FaceDeer

I don’t consider it something to be “fixed.” I like that the Fediverse is fully decentralized, with no authority over who gets “in” and who doesn’t. Once you’ve got some kind of authority that can decide who’s allowed on which instances, with some kind of global registry of individual users that can exclude you if the wrong people don’t like you, we’re basically back to being Reddit with some fancy extra steps.

Sure, it risks allowing assholes to continue getting new accounts. But we already have a Reddit, I’d rather try something new even if that comes with downsides.

Reddit is able to do global IP bans. The Fediverse is not able to do that because there’s no “global”.

“Asshole” is a broad term. It includes racists, abrasive personalities, anger-management problems, and so forth. Ie, people who have a tendency to get banned from other places. It’s not just trolls.

Being banned from Reddit is a unitary action. They can’t get back into Reddit, they’re just gone. Whereas in the Fediverse you can just go to a different instance and sign up afresh each time you get banned. This is part of the Fediverse’s design. And so I am concerned that the Fediverse will accumulate the worst users.

One thing that has been concerning me lately is that the Fediverse is being treated as a refuge for people who get banned on Reddit or other social media. Sure, sometimes those bans are based on arbitrary power tripping nonsense. But people actually do get banned for being assholes, and so I’ve got some worry that this is distilling the population of the Fediverse in an unfortunate direction.

Rule 3: Don’t request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

That’s why he’s asking why he’s not allowed to ask.

“Never” is a long time. Technology is always getting cheaper, I see no reason why that sensing equipment won’t end up on a production vehicle at some point.

I’m not making any statements about what other people may think about it. The question was why this guy is doing this thing, and I expect it’s because he finds it fun.

I’ve seen plenty of weird bots on Reddit over the years that had no point to their existence other than, presumably, having been fun to code. This is probably one such.

Right, and this is presumably something he finds fun. You were asking why, I was explaining why.

No, it’s not the same. I was using basketball as an analogy. Someone who doesn’t enjoy basketball wouldn’t “get it”, just as you’re not “getting” the fun that can come from building and playing around with AI bots. Different people find different things to be fun.

/r/SubSimGPT2Interactive/ does this.

I actually wandered away from the SubredditSimulator successor subreddits because even with GPT2 they were “too good”, they lost their charm. Back when SubredditSimulator was still active it was using simple Markov chain based text generators and they produced the most wonderfully bonkers nonsense, that was hilarious. Modern AIs just sound like regular people, and I get that everywhere already.

What I am failing to understand is: why?

People do things for fun sometimes. You could ask this about almost anything that people do that isn’t directly and immediately related to survival. Why do people play basketball? It’s just pointlessly bouncing a ball around in a room, following arbitrary rules that only serve to make the apparent goal of getting it through the hoop harder.

Heaven forbid an open protocol see adoption.

I’m not expecting them to do anything specifically to benefit the rest of us. But let them fight. If nothing else, it costs them money.

You don’t think the publishing industry would like to sue Meta over this?

Well, yes, why would you believe something without seeing it? But given how litigious the publishing industry is about this kind of thing I don’t see it as likely that they wouldn’t fight.

They’ll compare the amount the publishers are demanding against how much it would cost them to lawyer up to prevent that and any future payments. Meta’s heavyweight enough that they can use “lobbying their way out of the law, aka changing the law so that they’re not violating it at all” as a strategy.

If they do simply pay the publishers off, oh well, at least it’s just the status quo. But I don’t see a reason to assume that’s the way this is going to go. Other countries have already carved explicit exceptions to copyright for AI training, Meta would be in favor of that kind of thing.

You think Meta will just roll over and hand out whatever penalties the publishers demand of them?

Meta isn’t going to be defending us. It’s going to be defending itself. Because it is now one of us.

I think this is still going to be a net benefit to us, though. Meta may not have contributed much bandwidth, which is leeching in the short term, but in the long term they’re now forced to contribute something much more important; lawyer power. Meta is going to have to fight to defend piracy.

Anything that pushes back copyright is fine by me.