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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Lemmy was originally founded by political extremists who wantted a space for their politics (tankies.) Its since grown past that, but that inflence is still present in many ways, most prominently in the influences of .ml. On top of this, politics is something inflammatory (and thus engaging) that affects everyone. Because its both engaging and broad-appeal, its going to be something everyone talks about. On the other hand, many niches, aside from being niche are often less inherently engaging (IE talking about a finished TV show). This makes it very hard to get the critical mass needed for a community to snowball into relevance. This means that (effectively) all you’re left with is the political communities and a couple niches that are broad appeal enough and have active enough users to be stable.







  • Bears are predators evolved to hunt large game, primarily with brute force (unlike something like a big cat, which relies much more on ambushes).

    Gorrilas, as tough as they are, survive through intelligence. This means avoiding tough fights, and when absolutely needed, fighting as a troop rather than individualy.

    So bear. But…

    Does the Gorilla get time to prepare?

    The one advantage gorillas have is their intelligence. If both animals are given training, or tools, then I could see the gorilla potentially winning - mostly because a bear will struggle to get any use out of either, whereas a gorilla could be trained to fight much more effectively and possibly even make/use weapons.


  • My point, and the conclusion of the video is more of a “Yes, but…” As he discusses, AI use isn’t completely insignificant, but much of the cost (in all aspects) is in R&D and hardware, rather than the results it produces. Its in the same vein as how yes, you should probably feel guilty for using a paper or disposable platic grocery bag over a reusable one, but even if everyone in the world did so, it would make little difference when companies (who do 99.99% of the damage) will continue doing the exact same thing at every opportunity. As AI is driven by speculation rather than by product sales, not using it doesn’t stop their IP theft, it may reduce their energy use but likely not a lot (esspecially factoring in human cost to complete a task), and it doesn’t stop these companies from manipulating our politics and walking over our laws.

    While, technically the video does agree that the answer is ‘Yes’, the majority of the video is about why that Yes needs a half-dozen asterisks. Simplifying it to just a ‘yes’ shifts blame away from the ones doing 99.9% of the damage onto individuals who do a tiny fraction of the damage, and who have much less understanding of or influence over the technology.


  • Except it isn’t because the point of the video is in large part, that individual users have little influence over the AI companies. AI companies, as well as their investors and those meant to regulate them (not that those two are separate groups) don’t particularly care about the miniscule current revenue to be made. They’re collectively gambling rule of law, money, the environment, ect. on the idea that they will make huge amounts of money when AI becomes a true general-purpose artificial intelligence. The way to fix this isn’t to not use AI (not that it doesn’t help), its to collectively stand against them and actually hold them accountable for their destruction.


  • Tl;dw: Yes, but much like the idea of individual carbon footprints, putting the blame on individuals also directs away the the actions of those who invest in, direct, and (don’t) regulate AI companies. This is esspecially true as AI is driven more than by speculation than by current success. Individuals will have little-to-no impact unless there is collective action to regulate AI companies and hold them accountable for their destruction.





  • Social media in general (as we think of it) is much more popular in western nations. Thats not to say those outside the west don’t use social media, but it tends to be much more dominated by group-chats (IE WhatsApp, Telegram) and by more isolated platforms or sections of platforms. Of the social media platforms we’ll be familiar with, it tends to be mostly just the most popular and established ones like Instagram, Facebook, and now Tiktok, rather than something still relatively niche and nerdy like Reddit (nonetheless Lemmy).

    All that said, again, this is a massive oversimplification talking broadly about trends. We’re talking about thousands of different cultures in entirely different countries and enviroments.