tries to use the military to depose them).











  • I use LLMs for multiple things, and it’s useful for things that are easy to validate. E.g. when you’re trying to find or learn about something, but don’t know the right terminology or keywords to put into a search engine. I also use it for some coding tasks. It works OK for getting customized usage examples for libraries, languages, and frameworks you may not be familiar with (but will sometimes use old APIs or just hallucinate APIs that don’t exist). It works OK for things like “translation” tasks; such as converting a MySQL query to a PostGres query. I tried out GitHub CoPilot for a while, but found that it would sometimes introduce subtle bugs that I would initially overlook, so I don’t use it anymore. I’ve had to create some graphics, and am not at all an artist, but was able to use transmission1111, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Gimp to get usable results (an artist would obviously be much better though). RemBG and works pretty well for isolating the subject of an image and removing the background too. Image upsampling, DLSS, DTS Neural X, plant identification apps, the blind-spot warnings in my car, image stabilization, and stuff like that are pretty useful too.



  • Ideally, the Democrats would be unabashedly pro-immigration and advocate for solving the “problem” by making it much easier to immigrate legally and getting those currently undocumented, documented. This would make immigrants harder to exploit, address fears of immigrants under-cutting wages, and paying more taxes and social security. That addresses all the somewhat legitimate worries I can think of; the rest of the “problems” I can think of are just rooted in racism and lies. Immigration has been and is a net-positive for the U.S., and a pro-immigration stance should be an easy argument to sell to voters that’s also backed up by many studies and data; including conservative think-tanks like Cato. Pro-immigration sentiments were very popular in the U.S. until this recent bout of anti-immigration propaganda. Even now, Americans hold contradictory opinions, like being pro-mass-deportation while being in favor of expanding pathways to citizenship: https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/polling-around-mass-deportation-far-more-complicated-right-wing-media-let