I just read through this giant book twice in a row, and my TL;DR is that it’s a must-read for anyone that loves fantasy, furry or not. That’s not to say it’s an all-time masterpiece, but it’s surprisingly strong in almost every aspect, and I think almost anyone will have a great time with its unique blend. I picked up an...
It’s honestly pretty hard for me to find media I can swallow because of having an anxiety trigger that is so common.
Most media has depictions of death or loss in it, and I’ve come across first person descriptions that were so immersive that my heart was actually pounding and I had to take a few days to stop feeling down, and it’s not something the authors usually mention explicitly. So in the end I don’t really watch or read anything serious these days.
I’ve tried to love Itch, EGS and GOG, but the thing that keeps me coming back to Steam is the ability to say “No, I’m not going to play that, stop showing it”. The other stores shove unwanted ads in my face every time I visit, and it’s always for the same old games I have no interest in. Steam helps me on my quest to...
That’s really the thing with Steam in general, from a consumer perspective it’s a very good and honest service, it actually adds to the experience of playing games instead of being an annoyance.
A lot of other stores feel like only shells made around popular titles to promote more stuff and lock people into using them. More launchers won’t solve the monopoly of Steam, you’ll just end up with as many as there are streaming services.
That’s not the case for GOG and Itch, but there you don’t get the same level of experience.
The future of selfhosted services is going to be... Android?
Wait, what?
Think about it. At some point everyone has had an old phone lying around. They are designed to be constantly connected, constantly on... and even have a battery and potentially still a SIM card to survive power outages.
We just need to make it easy to create APK packaged servers that can avoid battery-optimization kills and automatically configure an outbound tunnel like ngrok, zerotrust, etc...
The goal: hosting services like #nextcloud, #syncthing, #mastodon!? should be as easy as installing an APK and leaving an old phone connected to a spare charger / outlet.
It would be tempting to have an optimized ROM, but if self-hosting is meant to become more commonplace, installing an APK should be all that's needed. #Android can do SSH, VPN and other tunnels without the need for root, so there should be no problem in using tunnels to publicly expose a phone/server in a secure manner.
In regards to the suitability of home-grade broadband, I believe that it should not be a huge problem at least in Europe where home connections are most often unmetered: "At the end of June 2021, 70.2% of EU homes were passed by either FTTP or cable DOCSIS
3.1 networks, i.e. those technologies currently capable of supporting gigabit speeds."
PS. syncthing actually already has an APK and is easy to use. Although I had to sort out some battery optimization stuff, it's a good example of what should become much more commonplace.
Hmm I think my main concern would be lack of kernel/firmware updates, running something like postmarketOS could partly solve that and still be nearly as easy to set up (just unlock and flash a prebuilt image)
But firmware is still almost entirely dependent on the vendor, since it’s all signed and unpatchable.
Next issue would be lack of connectivity on a lot of phones, which have gone backwards and include USB 2.0 now. WiFi is an option, but less stable, I personally decided to just go 100Mbps and suffer.
As for the battery, it would help a lot if phones were designed to boot without one and they were removable, it all worked well for about half a year until I found out I had a spicy pillow and had to replace it with direct power to the board, which made the whole setup much less elegant and required soldering.
It all comes down to how devices are designed in the end. If someone took the time to make a computer instead of just a phone, and included features that make it useful past its initial life that aren’t that popular (display output, microsd, headphone jack), mainlined all the drivers and maintained firmware, that would be a different story.
But that’s not a very profitable model, because it’s all about reducing waste and thus selling less. A lot needs to change.
Not sure myself, I’m trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren’t anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you’re starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.
But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there’s no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won’t align with yourself or the other workers fully, it’s just a question of degree.
Hello! This will be the first of our weekly discussions. This thread will be pinned in the local timeline all week long and I hope that everyone feels encouraged to voice their opinion....
It’s definitely useful for exploring ideas, I recently used AI-generated images as reference for an artist and it helped me get my thoughts across. I can’t wait to see the final result of it!
It’s probably also good for adding illustration to text where someone otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it or spend the time, adding detail to your own art and so on.
The worrying thing to me is how fast it can create all sorts of images, and combined with LLMs and other tools even be automated. I could totally see entire feeds being populated by personalized AI art, stories, and music, let’s not forget that’s largely dictated by algorithms already if someone uses things like Spotify.
So one day it might get extremely difficult to tell if what you’re looking at was even created by someone on their own, or if AI had any significant role in it. This would make it impossible for regular artists to compete under the current economic model, which to be fair needs to go, but it will still cause suffering in the meantime. Even beyond capitalism, people want share their work for others to appreciate, and if every channel of communication is flooded it’s going to be pretty difficult to get noticed among the noise. If AI can create stunning images it might also depreciate art in the eyes of others, because to get to a very similar result using AI could take a lot less effort if the technology further improves, so they might see it as just a commodity or “pretty picture” and not think about artists at all.
I have been wanting to use peertube but I have not really found an instance that is right for my content. On my youtube channel I do blender tutorial, pony animations, and recently some furry stuff.
In a world full of anthrophomorphic animals, furries if you will, most species would have an additional appendages to humans: a tail. These tails can probably be used for ergonomics....
For a sci-fi story I'm slowly chipping away at I'm sort of trying to answer the question of how anthros could arise from humans, so that kinda sidesteps the issue of jealousy, since there would be choice, but it still leaves the other questions.
Maybe tail accessories would be made in multiple sizes and shapes, just like clothes for people are, though if tails and species are custom that could make it even more difficult, and there are so many real animals regardless. I guess in such a technologically advanced world accessories would all be custom made and arbitrary designs could be applied to them.
Something I haven't seen too many people think about is the health implications of having a tail. Walking on two legs while having a tail would probably cause tail injuries to be common from falls etc., and how do you account for it in infrastructure so it's safe for all kinds of them? It's similar to how things in our world aren't always designed for left-handed users, women or different body types, like cars for example. How would you keep lots of different species with slightly different anatomies, including tails, safe?
Furgonomics aside, I love tails and ears as a form of emotional expression, maybe in part because I'm autistic and would find it easier to express myself this way without the baggage that human body language brings!
I guess you could make a lemmy community where only you can post and it would act as a kind of blog, but you still can't follow mastodon users. That's actually something I want to do with my own instance and a custom frontend, because it seems perfect for what I want!
Not sure if merging different accounts would really be possible like that, you could do authentication using mastodon accounts similar to how you can log in with google, but there's really no universal way of doing it over activitypub itself unless you want to send confirmation codes over it like we do over email heh.
It's possible to point a custom domain to your existing fedi account with webfinger (you actually only need to make a file in .well-known on a web server), but I don't think it's possible to do it with multiple accounts. It would actually be cool if you could point people to your domain and have different fedi software figure out which one is the most appropriate, or present a list.
Also that custom domain won't show up on the account itself, that's another opportunity to maybe make identify separable from instances, so someone could be less dependent on it sticking around, I think bsky attempts to do something like that, but it also has quite a lot of holes in it and I feel like activitypub is a better foundation overall.
It is a derogatory term, so it's bound to get overused a bit, but it generally refers to "leftists" who like the USSR and simp for existing authoritarian states with "communist" parties, like the PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, NK, and even Russia despite it having nothing to do with any kind of socialism anymore. Some of them are indeed war crime enjoyers, while others try to dress it in denial and propaganda.
As a counter example, socdems, democratic socialists, anarchists are not tankies, it's not just anyone on the left spectrum.
I'm very afraid another alternative is being conisidered here, and it's worse than any of these.
It's fascism.
And there's sadly precedent for it, economic crisis leads to political and social instability that can be cleverly exploited by appealing to peoples' emotions and putting them against an imagined enemy in other people, when the real enemy is hovering above us and cheering it on.
If this is true, then some things start to make a lot of sense. By making the user calls so incredibly expensive for the API, Reddit makes it so it would be come prohibitively expensive for basically anyone else to be able to access. Google could likely still afford it (but they would certainly pay a lot to do so), but an...
OpenAI definitely owes a lot to Reddit threads, I've even been able to trace a GPT-4 hallucination to a single thread where the things it was talking about appeared, but it seemed to have merge two completely different names together.
It definitely could be a contributing factor, the biggest players are caught in a war among themselves while trying to fend off open models at the same time. That may explain why everyone values their publicly accessible data all of a sudden.
Maybe even the recent stuff with YouTube (invidious and ad blockers) can be explained by this, maybe they want to set the stage for restricting access to videos. Why? Videos have proven to be a good way of training open-ended agents that play Minecraft for example. Google has PALM-E (which is based on an LM and another transformer for performing physical movements) and is working on general-purpose robots. They also said they were training on some kind of model that's built to be multimodal from the very start, which will probably be a successor to that.
tbh training robots on videos wouldn't even be bad copyright wise, there's nothing copyrightable about the way people move and do things, and people mostly want boring manual jobs to be automated (at least if we get rid of capitalism first so we don't fucking starve). But of course Google wants to have an edge on its robots and they can get that by siloing off the data from everyone else...
AI research should be public and the results made as accessible as possible. I hate the intersection of AI and capitalism.
I suspect these supposedly good companies will either rise and fall as they run out of VC money, or become another OpenAI or Google at one point, only using their initial investment to kick start their tech.
But also we have to think about getting replaced by automation anyway (large corporations having exclusive access to it only exacerbates it). It's different from previous forms of technology, because it won't really create enough jobs for people.
And while we're at it, if we can get abundance of labour, why not give people a bit more agency over everything than just delegating it to some rich fucks who will turn around the moment they sniff out a way to make extra money and abuse in a multitude of ways to keep their influence?
I consider myself alterhuman, and I feel somewhat similar. I just don’t really vibe with my body too much, I’d prefer to be an anthro, but it’s more of an indifference than dysphoria.
Though it does affect my sexuality to some extent too.
I think it's interesting how much really silly fursuiting content there used to be on youtube, even some colab channels. I guess a lot of that has moved into VR, which removes the physical barrier, at least aside from the cost and the software ecosystem being ehh.
I think there is a bit more awareness now of the issues inside the fandom, though some of it has been directed into chaotic birdsite outrage which isn't terribly productive, and we've lost some autonomy to large sites, but so has a lot of the internet. Still our culture is quite unique and worth fighting for.
I don't know if I really miss anything in particular, maybe I'm a bit on the younger side here since I've been a furry for more like 6-7 years (also fuck, where has that time gone?)
You can't just distribute them across instances the way normal actors do. Whichever server hosts @technology or @technology is going to get HOSED on the regular.
Hmm, you could probably extend the protocol to do eventual consistency across instances if that ever becomes a problem, remote instances could keep their own counts and only send aggregated updates.
This sort of thing is why it bothers me when people mention staying and fighting on centralized platforms. You are fighting code, your existence on these places is not tangible and you can be stripped of it without physical force. Online dictatorships are not like offline ones, they can only fall when they run out of money, which happens when they run out of all of you.
White protogen (Art by Boopy_the_proot) (i.redd.it)
Source: www.reddit.com/r/protogen/…/white_protogen_3/...
[Book Review] Imperium Lupi by Adam Browne
I just read through this giant book twice in a row, and my TL;DR is that it’s a must-read for anyone that loves fantasy, furry or not. That’s not to say it’s an all-time masterpiece, but it’s surprisingly strong in almost every aspect, and I think almost anyone will have a great time with its unique blend. I picked up an...
Steam's killer feature (pawb.social)
I’ve tried to love Itch, EGS and GOG, but the thing that keeps me coming back to Steam is the ability to say “No, I’m not going to play that, stop showing it”. The other stores shove unwanted ads in my face every time I visit, and it’s always for the same old games I have no interest in. Steam helps me on my quest to...
IT Devs of of Lemmy, How do You Cope with Being Forced to Contribute to 'Social Media Pornshow of the Web'™ or Die?
(begin rant)...
Buyers of Bored Ape NFTs sue after digital apes turn out to be bad investment (arstechnica.com)
I have 0 fucking sympathy
Weekly Discussion: **How does AI "art" impact the furry fandom?**
Hello! This will be the first of our weekly discussions. This thread will be pinned in the local timeline all week long and I hope that everyone feels encouraged to voice their opinion....
Hiya, Lemmy! (cloud.hydrocelestis.com)
Thought I’d kick things off here with a hiya post, and share one of my favourite artworks of my fursona/me (I’m otherkin!) while I was at it!...
Furry Peertube Instance Recommendation?
I have been wanting to use peertube but I have not really found an instance that is right for my content. On my youtube channel I do blender tutorial, pony animations, and recently some furry stuff.
Furry_irl (pawb.social)
first post here, so i'm posting silly things (don't know why it's blurred :/)
Tail Ergonomics (Worldbuilding)
In a world full of anthrophomorphic animals, furries if you will, most species would have an additional appendages to humans: a tail. These tails can probably be used for ergonomics....
Fediverse Single Sign On
I think I joined the Fediverse misunderstanding how it works. I went in under the belief that:...
[Defederation] lemmygrad.ml
Instance: lemmygrad.ml...
The End of the Internet is Here. (www.youtube.com)
Really nice video on this, what are your thoughts? How can we turn it around?
Reddit CEO seeks to end site protest by allowing users to vote out moderators (www.google.com)
The title is from this video, although that one is very short....
Reddit is OpenAI’s Moat (www.cyberdemon.org)
If this is true, then some things start to make a lot of sense. By making the user calls so incredibly expensive for the API, Reddit makes it so it would be come prohibitively expensive for basically anyone else to be able to access. Google could likely still afford it (but they would certainly pay a lot to do so), but an...
Could I be an otherkin?
I don't know if this post will get any traction from other otherkins/therians, but......
Talking topic: How is today's furry fandom different from what it was 10 or 20 years ago?
What things do you like better now and what do you miss from older times?
Here it comes - Reddit admins taking over subs (lemmy.intai.tech)