The only soul you will ever be able to save is your own.

Set an example, invite them outside to play, or suggest a board game night, basically offer them options that get them away from it, but expect most of them to just keep scrolling for your own mental health.

Nah.

For starters, who will pay for the hosting and bandwidth of a monolithic Reddit knockoff? How do we prevent it from becoming another shitplug of capitalism? (We don’t, it goes exactly the way every other profit-seeking platform has gone)

And, MOST importantly: content moderation is impossible at scale; every Instance operator takes as many users as they can afford, in time and effort as well as money. The operators of monolithic sites end up doing things like hiring people in Africa and making them look at CSAM posts all day, so we don’t have to.

No, giant scale is bad. It was always bad. I have been here since 1992, you are really peddling terrible and ignorant ideas here.

You almost murdered me just now with a tuna fish sandwich.

I don’t buy it. If Datacentres were the powersipping butterflies you suggest, why all the new fossil power plants everywhere? I would probably not have given a shit about the datacentres, if not for all the new fossil pollution that is part and parcel of the construction.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Strictly speaking, I’m barely an acolyte; the cultists are the devs.

I endorse TrueNAS, mainly because ZFS. You want ZFS, I will go so far as to get on a video call with you and go over why, if I need to convince you. I used FreeNAS, the old name for the gratis, BSD-based TrueNAS, and it was brill. There are some very good videos on Youtube made by Allan Jude at Klara Systems if you want to dive in yourself.

I run my two servers on old PCs, and I echo that recommendation. You want room to expand your disk pool when needed, and you want as many cores and as much RAM as you can afford. If you don’t have ECC ram, it’s not a big deal for your files, as long as you’re running ZFS, but I would stick to containers rather than full VMs for your services. I have been using Docker, saved as Compose files, for most of my self-hosted stuff for years, and it’s nice cause I can basically nuke the server anytime Iike, import the zpool, and go start the services right back up.

I run straight Debian & FreeBSD nowadays so I cannot say what exact features are on TrueNAS these days, but ten years ago they had an easy GUI for setting up Jails (the BSD version of containers, sorta, it predates them I believe…), so I would assume that current TrueNAS does the same for Docker on some level.

Old PC running TrueNAS, that is the way.

I feel like this is what the Habsburgs looked like, actually. Those paintings all look like caricatures of these guys.

Programming is a very non-fuzzy topic; it’s no surprise that as the great delusion shakes out, generated art is too despised to be a significant revenue stream, and so far as I can tell the generated human text is still amateurishly bad.

But it’s a fact that these models have been trained on just about every bit of publicly-available code, which by and large, is good, working code. Not every bit of it, but enough that I have yet to see the thing spit out bad syntax… though it catches my bad syntax every time.

I have not and will never try to use it to write code for me, but it’s a smashing tutor, and I could certainly see an experienced dev who knows exactly what they want, handing off the building of tedious functions and stuff, piece by piece, and getting back good, compact code. I believe that the problems we’re having are to do with someone handing off the building of an entire website, or an entire app, that’s where you end up with runaway dependencies, bloated and badly-written functions, etc.

Now, it still goes idiot all the time. I point out that my push function is failing because the ringbuffer_is_full check is returning true every time (I’m very dumb when I’m first starting out on anything), it “sees” the problem and tells me correctly what to do to fix it, but it talks about the function returning false every time. Correct answer, but the dressing on the salad is wrong. This only happens, though, after I’ve been in the same chat for a while (context window overflow).

In other words, it’s a tool that humans can use, while keeping an eye for that kinda thing, but it certainly will not replace anyone, though we’re going to absorb a lot of damage from stupid rich people trying.

In other news, I had a dream last night where I was hanging out with an old ex, and when she showed up, she (somehow) told me that not only had she gone blind since we last talked, she had then gotten a brain tumour and had her head amputated. So I was walking around with my headless ex all day in this dream. I don’t dislike this ex, we were just walking around (how?) and talking to people (HOW?).

I wonder if this is a product of me conversing with something that has no consciousness so much this last week. Or maybe it’s the Ed Gein series we’re watching, I dunno.

I’m not walking around touting it, cause this is a time of battling cults. But I have been using an AI as a tutor to teach me how to write C code, with an eye towards kernel contributions and other things that require that speed. Obviously it’s a more marketable dev skill, even in this time, than the Python I know. It is very good at teaching, actually. Too bad about us all perishing by asphyxiation.

Here in Canada we do things right. You trying a Robertson head once, feel how the drill never jumps out of the screw, you will wish you were Canadian too.

I am one of the fortunate (right handed) so I remember one of my uncles eliminating all confusion by asking me which hand I “right” with.

Believing one is right does not inevitably lead to acting in violation of the rights of others.

I would argue that a narcissist who places themselves at the centre of everything, on the other hand, that set of conceits absolutely will lead to that sort of behavior.

This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.

That being said, I was addressing someone who refused to believe that local inference was even possible on CPU; this tells me that the efforts to present the current grift as the only and inevitable AI outcome is working, on minds that do not fundamentally grasp what the technology is, nor what it’s doing. I think the tech is great, and highly useful - the way they are implementing has perverse incentives and existential outcomes, and it does not have to be that way, but it is, because capitalism.

Was scrolling my account history and came upon this old post, in which many people, yourself included, expressed disbelief that Meta was knowingly taking money to foment genocide, which we learned when Careless People was released, was absolutely the case. And we learned just this week, Meta been paying Nazis to post on Facebook.

I wonder what the line is, for people in general.

Sometime between then and now, Careless People was released, in which we learned that from Zucklerberg on down, they knew about the genocide, and they took the money. We also just learned this week that they have been inviting Nazis into their content monetization setup - paying Nazis to post, that is.

What do you think now?

Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines - it’s a question of focused, tight training. What they’re doing instead is literally attempting to build gigantic models that take in absolutely everything (burning real books in the process because fuck history we got money to make) and attempting to sell the idea that this brute force, one-thing-does-it-all approach, which requires us to give up everything else that is good in the world, is the only way forward, and yes, we must build the roko basilisk now.

It’s a big, big grift.

I have always felt surrounded by right wing bullshit, on previous socials and in life.

This is the only place where I look around, and believe that it is people further to the left of me that are maybe taking things a bit far. I do NOT, for the record, agree with the apologists who want us to let more fash in, I like being in a place where I am, for once, the moderate.

Have to say, when I’m strictly looking for hard info, like, what are the command line switches to achieve the right config for a thing, the AI is pretty much always right. It’s not without use, but Doing Things For You is not its best use.

That depends on what you are calling Capitalism. I’m all for free markets and such, but Capitalism was never anti-feudal - first thing the Burghers did was marry their kids into Noble families. It was strictly about adding “man with enough money that he doesn’t work” to the protected class.

Never has it been more clear what Capitalism is. It has fuckall to do with freedom and everything to do with sharecropping.