It’s been used many times before, but I like the analogy of ordering food. If I go to a restaurant and order risotto, I haven’t made the dish, I’ve only consumed it. I want you to focus on that word “consume”, it’s important here.

Another idea I’ve seen recently that I like was a summed post something like this:

• People use AI to write a 4,000 word article from a 15 word idea (introduction of noise)
• Others then use AI to summarize the 4,000 word article into a 15 word blurb (introduction of more noise)

I know I’m using a lot of analogies here; from food to writing and now the visual medium - but stick with me. Completely sidestepping any lofty notions of soul or humanity, let’s look strictly at what’s being communicated in a visual piece of art generated by AI. It’s an idea, one containing neither your specific style (the creative process) or vision (the final product), though you may feel you get a close approximation after several iterations and a detailed/complex enough prompt. If you wanted to convey the idea of “eagle perched in a tree”, you’ve already done so with that phrase (or prompt in this respect). By providing an AI-generated image, you’ve narrowed my own ability to interpret down into the AI-generated noise now taking up space between us.

The reason you’d use AI-generated art is because you need to fill space, like the thumbnail to go with an article. An empty space to dump things into. While I can’t ever claim enough authority to define what exactly art is and is not (nobody can), I can say with absolute certainty that no matter how far the tech evolves, to me PERSONALLY, AI will only ever generate content, not art. There is already more art in the world than I could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes, I neither want nor need this garbage.

We could explain it to you, but you’re not interested in understanding.

1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.

Even if that’s not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it’ll work for your similar purposes as well.

Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

WTF, no, this is worse in every way. So instead of being involved with the people and topics I choose, it’s instead left up to an algorithm? Somehow even more opaque than usual because of AI involvement.

This isn’t solving any problem, this is yet another mask to push content in front of people.

In response to a perfectly valid question about dumbass plan I just came up with:

“we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”

One of my favorite examples of this was playing The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure on the Gamecube back in they day. Me and a friend were really into it, but had trouble rounding up extra players. We got his little sister and an unwilling third friend to join. After about 30 minutes the unwilling friend, Marcus, gets bored with the game and starts sabotaging the rest of us. He’d run around smacking us with his sword making us drop rupees or refuse to stand where we needed him. That’s honestly when it became fun for all of us, though.

The other three of us would plan out the room and then we’d figure out how to wrangle Marcus back into place. Someone would hold him so he couldn’t go rogue and hit us while the others got in place to pull some levers before the wrangler would toss Marcus onto a pressure plate or something. He got to continue being a little bastard while we (slowly) made progress through the game. He eventually came around and helped us when it was absolutely necessary, but it was always clear it was just so he could keep being a bastard again. I really enjoy that asymmetrical style of gameplay and wish more things capitalized on it.

Also on the Gamecube of notable mention was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Always fun when someone would get the personal mission of “take the most damage” and become a suicidal maniac in every encounter, much to everyone else’s detriment. Ah the good old days.

Thank you, that’s good clarification on what the actual motivations are here. Was having trouble following all the threads and sussing it out myself. Appreciate it.

Am I missing something obvious here? What is motivating such stringent measures to be put in place when things have been sufficient without them thus far? Who is asking for this?

I live in my own little online echo chambers, but even I can’t believe there’s enough ground swell for the government to step in on … What? Violence? Addiction? This is very confusing.

The original post was at least half joking in tone, but in seriousness, I think there’s an argument to be made that “posts” applies to topical threads. Threads that originate with a piece of content like a link or self post and that all following discussion is at least tangentially related. I’d call them posts here on Lemmy for that.

Tweets, however, often originate out of thin air, be it someone’s head or ass. When someone says, “Kanye West ‘tweeted’ <INSERT OPINION HERE>” you’ve already determined about how seriously you’re going to take it.

Not gonna lie, that still felt a little dirty. But I already posted it to the internet and there’s no going backsies.

Everything is tweets now, on all platforms; hear me out.

It might sound lazy, and I certainly have no loyalty to the Twitter brand, but if Musk isn’t going to defend it we have the opportunity to dilute and generalize the term (like zipper or band-aid). We can kill it dead AND reclaim it.

It’s a good word! Short, sweet, has familiarity, and is honestly pretty descriptive for the simple bird-like chatter of the discourse. Everything else proposed sounds dumb as hell, not to mention you’re doing the marketing for them. Don’t sell their brands - suffocate them!

It’s the one-two punch of “why wasn’t it already in place” and “very bad, slow communication” wrapped up in “a team that really should’ve known better already”. If any one of those had been different maybe the reaction wouldn’t’ve been so strong. This just isn’t what you want to see from a new service that’s hoping to take on the entrenched Twitter (no matter how rapidly it may be declining, holdouts will be strong) and the evil Threads (which jumped itself so far ahead in userbase through … shady tactics).

At the end of the day, this is a product. We have a right to demand better service if they want us using it (how they make a profit isn’t our concern). This is the best time to strike too, and lay down the groundwork for what kind of community that we want to foster there. Sending a strong message that we want Twitter but without the bad stuff that made us leave is very important. Did some people take it even way too far? Probably maybe, but you should know by now being online that you can’t let the worst of everyone represent you.

Sorry, yes, still trying to wrap my head around it. It’s one of those things where there is quite obviously no direct benefit for the user. The company is trying to sell it as improving their content, moderation, security, etc. which may have indirect, knock-on effects for the end user but whether that would even be true or if it would be perceptible to your average person is MUCH more questionable.

It’s the same kind of thing when you see people defending exclusivity on consoles. I mean sure, it helps prop up your favorite company/developer in hopes that the market benefit may someday come back around and help them to produce more content/games that you like, but people seriously need to start looking out after their own self interests first and corporations be damned. They earn money by providing actual value, don’t ever argue against yourself.

Maybe somebody can do a better job of boiling this down than I can.

Basically, right now, if you ask for something on the internet, it gets served to you. Sure there are lots of server side protections that may require an account to log in to access things or what have you, but still you can at least request something from a server and get some sort of response in return.

What this does is force attestation through a third party. I can ask for something from a server and the server turns to the attester and goes, “Hey, should I give this guy what he’s asking for?” and the attester can say “No” for whatever reasons it might. Or worse yet, I can get the attestation but the server can then decide based in turn that it doesn’t like me having that attestation and I get nothing.

You can make arguments that this would be good and useful, but it’s so easy to see how this could go sideways and nobody with any sense should be taking Google or any of these large corporations at their word.

I think the sooner the better. Something I’ve been mulling over for awhile now is the differences between Mastodon and Lemmy. Mastodon has growth issues (or not, depending on how you want to frame it) due to the type of social media it is. A lot of people that use Twitter are looking to follow particular voices in the chatter, or simply be where friends are. That’s a much steeper barrier for Mastodon to overcome. Lemmy on the other hand is just a place where conversation happens in general. People will come here for the content and the discourse. I know we’re all impatient wanting it to get back to that Reddit level, but it will happen in time. The stronger the foundation we build, the more tempting it will be for others to join.

I still visit using the website in a desktop browser because I can’t help myself, but it’s noticeably different, even on subs like r/games where there was never a shutdown at all. The weekly “What have you been playing?” topic isn’t getting nearly the number of responses as it normally does, and those responses aren’t as well moderated. They used to be very good at keeping people on topic and formatting their posts with game title/system/etc. but all of that is getting a little sideways now, too.

Almost 400 hours in it according to Steam and I’m still feeling the call, thinking of new builds or things I want to try.

Rust in the Windows kernel, eh? I suppose it really shouldn’t be that surprising at this point with Linux making the move first, but still. I guess I’m a little surprised.

I think that’s a respectable enough goal, though. Those games are clearly awful to play or actually experience in any way directly, but something about the weird and off-putting animations and voice acting has really resonated with people. I think with a team that has the skill and interest to put together something they’re actually invested in (and polish those platforming controls for the love of god) you could get something truly special.

Sure, it’s probably never going to achieve wide appeal, but I don’t think that’s the intent. This is the kind of stuff I want to see coming out of the indie scene, cult classics born of weird passions.