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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The term, “enshitification” is getting bandied about a lot. But the bots and corporations are an inevitable part of capitalism. Make money at all costs, never be satisfied with what you have, and treat everybody that isn’t you like a stepping stone.

    Scammers and sociopathic c-levels are missing something fundamentally human. A complete lack of empathy. But this has always been a part of our species. The difference now is that we have a system that dramatically rewards that sickness. And that’s not even getting into how being able to be evil at scale is going to make the next few decades interesting.




  • My argument is thus:

    LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They’re good at rephrasing things so that they’re easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she’s rockin’.

    I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, “type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!”

    But if you’re using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you’re going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.



  • It takes nearly as long to decrapify a new Firefox install as it does to compile Librewolf.

    Install uBlock.

    Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

    Disable “sponsored” stories. AKA, listicles designed to draw in idiots who want to see which 8 child actors from the 90s turned out to be the tallest. Alarmingly close to the tacky crap that you might see on a fresh Windows install.

    Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

    Now disable Pocket. Remembering to go into about:config to really disable it

    Disable telemetry.

    Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

    Remove Amazon, Bing, et al. from the search engine list.

    Remove “suggested” and “sponsored” autocomplete.

    Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

    Remind yourself that, despite this crap, Firefox is still a better browser than any Chromium knockoff.












  • I still go to Reddit for American politics, my cities sub, and /r/nfl.

    But I haven’t made a single comment and treat it more as a news aggregator than a proper community. And even that is happening less and less as I get more comfortable with the pacing of the community here.

    On Reddit you can make a clever comment at the right time and get thousands of upvotes and sidebar conversations. It’s great for a shot of that sweet, sweet dopamine.

    On Lemmy, I rarely get more than 5-10 upvotes, but the conversations are meaningful and nuanced.

    People are realizing that Lemmy is not a 1:1 drop-in replacement and are adjusting their expectations and behavior accordingly. Hopefully we’ll hit a critical mass soon.