Except no, they don’t.

Well… Until you get someone like Trump in charge and he decides that the stipend only goes to those that praise him and strips the stipend from anyone critical of him or his ideology.

If you only funded drugs through public funding, that means the government has a say in what drugs get funded and which don’t, meaning any and all drugs that don’t affect the broadest number of people simply won’t get funded.

Drugs will no longer be for all people, it’ll be strictly the people that vote for the government in charge. So… No hormone treatments, no birth control, no vaccines, no aids research, nothing that doesn’t explicitly align with the government.

I wouldn’t say Lemmy is much better though… It’s just Reddit but not on Reddit.

I’m still waiting for a reliable way to pirate games with micro transactions and lootboxes.

Like, I know Assassin’s Creed Odyssey has daily quests and a rotating cash shop, and that must be talking to some sort of server that isn’t guaranteed to be there. Surely there’s a way to mock that server?

What’s recreational about it?

“Oh boy! I feel amazing! I can get out of bed in the night without falling over my floordrobe!”

Yeah, sure… Super fun.

I’ve been doing that for years. I’ve been claiming to be a conservative and supporting things like universal healthcare. I even give it capitalist flair by saying that ensuring everyone has more money means I can then take that money by selling them shit they don’t need. How the hell am I supposed to sell my useless crap if everyone’s spending their money on rent?!

Ditto with stuff like housing the unhoused. I don’t want filthy drug addicts strewn about the streets taking up my park benches and constantly asking me for ‘bus money’! Get them houses so I don’t have to see them anymore! Also god I hate kids, especially when they’re just hanging around on the street being annoying and intimidating. Build some youth centres so they have somewhere to go and get them away from me!

Altruism through selfishness etc etc etc.

I disagree that Reddit would gain in value over time if they kept banning automation, because it is increasingly difficult to avoid AI-generated material polluting your dataset, no matter how much you avoid automation and try banning it. Inevitably, some AI-generated material is going to get in.

It’s a problem in two ways:

1. The vast vast majority of data on Reddit has already been sold, so you can’t rely on that data for future revenue
2. The remaining data that’s current is polluted by AI and is therefore worth less than the historical data because the more AI pollutes your dataset, the more likely it is to lead to Model Collapse, where an LLM is poisoned due to unverified data generated by other LLMs

I am firmly of the belief that sites like Internet Archive will be some of the most valuable companies in the AI space, because they hold an immense amount of untainted data created prior to 2019.

I’m not sure why anyone would ever buy Reddit stock. There is no money to be made in Reddit. They failed to make any money before they went public, and they’re failing to make any money now.

They tried the whole NFT thing, failed. They’re trying to sell the data to AI companies but once that’s sold they can’t sell any more of it because the benefit of Reddit data was historical data unpolluted by AI, but new Reddit data is polluted by ChatGPT posts and is therefore worth less.

It’s not even about banning people, it’s about the fact that Reddit was never a sustainable business model from the start, at least not in the traditional capitalist sense where you’re actively trying to make a profit to please shareholders.

The only benefit to owning Reddit stock is if you have voting shares and can manipulate the algorithm to benefit you in some way. Suppress some voices, amplify others to back what you want to do etc. but you need money to burn in order to achieve that because you aren’t going to be making money directly by owning Reddit stock and manipulating public opinion takes time.

The funny thing is you can still buy Office standalone but you have to actively go looking for it and Microsoft doesn’t advertise it because 365 subscriptions make more money.

Microsoft doesn’t want you buying standalone versions of software, but they still have to sell it because there’s still a market for it.

I wonder if there’s a market for male-centric therapy. As in “I’ve got a loada wood that needs chopping. Come chop wood with me and we’ll talk about stuff”. You know, give 'em something to do with their hands while they talk. Obviously you probably couldn’t do that with someone who’s known for being aggressive and has a criminal record, but someone who has trouble talking about their feelings and doesn’t feel comfortable just sitting in a room or on a Teams call and would rather feel like they’re accomplishing something.

The one thing I don’t like about oldschool forums is that I have to make an account for each one. With each account comes a new place where your email address is registered, and a new password, with each password comes a new avenue for attack if you’re shitty about web security and use the same password (or a variation thereof) for everything. If you use a password manager you’re fine, but I don’t want my email being put everywhere.

There needs to be some kind of SSO that’s open source (like Google but not Google), so I can log into any forum that implements it, but with that comes the cost of running an identity provider and I don’t think forums are going to want to pay for that in addition to their own costs. Maybe some sort of distributed system or something where each forum donates a little bit of compute power to running the IDP, I dunno…

Discord, Reddit and Lemmy are bad choices for forums. If you want ANY useful information to stick, put it on forums you know are gonna get indexed and archived reliably. Reddit is indexable but there’s no guarantee the page will still be there when you search for it through Google.

Discord is completely unindexable so any information that exists on a server that gets deleted is lost forever.

Lemmy is a half-way house. As far as I know it’s kinda indexable but not really.

I have certainly found that to be the case with developers working with me. They run into a small problem so they instantly go to Copilot and just paste what it says the answer is. Then, because they don’t know what they’re asking or fully understand the problem, they can’t comprehend the answer either. Then later, they come to me having installed a library they don’t understand and code that’s been hallucinated by Copilot and then ask me why it’s not working.

A little bit of stepping back and going “What do I hope to achieve with this?” and “Why do I have to do it this way?” goes a long way. It stops you going down rabbit holes.

Then again, isn’t that what people used to do with StackOverflow?

I wouldn’t call that a particularly insightful observation. Ever since humanity settled down in agricultural societies there have been governments, and with governments come a monopoly on force, so obviously governments have killed more people than anything else. Any organisation of humans is gonna have at least some threat of lethal force backing it.

I got banned for making fun of Kemi Badenoch when she said autistic people are privileged. I said maybe she’s jealous that there are people that know more about trains than her. That was apparently enough to warrant a permanent ban.

Couple years now. Old accounts got grandfathered in but if you never made a full account or started using WeMod recently there’s a 2 hour timer that when it expires turns off all the cheats and demands you pay the fee.

WeMod is shit now. It used to be free but now they demand you pay them if you play for more than 2 hours.

I think it’s more “Butt as an alternative to algorithms” which I fully agree with. Butts are better than algorithms

Does it fight algorithm addiction or does it just utilise existing algorithm addiction to give you something slightly more informative?