DigitalDilemma

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  • 402 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • “That’s a great question!” </ai>

    The truth is, we don’t need AI to have misinformation, and AI is not the biggest problem in the current post-truth society. There has been a war going on globally in undermining truth for a long time. The old saying, “The first casualty in war is truth” is invalid now, because truth is no longer relevant and lies are weaponised like never before in history. People don’t want to be certain of something, their first reaction to news is to react at a deep and emotional level and the science of misinformation is highly refined and successful in making most people react in a certain way. It takes effort and training not to do that, and most of us can’t.

    Journalists have been warning us about this for decades but integrity costs money, and that funding has been under attack too. It’s pretty depressing whichever way you look at it.








  • I don’t want Lemmy to be zero censorship.

    In every case I’ve known, anywhere claiming “zero censorship” either adopts it sooner or later, or disappears - and in every one of those cases, it was a godawful place to be 100% of the time. IME, those who do say they want this tend to be either edgy teenagers, crackpot conspiracy theorists or psychopaths.

    Sure, you can say “well, zero censorship except bots” - well that’s censorship, isn’t it? And given no anti-bot tactic is reliable, you’ll be blocking humans. Or you can say, “zero censorship except CSAM, or extreme pornography, or anti-terrorist” and you’re either applying societal laws or your own morality on others. You can’t use “no censor” and “except” in a sentence without contradiction.

    If you want zero censorship, I don’t think Lemmy is for you. I don’t think the fediverse is for you. But if you disagree, then run your own instance and put it on an onion address, please stop trying to rant at us for not sharing your views.







  • A book. Teach yourself Perl in 30 days. (Edit - may have been 21 days)

    I bought it around 25-30 years ago. I have dyslexia and autism and have had problems learning from books in the past, but something about the way that was written just clicked for me.

    It allowed me to write some pretty cool software, including a huge system that ran a large animal charity for a very long time, tons of automation software and scripts, and several full webuis. Indirectly it led me to a new career where I write perl every day.

    (I can write in many other languages now, but that was the keystone of everything for me)