FaceDeer
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FaceDeer

@FaceDeer@kbin.social

Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.

Teen GTA VI hacker sentenced to life in a secure hospital (www.theverge.com)

The 18-year-old Lapsus$ hacker who played a critical role in leaking Grand Theft Auto VI footage has been sentenced to life inside a hospital prison, according to a report from the BBC. A British judge ruled on Thursday that Arion Kurtaj is a high risk to the public because he still wants to commit cybercrimes....

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Don't just read the headline, read the article. The situation is nuanced.

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Everyone's been dumping on Meta for integrating ActivityPub support, but I wonder if perhaps that's what's precipitating smaller projects like Flipboard and Discourse to be making similar announcements more. Here's hoping it's the start of an avalanche.

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And once again, we see the real mechanism by which terrorism "wins". Israel has hurt itself in its confusion.

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Looks like we're in another period of "double-check every headline to see if it's real or from the Onion" for me...

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If they put the cat in the bag I can just use one of these handy apps to make the bag disappear again.

Ireland plans to dramatically cut welfare benefits for Ukrainian refugees (theleaven.org)

Plans to dramatically cut welfare benefits for refugees from Ukraine who flee to Ireland to avoid Russia's war are causing anxiety, according to a priest who works with the new arrivals. Officials in Dublin say that they want to "slow" the number of people arriving from Ukraine.

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In fairness, much of Ukraine is actually pretty safe these days and it might be best for all concerned if a lot of Ukrainians went back there to help keep the local economy going as strong as possible. Gearing up to accept mass quantities of Ukrainian refugees made sense in the first few weeks of the war when there was a strong perceived risk of Russia rolling over and genociding the whole country but that's no longer in the cards.

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To be fair, that description of being piled on by angry people who are looking for an excuse to be angry could easily describe a lot of threads I've been in on the Fediverse lately. Seems like there's an unfortunate mood going around right now.

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Yeah, in discussions like this it's important to put out both the "it's okay if you've got a deep curiousity/desire to be the other gender that you want to explore to see if it leads somewhere more" and the "there's nothing wrong with just having fun exploring other identities or bodies without it being some kind of deep-seated transgender thing." I think the "egg_irl" reaction is sometimes harmful because it ends up pressuring people who really aren't transgender but who would be perfect allies if they weren't ending up feeling annoyed by the whole thing.

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I have often described fanfic as the mythology and folklore of the modern world. Captain Kirk is the equivalent of what Hercules was to the ancient Greeks, a hero that everyone knows about and so can be an archetypal hero in anyone's story.

Copyright is a very unnatural imposition on how this aspect of human culture has worked throughout the vast majority of history. It really annoys me when people discuss what elements of a setting are "canon" and fall back on the authority of the legal system, rather than what the collective will of the fandom feels is the correct course of things. Imagine if someone had "owned" Poseidon and had suppressed the Iliad because Homer was doing unauthorized things with the character.

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This is one of those situations where everybody can point to everybody else and exclaim "they started it!"

All I feel like I can hope for right now is that the bombing is largely confined to military targets, in both directions.

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Ideally, everyone would militarily disengage with everyone else. The situation is bad enough as it is without drawing more sides in. But I suppose if the US feels it must directly involve itself, then shooting down unmanned missiles is the least bloody way and the easiest to back out of.

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We've got LLMs now that can do that. Sorry, you've been replaced. Please gather your things into this box and cheer up.

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I'm honestly interested to see how this goes. Usually when someone is elected who claims to be "libertarian" they don't actually adhere to the philosophy or just pay lip service. I lean socialist myself, but one size never fits all and Argentina is in bad enough shape that maybe this will help.

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Yeah, so many people are confidently stating "LLMs can't think like humans do!" When we're actually still pretty unclear on how humans think.

Sure, an LLM on its own may not be an AGI. But they're remarkably closer than we would have predicted they could get just a few years ago, and it may well be that we just need to add a bit more "special sauce" (memory, prompting strategies, perhaps a couple of parallel LLMs that specialize in different types of reasoning) to get them over the hump. At this point a lot of the research isn't going into simply "make it bigger!", it's going into "use LLMs smarter."

Johnson Needs Democrats on Ukraine, Handing Them Power to Shape Aid Plan (www.nytimes.com)

Speaker Mike Johnson’s elaborate plan for pushing aid to Ukraine through the House over his own party’s objections relies on an unusual strategy: He is counting on House Democrats and their leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, to provide the votes necessary to clear the way for it to come to the floor....

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If it saves Ukraine from Russian occupation I'll at least give them a favorable mention. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I'm starting to see some serious downsides to being able to see who downvotes you.

A few days ago I downvoted someone's comment, and the next day I happened to notice every single comment I've ever made had at least one downvote. All from the person I dared to downvote the ONE time. I straight up asked why they did it, and they seem to think I'm an "obvious" troll account that "apparently just exist to...

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Same, generally speaking when I'm writing a comment in order to disagree with someone I want that other person's comment to be more visible to other readers. That way they can read it, see my response, and realize how wrong the original comment was and how right I am. :) I save my downvotes for comments that are so wrong they're not worth a response.

I'll even sometimes downvote a comment, ponder for a moment, and then remove my downvote and write a response instead.

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Especially given that this particular comment is 90% quotes from some other author.

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Oh, that's what you meant. How do you contribute to a project on any git host if that git host won't let you? In what way is GitHub any different from that?

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You're not "pretty fucked". Just use one of the many other git hosts out there. OP himself lists some of them in his rant.

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All of those issues would arise if you wanted to migrate an established project to Github as well.

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This isn't even a problem with historical awareness, OP knows that Github isn't a monopoly. They listed off a bunch of alternatives in their rant. I'm really not sure what they were even complaining about.

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You think Microsoft is the only "evil corporation" among these? That's very naive. Any hosting service will deplatform users when they can see a profit to be made from doing so.

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Actually, you can do exactly that. Fork them.

You can't force the people who are using Github to follow you, of course. But that's every individual's choice.

Leaked Cables Show White House Opposes Palestinian Statehood (theintercept.com)

Ahead of the United Nations Security Council action to consider the Palestinian Authority’s application to become a full member of the international body, the United States is lobbying nations to reject such membership, hoping to avoid an overt “veto” by Washington. The lobbying effort, revealed in copies of unclassified...

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Indeed. If the US government were truly dancing on the puppet strings of the arms industry right now there'd be a ton of resources heading to Ukraine.

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It's not like deleting your comments or posts off of Reddit would magically remove them from all the various Reddit archives that exist around the Internet, either. Reddit only controls what happens on Reddit, and that problem is now generalized across the whole Fediverse.

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