Imagine if instead of just reddit.com there was also reddit.org and reddit.co.uk and reddit.nl and reddit.social and (etc etc) all on a different server from each other and each with its own set of users and subreddits. But each user and each subreddit could be viewed and joined by any user from any server - that’s Lemmy.

So you’re on the piefed.social server (but on the fediverse servers are called ‘instances’) and I’m on the lemmy.blahaj.zone instance but we can both see, subscribe to and post to a community (the Lemmy name for subreddits) on an instance neither of us are members of - the asklemmy community on the lemmy.world instance.

Take a look at your screen (or app if you’re on mobile) and you’ll see ‘Local’, ‘Subscribed’ and ‘All’. If you select ‘Local’ you will see a list of posts from Communities that are on your home instance (which is piefed.social in your case). If you selected ‘Subscribed’ you’d see posts from all the Communities you chose to join/subscribe to across all instances. If you choose ‘All’ you’ll see posts from the entirety of Lemmy whether you subscribed to them or not. Whichever view you choose can be sorted by things like ‘new’, ‘active’, ‘hot’ etc.

To find Communities you’re interested in joining, use the Search function, type in a keyword and select ‘Communities’.

Cut, otherwise you do a line and you wake up in A&E.

Thunderbird Pro will apparently be:

This email thing plus Thunderbird Send (which is basically https://send.vis.ee/), Thunderbird Appointment - a scheduling tool and Thunderbird Assist, which is:

“…at least for now, being cautiously labeled as “an experiment” that will allow users to take advantage of AI features within their email. However, the goal is to be lightweight enough that the language models can be run locally on a user’s PC in the interest of privacy. This service is being developed in partnership with Flower AI, which leverages Nvidia’s confidential compute to provide private remote processing in the event a user’s PC isn’t powerful enough. Sipes emphasizes that any remote processing features attached to Thunderbird Assist will always be optional, in the interest of ensuring complete user privacy.”

So AI shit that nobody asked for or wants.

Archive link for anyone else for whom that article crashed their tab.

my problem is people who chastise others over not acting sooner.

All they said was that they wish people had listened. Thats it. The only one who’s mentioned action is you.

Musk is a fascist, but did ANYONE believe he was capable of doing the things he’s doing now, then?

Yes, because he’s always been a billionaire with no morals, he’s always treated people like shit and he’s always put money ahead of everything, even his own family members. Someone who can do those things is capable of anything.

if anyone says yes, they’re lying.

lol.

I’m going to take a wide definition of the word ‘art’ here and apply it to all artistic methods.

Its not art. Art, almost by definition, partly reflects an emotional state the artist was in when creating the work. AI merely apes the output, not the necessary emotional connection. Its like the shitty music that used to play in lifts (elevators) in that it uses the output but is utterly soulless.

Its ethically way worse than piracy. If you pirate (for example) an ebook or music its more than likely because you want to escape DRM or some other type of controlling software designed to prevent you from actually having control over what you would otherwise have bought. LLM’s steal not just that but the whole creative process. Its more than pirating a movie or track or book, its more akin to stealing the thought process from an artists mind and trying to replicate the process automatically.

It is, to me, just another example of making the whole of our international artistic culture a bland homogenized cesspit of crapness. Its capitalism’s best way to profit from art as there’s no one to pay. But we end of with ever decreasing quality. AI based art becomes like humanity in the matrix - used then liquidised to feed the next iteration.

And then there’s also the environmental impact. The last thing the word needs right now is something else gobbling resources - especially when the end result is utter shit.

How? Either way I lose.

Because when you vote against a fascist you’re considering wider society, not just your self.

If I voted for harris and harris won, I still lost. If I voted for harris and trump won, I still lost. if I voted for trump and trump won, I still lost.

The correct statement is 'if Harris gets in, I lost. If Trump gets in everyone loses. Its about more than just you.

You’re naive enough to believe that harris winning is the same as you winning, and that’s just proving my point. You’ve been conditioned to think that a slow loss is the same as a win

I’m not American. What I am though is able to see that fascism is worse than conservatism. The fact that conservatism is still bad is irrelevant when the only other choice is an actual fascist because the fascist will probably remove your power to vote in the future.

Gonna block you now. Good luck in life.

Yeah, some truths are too uncomfortable to be lived with aren’t they?

I can tell you’re going to go through whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to convince yourself that voting for the lesser evil is somehow a win.

My friend, the only one performing mental gymnastics right now is you trying to convince yourself that what you have achieved by refusing to vote against a fascist is a win.

Sorry you’ve been conditioned to dedicate so much energy working against your own interests. If more of you diverted that energy to the people supporting our oppressors, we wouldn’t need to be having this discussion.

Assuming you’re an American, by refusing to vote against fascism I’m pretty sure you won’t be having any free discussions in a year or so lest you be carted off by the local stasi.

You have to vote according to how the electoral system actually works, not how you wish it worked. Unless you - yes, you - are personally prepared to fund and organise a revolution to change that system then you vote against the actual fascist.

<link rel="me" href="https://instance.tld/@username" /> in the <head> is probably a bit tidier :)

I love the aesthetics of hardback books, a beautiful Victorian-era library looks (and smells!) great but my own library is all ebooks. I don’t have the space for over 2k physical books and as I get older and my eyesight worsens, the ability to adjust font size, line-height, borders, contrast etc becomes invaluable.

I won’t buy from Amazon at all, ever. I prefer to buy DRM free but if its not possible to buy DRM free then I buy a paperback copy from a local indie bookstore if possible which I immediately donate to a library or hospital or prison or whatever and, ahem, ‘source’ a DRM-free version from elsewhere. I do it this way because DRM is cancer but I also want to support small and/or new authors so buying and passing on a print copy is good for everyone and having a DRM free copy is good for me.

As for subject matter, both fiction and non-fiction but more fiction than non. I like historical novels like the Aubrey/Maturin series, or the Shardlake series, Madeline Miller’s greek retellings, Hilary Mantel’s stuff, fantasy/sci-f- like Ursula K Leguinn, NK Jemisin, Margaret Attwood, Robin Hobb, Lois McMaster Bujold, Susannah Clarke, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Horror/Thrillers by writers like Peter Straub, Catriona Ward, Shirley Jackson. Non-fiction books tend to be popular science that are ‘popular’ enough I can grasp what they’re on about but ‘science’ enough they’re not just dumbed down crap.

The only slightly surprising thing about this is that Musk didn’t commission a gold plated car with a TRUMP#1 vanity plate.

Lots here too.

‘Better’ is relative :) is it better than using something like SearXNG? No. But for those people who insist on using Google, its better to do a proxied search than a first-hand one. Mullvad are European, are one of the very few orgs I personally think are trustable and have shown no signs of enshittification, Leta has been audited by a 3rd party - for those looking for a private Google experience this is about the best there is.

Leaving notes…committing genocide, yeah they’re interchangeable really.

This is both horrifyingly shocking and simultaneously utterly unsurprising.

You know that famous poem that ends with ‘…because there was no one left to speak for me’? This is the opening line.

Well, they do say ignorance is bliss.

Sadly, 99% of people - wherever they live - won’t really do or say anything until it affects them personally.

According to this comment the following is accurate as of two weeks ago:

With keyword filter:

• Voyager
• Connect
• Eternity
• Interstellar
• Raccoon
• Summit
• Sync
• Tesseract
• Thunder
• Boost

Without keyword filter:

• Alexandrite
• Jerboa
• Lemmy UI
• mlmym
• Next
• Photon
• Quiblr

True-ish :)

Wakefield went after the MMR vaccine. The whole (separate) mercury thing was started in the US and later perpetuated by people like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey among others.