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.

FaceDeer,
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The abuse of power is instance-specific, fortunately. The whole point of all this is that there are multiple instances. Just ignore the ones that are run by tankies, those instances are theirs to wallow in if they want.

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"Prompt engineering" is simply the skill of knowing how to correctly ask for the thing that you want. Given that this is something that is in rare supply even when interacting with other humans, I don't see this going away until we're well past AGI and into ASI.

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I signed up to fedia.io (an mBin instance) as a fallback account and I can see votes there. Though I did notice that under "activity" I can only see the identity of who upvoted me but not the identity of who downvoted. I expect these are configurable settings that will vary from instance to instance, I'm of two minds on hiding the identity of downvoters like that and would hope that it doesn't become standard.

FaceDeer,
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I used this script to "port" my subscriptions over. I have some concern about keeping them synced since going forward I'll likely end up randomly subscribing to new communities from different accounts, hopefully that sort of thing is one of the things that Fediverse coders are working on making better to manage.

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Well that sucks. I've long thought it would potentially push things toward greater civility, since one couldn't sling negatives anonymously.

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Given how I usually feel kind of sucky for a day or two after getting a Covid shot, that's not what I'd call "free."

Unless perhaps I could get all 217 shots at once, to get it all out of the way in one go?

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The problem is that nobody else has 1085G. What's the point in a super-advanced phone when there's nobody you can talk to with it?

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I'm a fan of Kyle Hill's work in general, but I really wish he hadn't used the term "Dark Forest" here - it doesn't really align with the Fermi Paradox version and I think he just used it because it's a popular and scary-sounding phrase right now.

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It's important to note that the novels had to make up a lot of details to get the Dark Forest to "work" in that setting, in real life there are a lot of reasons why Dark Forest is implausible as a real explanation for the Fermi paradox.

Just getting that out there because I see a lot of people ending up scared of it in real life. It's no more scary than Freddy Kruegar.

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I recall being quite interested when I dug into the details of panpsychism. At first glance it's pretty woo-woo, talking about the state of "consciousness" for things like individual electrons or whole galaxies, but there are some good ideas in there for a framework for considering the concept of consciousness in general. It's especially relevant now that things like LLMs are raising actual practical questions about how to define and measure consciousness.

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And while it's probably true that "we're not ready", we're never going to become ready until the tech actually arrives and forces us to do that.

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Indeed. Firefox already has "sponsored links" and such in the built-in homepage, I simply disable those when I first install it and get on with life.

Big projects like Firefox need big money to support it. If you don't want it to be beholden to Google it needs to find ways to earn some on its own.

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It says "opt-out" in the title.

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I haven't read more than this summary, but I wonder if their attempts at cruelty might actually backfire. It will be good for Ukraine in the long run if more of their citizens stay to rebuild, and there are less-militaritly-inclined allies who can pick up the humanitarian slack.

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It doesn't help that whenever this comes up there's a contingent of users who jump to Ernest's "defense" by calling the folks raising these issues "concern trolls" and accusing them of shilling for mbin.

No, this is simply a matter of what is actually working well. The point of federation is that one shouldn't need to have "loyalty" to any particular instance or any particular platform. Use whichever one's working.

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Here's one from yesterday.

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This site never worked without a hitch.

That is not a ringing endorsement.

I was very enthusiastic about kbin when it launched, I donated a fair bit to Ernest in those early heady days. But if he's refusing to accept help from other devs and admins I don't think it's sustainable, something like this just can't work as a one-man show. I wish him all the best but if that doesn't change I don't see this working in the long run.

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It has been getting worse for me. In addition to the sporadic outages, the spam, and the slow federation, I've had to develop the habit of refreshing the page before I try to respond to or vote on any comments. If I open the page and let it sit for a few minutes before trying I invariably get an error. It definitely didn't used to be that way.

If it was that bad for you from the outset I'm surprised you stuck around. I wouldn't've. I've only held on because I started to feel "settled".

FaceDeer,
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I'm in a campaign (with rotating GMs) where I'm playing a character who is literally an alien infiltrator that has infiltrated the party. Except he's really bad at it and it's obvious he's an alien infiltrator, and because he's bad at it he has no idea that it's obvious. The party's superiors told them to play along for now and try to find out what my character is up to.

It's been about four years now, going on five, and I practically had to spoon-feed them useful tidbits about his mission. I've finally just kidnapped them all and took them back to my homeworld, we're now running through the adventure where they escape. I had to put an alien diplomat in their cell to monologue information about them.

Still, I've been having fun so I don't mind. Just amusing how much PCs are willing to trust other PCs simply because they're PCs. :)

Sometimes it's different for NPCs, but not always - in another campaign just now the party encountered an Aboleth who told them that he was a good Aboleth that wasn't interested in mind control or manipulating anyone. And by the way, there's this list of quests he's working on and he'd appreciate some help. They jumped right in. He actually is on the level, but come on - Aboleth. If there's anyone to be instantly suspicious of it's someone like that.

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They swore an oath to do no harm. They didn't swear an oath to mindlessly obey anyone with a badge. It actually should be easy.

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You have misunderstood me. You said "Apple spent twenty years building the ecosystem Spotify and Epic want to exploit for free." I'm pointing out that the amount of effort Apple put into building the ecosystem is immaterial to whether they're doing illegal things with it.

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I just set up an account at fedia.io, which is an mbin instance. When I ran the script posted over here to copy my subscriptions I had 111 subscriptions succeed and 49 fail. I've been checking the ones that failed and they've all been ones that haven't had anyone post in them for 5 months or more, so I'm guessing those are "dead" anyway. Seems not too bad, I'll see how it goes I guess.

I posted this same response from both of my accounts, I'm going to watch to see how well it federates back and forth.

FaceDeer,
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Weird. Your initial comment federated, since I was able to see it from both instances. All these responses to it did not, though.

FaceDeer,
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I just gave this a try and I think there's a potentially worrisome problem, it silently failed on a lot of community subscriptions. The ones that returned HTTP 500 errors were listed in the "fail" list that the importer script generated, but a whole bunch of others returned 404 errors and weren't listed in either the success or fail lists.

So I advise those running this to pay attention to the error log to avoid losing track of those communities rather than trusting the "fail" list.

FaceDeer,
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I haven't tried all of them, but the ones I did check were ones that had not had posts on them at their source instance for quite a while. A few random examples:

I had 43 failures and 111 successes, so visual inspection wouldn't really help. I kept copies of the error log and the script output in a text file to figure it out later.

I assume that this means these communities haven't had activity since fedia.io opened, and so fedia.io doesn't know they exist? I've always wondered how the first person to subscribe to a community on an instance is able to do that.

And yeah, I'm using "community" to refer to "magazine".

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