Arotrios

Arotrios, 10 months ago

Dammit, that's awesome, didn't even see the block button - you got me bonus hunting now... :)

Bonus #2 - Turns out the /d/ parameter works for ANY domains with content posted on Kbin or in your feed.

For instance, let's say you wanna see (or block) everything posted from Facebook:

https://kbin.social/d/facebook.com

or Twitter:

https://kbin.social/d/twitter.com

I gotta hand it to Ernest - this platform has got some kickass code under the hood.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

I've been observing the creation, expansion, and slow heat death of Reddit for a long time now (had accounts there since it opened). I think that Reddit's decisions here accelerated a decline in content quantity and quality, but the trend had been happening for a while.

I think that the biggest issue behind this decline is infrastructure based. Reddit was designed around the basic concept that the desire to post and contribute to the discussion would be reward enough to drive participation. Karma is the point system for this participation, a number that only speaks to popularity, not the quality of a post or a contributor. When the community was small, this non-specific variable served the purpose of identifying content trends, but karma is very poor at describing WHY a post or comment is popular. Eventually, instead of karma being an indicator that someone had contributed to conversation, it's only meaningful metric became one of popularity or notoriety.

This meant that where once Reddit had been a haven for enabling discussion on any topic, it became a shouting match between who could get the most upvotes. This cultural shift became very apparent after the Digg exodus, and the trend accelerated as other social media copied Reddit's voting and karma system. Of course, Reddit began feeding off of their content, which was also popularity driven, and once the content algorithms started coming into play in the mid-2010s, it created a feedback loop of popularity driven schlock that drove most real discussion to fringes of the site.

We've recently seen this dynamic start to even affect Google, whose search results are getting hammered due to Reddit's blackouts, and whose search results have been significantly dropping in quality over the last few years.

As for myself, I still browse certain reddits that I haven't found equivalents for in the Fediverse, but it's pretty clear to me that Reddit's not really a positive place for contributors - whether they be moderators or posters. To some extent, I'll miss the reach of Reddit's audience, but lets face it, most of that audience is just shitposters and bots.

Will the same trend happen in the Fediverse? Possibly, but I think there's more potential here for positive change than there ever will be in a company led by the likes of Huffman, or for that matter any company or centralized authority. Besides, it took about 15 years for Reddit to condense from being a cool place full of new ideas to the condensed black hole of regurgitated shitposting it's become. I think the Fediverse has a bit more potential longevity than that.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

"I ever tell you about the time my buddy Keith and I were on the top of a burnin' building, and we had to fight our way down like five floors of zombies and― Hey, wait a second...I guess that was you guys. Oh, shit, man, I can't wait to tell Keith about that one!"

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Ok, I gotta give you real props for this submission. This gets weirder the further you go down the road. Right now I'm in Blythe, CA:

The Tropics of Blythe raises some mysteries. No such place exists today, and that’s hardly a surprise; your chance of coming across a motel with a big A-frame lobby AND and an adjacent Sambo’s are as likely as finding a two-headed jackelope.

Then there's that little elfin fellow. That's Ken Kimes, motel developer. Therein hangs a tale. New York Times:

While living in Mexico City in 1985, Ms. Kimes and her husband were arrested on slavery charges after several of their maids complained to the Mexican authorities that they had been beaten and imprisoned in the Kimes’s house. Ms. Kimes served five years on the charge (Mr. Kimes served three), and when the couple was reunited with Kenneth Jr., the family embarked on itinerant journeys to Hawaii, Europe and the Bahamas.

It was not long after the senior Mr. Kimes died — of natural causes — in 1994 that people in the orbit of Ms. Kimes and her son started disappearing.

Murder followed. Read it all here

While the link on the site was dead, I tracked it down and found it not to be just a crime article, but a crime novel with 16 chapters.

Bravo, sir - you win this week's wormhole to what the holy hell award, hands down.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

There are two immediate flaws I see with the study. The first is the sound quality of the youtube videos, which have been engineered to human hearing. Dogs hear frequencies high above the human range, and it's highly likely their vocalizations carry nuance and context in the upper frequency. A simple microphone recording won't do - you need something with high sensitivity and minimal distortion, and you have to ensure the digitization of the sound file doesn't interfere with the quality for those higher ranges.

The second is the sound input into the analysis, which also should be tuned for these higher frequencies - I find it unlikely that the AI was matching frequencies above human hearing to generate dog "words".

In essence, they're analyzing how humans hear dogs speak, not how dogs speak to each other. To do so properly, an ideal research setting would be one of dogs interacting live with each other, with sound recording equipment that can match the quality of canine hearing.

That being said, it's a fascinating work, and I understand that the researchers were working with the data on hand - definitely shows promise for continued study.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Some of my favs in this category:

• They Live
• District 9
• Alien Nation
• Robocop
• Alphaville (have to hat tip @livus for introducing me to that one)
• Enemy Mine - this one might not exactly qualify, as it starts as high action scifi on an alien planet, but it transitions into a very different kind of story by the end. Dennis Quaid's best performance too, imho, and Lou Gosset Jr is exceptional in one of the weirdest roles of his career.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Let the games begin...

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Saw your post and I got curious, as it's clear your new threads aren't appearing on the instances you're posting to.

Test run shows that posting to lemmy.world is working for my account: https://lemmy.world/post/6641504 .

There's a couple things that could be happening, but I'm gonna go with my gut and ask do you have any domains blocked? There's been repeated issues with domain blocking affecting your ability to post (in fact, I had to clear all my domain blocking to properly post to kbin). This is the first thing I'd check.

The next thing would be to see if those instances or communities banned you. This seems unlikely, as it's affecting you on both lemmy.world and lemmy.blahaj.zone. The last thing could be that these communities have defederated or blocked kbin users due to past spam issues (@Technology is still blocked on lemmy.world due to this), but I haven't seen it implemented in this way before.

But I'd start with the domain blocking - 90% of the time when people have problems posting on kbin, that's the cause.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Bummer - looks like your post did show on lemmy.blahaj.zone, and I see that you got one up on @gothindustrial. Leads me to think it might be a community ban on @spookymemes for why your toy post didn't show up there. blahaj.zone was probably just slow.