Yeah. In retrospect, it’s easy to pick out what stuff is just Elon Musk making up bullshit because it would be awesome. And, with the cybertruck, he finally got to inject that into the engineering process as a dominant factor as he’d been trying to do for so long with the cars. And look at the result…

Back before people knew all that much about it, back when Elon Musk was the guy who made Tesla and SpaceX and this super smart guy (as opposed to being the guy who bought them and then fucked up the engineering), I knew some people who were excited about it. It was supposed to be a working truck but electric, bring all the better-than-other-cars stuff that the Roadster and Model S had, it was supposed to have solar panels and electrical outlets and super-strong construction so you could use it to survive the zombie apocalypse.

I think that was before the inflection point, back when the genuine success Tesla had had made Musk’s personal brand of bullshit believable. I remember when people started getting a good look at all the concept and actual prototypes, that made it look like a dumpster without the storage space, was when the shine came off the rose. But I definitely do remember people who were excited about it back in the beginning.

No water for you, you gotta be able to fit the grooves. As is known.

No, he had to bunch his fingers up because the number of grooves wasn’t right, and only then did it perfectly match. Weren’t you paying attention?

See my other comment; I think the same user contingent that likes VPNs tends to also want maximum convenience, which isn’t Tor. Of course they frame convenience as the only relevant factor, instead of acknowledging that being the tradeoff they’re making.

I haven’t really played around with VPNs to make the comparison. Tor breaks for a significant number of sites, but it’s still a pretty small minority; “only works for a small number of sites” is a comical untruth.

If Tor breaks more sites than VPNs do (which I think is likely), I think it is because Tor is secure. It is easier to do malicious things behind Tor because you have, for all intents and purposes, an unbreakable shield of privacy while you are doing those malicious things. And so, site operators tend to block it more readily than they do VPNs.

Whether you want to make the tradeoff in favor of convenience or genuine privacy is, of course, up to you. It’s not surprising to me that the Lemmy userbase is more or less unanimous in favor of convenience. Of course it is fine if you want, but you don’t need to misrepresent how things are to make it the only possible choice.

Tor Browser

Got it. So just trying to spam in favor of their pet project. Ty

I kind of do too… anyone have a link to what it was before it was deleted? I am curious.

@admins thank you for squashing this ❤️

Don’t wash them until you’re ready to eat them, don’t get crappy strawberries, and you should be good

Hm.

Here are my thoughts:

I don’t really care about picking the better debater. That actually seems kind of antithetical: In a perfect world, the truth should win, and it doesn’t really matter if someone’s more “skillful” or forceful or just willing to type and berate more. Actually one of the things that bothers me about the propaganda on Lemmy is that it is often (not always) pretty skillful at changing minds, independent of the validity of the content.

I do like the idea of formalizing it a little bit. Having a limited number of “rounds” is an interesting idea. Right now, one of the issues I see that I’m trying to deal with with this thing is the strategy of kind of blathering endlessly or constantly changing the subject, not really being responsive but talking without end. The current iteration of the bot will call you out on it when that happens, but it might be kind of better if it’s your chance and once it’s done it is done. Kind of like court: If the opponent raises a point, and you just ignore it, than by default they “win” that point and you don’t even have a chance to go back and correct it.

I don’t even necessarily like the idea of picking a “winner.” To me, that’s up to each reader, and often the truth is kind of in the middle or they are both valid arguments. It’s more of kind of a pass/fail on both sides: Are you being reasonable? There are a lot of strategies that look really reasonable, or at worst just like aggressively asserting your side, but if you’re good at using them you can literally make almost anything sound plausible. So, if neither side is doing that, then it’s fine! They just had a conversation, responded reasonably to each other’s points, everything moved forward. I am more on the side of “what truth did we figure out” as opposed to needing to assign a winner and a loser mechanically to each debate.

Yeah, modern day political TV debate is nonsense. Actually, even this format of debate in the video you sent, I don’t completely like. The woman is clearly full of shit. They’re setting up this format structure, this respect, this kind of “objective” format, and then they are welcoming someone to take an honored position within it that doesn’t deserve the respect. I didn’t watch much beyond the beginning, but I can almost guarantee that she is lying and rationalizing, and her underlying position is “red man good blue man bad.” I don’t really know how you can expose that in a taking turns long form “debate” format, that’s just my reaction seeing her. I feel like having something like Jon Stewart interviewing her and challenging her, still being fair and letting her talk but not letting her get away with bullshit, would be better than implicitly pretending that she is upholding the social contract when she is not.

Maybe I am wrong, that’s just my snap judgement seeing the first little bit. Actually, setting up a framework where being unfriendly to that kind of dishonesty is allowed and sanctioned, but being dishonest or shifty in your debating is “not allowed” in the same way that overt incivility is “not allowed” currently on Lemmy, is part of my goal here.

Those are my thoughts about it, in no real coherent order, it just took me a little time to watch a piece of the video and get back to you.

Well, but you do though. Making comments and getting the respect and agreement of the people in the community is how you get influence.

I really don’t like this Lemmy thing where certain people are empowered by the software to control the communications of other people (beyond just removing spam or abuse or something). I feel like you don’t need that. I really don’t feel like you or me or anybody being put in a position where they can “influence” someone else’s communications unilaterally is really necessary to a good community. Often it is counterproductive. Maybe that’s the issue, you just activated one of my pet peeves in a way that has nothing to do with what you want to do.

Can you tell me more about what you want to do, how you would want to apply Oxford scoring and such? Maybe that could be a whole separate community / idea, I was envisioning this one as being a lot more basic, just can people talk with each other without blatantly mischaracterizing the other person’s points or ignoring questions or etc. But IDK, maybe I just don’t understand the basic concept even yet.

Do, or do not. There is no try.

Yeah, I’d be happy to post it up along with some of the other little tools I use here, that’s a good idea.

Nothing is stopping you from making that tool without mod powers…

I generally don’t even touch the mod buttons except in exceptional circumstances; I don’t expect that this place would be any different. Maybe events will change my mind but I would hope that a lot of this stuff can get worked out with talking and culture, as opposed to by removing comments.

Ooh… that’s a good point. Any discussion which gets fed into the debate bot will get fed into OpenAI’s API, which means it’ll be used for training. (I trust their “do not use this data” checkbox not at all.) And I think you’re right that having that happen will be a deal-breaker for most people and just a totally different thing than the purpose of the community as stated.

Let me think on that a little more. I won’t do anything with the tool until I can look into self-hosting it or something. I think consider it as purely a human community until further discussion, then.

I don’t think this is really true as long as they’re complying with the DMCA. OP can upload stuff, it’ll stay up until someone notices and cares enough to send a takedown notice, and then the server host will take it down. In theory OP might be liable if they really wanted to push it, which maybe makes it not the best idea, but I think the server operator is in the clear as long as they take stuff down if it does get requested to.

See my other comment. I wasn’t saying at all that Lemmy was a US-only thing, I was just trying to say that that the whole network is probably enough of a niche platform that it’s not worth the substantial effort that would be involved in trying to interfere too much with US users on non-US instances. Big instances in the US, they can fuck with, and so why not (and especially since the Take it Down act is structured to empower individuals to go after them without the government needing to spend resources on it.) Instances outside the US, never mind, we have bigger fish to fry.

Oh, I am sure most of Lemmy is outside the US. I was saying that, in general, Lemmy (and even Mastodon) is probably too small and difficult a problem for them to want to attack through any systematic method. I think, if anything, they’ll just surveil and punish individual US-based users as opposed to trying to shut down or block instances outside the US.

It’s one of the advantages of ActivityPub services. Bluesky will be easy for them to attack at the root and I fully expect them to do so, whereas for truly federated services I think the reaction will be “ah what the hell too much trouble, how much harm can they really do.”

No, they will just make server operators liable for obeying any conservative who has an issue with any content there and can make the right format of complaint.

I suspect that instances outside the US will simply be too small a factor to bother with. Small, scattered opposition that is subject to deliberate trolling and disruption at any scale anyone feels like deploying will simply not be worth bothering with.

This is all assuming if a big internet-censorship operation starts (which it seems likely that it will). I think it will mainly focus on large based-in-the-US companies which host large services. Notably among them will be Bluesky. The only impact it will have on anything ActivityPub-based is that they will shut down or muzzle some big instances inside the US, and then, the point being made, they will probably move on, leaving instances outside the US to do whatever they want. That’s my prediction.

Oh, also, Palantir’s surveillance will incorporate people’s comments into their overall dossier on the person, regardless of where their instance is, which means that anyone who maintains a big presence on an ActivityPub network will be putting themselves at person risk of neo-deportation to somewhere they can never get free from. It will still be legal to do, though. Sure.