Where I work in software development, we were about to undertake writing a pretty large application from scratch. Mostly, the company was a Java plus Spring shop with a few exceptions. One team wrote almost exclusively Python, for instance. But as far as I knew, there wasn’t any specific policy requiring the use of any particular language.

So as a team, we pushed to write our new project in Python. It was originally my idea, but my team got on board with it pretty quickly. Plus there was precedent for Python projects and Python was definitely appropriate for our use case.

The managers took it up the chain. The chain hemmed and hawed for months, but eventually made a more official policy that we had to use Java (and Spring).

Good call. “Let’s burn all blockchains in a fire” is actually a great idea.

Step 1: Print a photo of your dad.

Step 2: Hold it up to the camera.

Step 3: Play Resident Evil 7.

The correct answer to every suggestion that contains the word “blockchain” is “that’s a terrible fucking idea.”

“I”

“could”

“stop”

“any”

“time”

“I”

“want.”

Did you really say that with a straight face? I thought that was just what people said to mock people who were clearly addicted.

Cigarettes aren’t good for you and it sounds like you’re not ready to hear this, but you are addicted.

I will admit I’ve never used them. I’m not keen on providing my email address to huxters for purposes of signing up and they won’t accept a disposable email address. At least not one I’ve been able to find.

I’ll be honest, though. Running into someone extolling the benefits of LLM’s, I wonder if they have ulterior motives. A lot of the cryptobros are now jumping ship from the blockchain bandwagon to the AI bandwagon. (Because the blockchain bubble has partially burst now and the AI bubble is still going strong.)

With cryptocurrencies or NFT’s, anyone telling you it was the best thing ever was always misrepresenting their own gains and telling lies about the capabilities of blockchain. Maybe they were themselves deluded, but the ultimate motivation to extoll the benefits of blockchain was not actual benefits, but rather that the extoller was invested. If they could be convinging enough and their audience believed them and invested, the value of the extoller’s investment would go up.

Now, LLM’s are known to hallucinate. And very confidently and convincingly. None of the content of what LLM’s produce can be trusted for factual accuracy. LLM’s as a technology are just not suitable for producing factual output and will always be inferior to platforms like StackOverflow or… what Reddit used to be.

So, what you’ve claimed GhatGPT has helped you with: Software development, language aquisition, and learning how to use software (Excel specifically). I really hope you’re not just copying programs out of ChatGPT and using those programs at work without auditing them first. If you have the skills to vet code, then what do you need ChatGPT for? And would plain-old Google not do a better job? And for learning Excel as well?

And as others have said, I wouldn’t trust any language learning I got from ChatGPT.

Just imagine what it could do in the hands of innumerable virtuous and malicious individuals.

So, when Beanie Babies were at the height of their economic bubble, people were robbing stores and engaging in fist fights to get them. I very much believe that the hype around AI lately is causing a lot of terrible things. Big companies are publicly announcing they’re “replacing jobs” with AI. I think some of those cases are just big corporations finding dumb ways to put positive PR spins on “we’re laying off a lot of people” without actually intending to replace them with AI. I think some big businesses are actually swept up in the hype and think “replacing people with AI” is actually going to work out for them. Maybe some companies are somewhere in the middle: laying people off with the intention of getting them back on a part-time contracting basis for lower pay as “editors” of content output by ChatGPT. But really they’ll be doing the same job, just less efficiently and for lower pay.

Again, look at the effect Beanie Babies had on the world. And that proved to have been a worthless nothing burger all along. The effects the AI hype is having on the world is no proof that it’s anything other than worthless lie-generating machines.

Trusted computing is back in a new form. :\

LLM’s are worthless and I’m skeptical they’ll ever be otherwise. I think for a program that works roughly like ChatGPT from a user’s perspective to ever achieve usefulness would require a whole different algorithm.

I didn’t realize people were advocating philosophies that bowed to the idea that “needs” should take priority over personal possessions.

Yeah, I tend to work Maslow’s work into my take on political systems. Maybe I should call myself an anarcho-Maslowist or something. Heh.

I do really think that society is best that best fulfills people’s needs. And by “needs,” I mean something very like the way Maslow used the term. I’m not sure what higher purpose one could give for a society than the fulfillment of needs, really.

(Mind you, I do know that there have been other psychologists who have built on Maslow’s work as well as some with different models of needs. I don’t necessarily mean to exclude those other definitions of needs. I don’t think it would serve us well to be dogmatic about one person’s take. But even if Maslow can be improved on, I do think the broad strokes of his take are on to something.)

To be fair, just about any purpose a society might have can be shoehorned into the language of “needs” and that paradigm may be better for some things than others.

Also, of course, more basic needs are more important. If you’re trying to improve things and you have one option that will address society’s unfulfilled need for basic sustinence and another option that will improve society’s access to aesthetic fulfillment, let’s fill people’s bellies first and put up murals later.

Now, I do largely believe in “usership,” but the idea can definitely go too far. If in the revolution, Ted takes possession of a mansion and uses it daily for a private indoor jogging track, that’s fine with me so long as others are not deprived of some sufficiently basic need. Under a strict usership system, one could say that Ted uses all of that mansion daily and that there is no “surplus” of space there. And, again if others are not deprived, I have no issue with it. But if homelessness exists in that area, Ted’s claim to that mansion for his comparatively frivolous use of the structure is superceded by other people’s right to not have to live in a tent under a bridge.

But this is all mostly my own take. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else take quite the same stance on things. But then, I haven’t really read that much anarchist theory either. Just Conquest of Bread and /r/Anarchism, pretty much. (Oh, and some random guy on a first person shooter I used to play a lot that was my introduction to anarchism.)

Edit: Oh! Also, there is the whole “to each according to need” thing. Maybe Marx would’ve been a fan of Maslow’s ideas. Who knows.

So, first off, let me say that if it’ll help us move toward something better than we have now, even if in my head I call it anarcho-communism, I’ll happily call it “capitalism.”

For reference, there’s an author named Charles Eisenstein who in his book “Sacred Economics” advocates for taking steps that he intends to move us (the world, I guess) eventually to a gift-based economy without money or barter. And he calls it capitalism. With a straight face. Now, I don’t know if deep down in his heart he believes it actually qualifies as capitalism or if he’s calling it capitalism because he feels like his aims are more likely to be well received by pro-capitalists if he calls it “capitalism.”

One can IMO go too far with that. Case in point: ecofascism. But I digress.

On to the definition of capitalism. At least in my head, capitalism is characterized by:

• The profit motive. The incentive to amass. (Typically money, but a barter-based system could well be the same in every way that matters.)
• Quid pro quo. The whole system is based on it.
• Private property. A particular set of rules for who has ownership rights over what.
• The institution of employment.

My answer didn’t include the word “capital”, so I’ll skip that second question.

As to your third question, let me take exception with the question itself. I don’t believe “control over what you produce” is necesssarily a good thing per se. I believe in having something roughly like ownership rights over what one uses. But if one produce a surplus, I don’t believe they should be able to deprive others in need of said surplus.

I think capitalism coerces people into producing surplus for others to sell for a profit that the producer (employee) doesn’t get a fair share in if that goes more to the spirit of your question.

Bonus questions:

1. I… don’t know or care? “Capitalist” can mean someone who supports the institution of capitalism. Or it can mean something like an owner of a company that employs people. I think plenty of people participate in capitalism (by selling things they make, by accepting an employment position, etc) out of necessity while disapproving of the system as a whole. Hell, I’m one of them. I’m not sure I understand why you ask.
2. If I’m the person who sells things I make? Again, anticapitalists participate in capitalism because capitalism doesn’t give them a choice. Does that answer your question?
3. The word “sell” here has some baggage I don’t like. I’m not for a system in which anybody “sells” anything. But to answer how one might expand an operation that produces things, worker cooperatives are probably the most obvious answer.
4. Anyway, worker cooperatives are owned and run by the workers. Corporations are owned by shareholders and run by boards of directors. Worker cooperatives don’t have incentives and power to fuck their workers over. They do have incentive and power to take care of their workers.

Maybe I should have read the first thread you referenced before answering these. Maybe it would have given more context. But hopefully this response gives you what you were looking for.

I’ve got a smart TV on which the Wifi broke very shortly after I got it. I just use a Chromecast and it works nicely.

Ah. Well, I still see the web interface pulling in new posts as I sit on the home page. But then, I also mentioned that my Lemmy instance (or, the instance I’ve joined, that is) is a couple of versions behind. (I’m not sure if they’re behind on both Lemmy and the UI or on just one.) If they’ve changed that behavior in newer versions, that could be why I’m still seeing the web interface pull in new posts while you don’t.

And if that behavior is removed in the newer versions, then I can probably expect all the issues I’ve mentioned in this thread to be resolved as soon as latte.isnot.coffee updates to more recent versions of either Lemmy or Lemmy-UI or both.

It doesn’t refresh the page to get new posts, but it does pull in new posts as they’re posted.

I know this is supposed to be humor, but if philosoraptor is trying to say AI is overhyped, I wholeheartedly agree.

This u?

I’m pretty sure latte.isnot.coffe admins are also tankies. Should’ve done my research before I signed up. Maybe some day account migration will be a thing. ('Cuz I’d like to keep my post history if I were to jump to a different instance.)

Yeah. I’m definitely for some pretty seamless integration. Probably in the optimal case:

• The wikis would be hosted on the same domain as the Lemmy servers.
• Any account you had on the associated Lemmy server would automatically exist to the wiki as well.
• If you were logged into Lemmy, you’d also be logged into the wiki.
• Only mods would be able to enable wikis but the process of doing so would be trivially easy.
• I’d personally say that it makes the most sense to just have the mods link the associated wiki from the sidebar rather than creating new special interface features to add a link outside the sidebar or whatever. (Unless some kind of plugin infrastructure that would allow that already exists.)

But all that can be done without putting any wiki-specific code into the Lemmy or Lemmy-UI source repositories, which I think is preferable for the same reason you wouldn’t add flight simulator code to a spreadsheet application. (Ok, maybe a bad example, but you get my point.)

Edit: And I’ll admit there are both upsides and downsides to my approach here. One downside would be that some Lemmy instances would offer attached wikis and others wouldn’t. It’s possible it also just wouldn’t catch on at all and nobody would enable attached wikis as a feature if it was a whole separate step to setting up “Lemmy”.

Mostly I mean the wikis for really informational subreddits like /r/bodyweightfitness or /r/personalfinance. Those would usually be the best place to get information on whatever topic that wasn’t mostly sponsored propaganda. And it had uses that the threads didn’t fill because the wikis would take a comprehensive view of the subject matter whereas threads would be about one or another detail.

Who knows. Maybe I was the only one who felt like they got benefit from the wikis. Ha!

I don’t want to be constantly comparing Lemmy to Reddit, but on Reddit, the wikis were invaluable. As helpful as the threads were, the wikis frequently had amazingly useful info.

That said, I’m not sure I think adding wikis to Lemmy is the right way to go. “One thing well” and all that.

Maybe instead, some ancilliary wiki platform that can be run alongside Lemmy that lets a community mod easily set up a wiki that can be linked to in the sidebar?

Or we could go really simple and just link specific posts in the sidebar with useful information of the kind you’d otherwise put into a wiki.