Something I see a lot in the Fediverse and left wing spheres is people rejecting, or making enemies of imperfect allies. The video I shared paints a great picture of what it's like.

Here is some examples I've seen, and what reactions they've been met with.

"I ditched Gmail for Proton" is met with "That's terrible the CEO is a Trump boot licker"

"Posts on r/BuyCanadian" is met with "Why are you still using Reddit, it's American?"

"I'm pro trans but, there are some things I'm not 100% onboard with" is met with "Harsh criticism & Ban"

"I sold my diesel SUV for an electric KIA" is met with "You shouldn't support China or drive a SUV, buy European instead"

"I switched to Brave instead of Chrome" is met with "Brave sucks its American and still part of chromium"
etc.

I so often see people harshly criticize and alienate people that are mostly on their side, and might in the near future be fully on their side.

Instead I'd like to see responses like

"Hey fantastic that you switched to Proton away from Gmail, consider moving to Migadu as they're an even better solution"

"Awesome that you're buying Canadian, while you're at it consider checking out Lemmy or PieFed"

"Great job switching to Electric, next time consider buying a smaller European car there are many great reasons why they are better"

"Great that you're pro-trance, what's stopping your from being onboard with XYZ? Maybe I can change your mind?"

"Nice Brave is already a lot better than Chrome, even better would be LibreWolf, also make sure to try out Kagi or Qwant instead of google"

You don't change someone's mind by criticizing them, you need to have a discussion and bring them over, tone matters. How do we stop these criticisms and alienating imperfect allies?

Should I try to update the name of my cousin? The marks are about 20 years old. I think it will be obvious that it has been edited and draw more attention to the change.

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. We try to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are highly encouraged as no-discussion downvotes don't help anyone learn anything valuable. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

We're back! We're testing the waters with the new influx of people to see if this is valuable or not. We are also actively seeking moderators and people who enjoy discussion (and understand that being wrong is an important part of being a better person)! Send me a message if you'd like to help out.

This weekly thread will focus on The Future Of The USA. You may not be American (I'm sure not), but what happens with America can impact the world.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• How do you feel things are going there?
• How are they impacting relations with your country if you aren't from America?
• Do you think things will get better or worse?
• How do you think things could be made better?
• What should other countries do to mitigate the damage that may be occurring?
• What are your thoughts on tariffs?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

This weekly thread will focus on the word "Woke" and its meaning, use, and misuse.

Some Starters (and don’t feel you have to speak on all or any of them if you don’t care to):

• What does the word mean to you?
• Is it applied correctly or incorrectly?
• Is it even applicable any longer?
• Do you feel that Conservative media misapplies it, and is "everything I don't like is woke" an appropriate sentiment or simply uncharitable?

Reminder: This post is from the Community Actual Discussion. You’re encouraged to use voting for elevating constructive, or lowering unproductive, posts and comments here. When disagreeing, replies detailing your views are appreciated. For other rules, please see this pinned thread. Thanks!

PREFACE:

These dumb chat "A.I." programs are... not A.I. and even people selling it even recognize that.

THE CRUX:

We don't have real A.I. - we have generative models trained on massive amounts of data which in effect attempts to compress it down into a trained model which it can run to try and regenerate answers based on the data it was trained from. It is a lossy compression, as the model itself is too small to contain the whole of the information it ingests. As such it makes things up along the way in order to fill in the blanks. You can see this in how chat models like ChatGPT will confidently give you incorrect information. Researchers call this "hallucinating".

The model doesn't actually have any core understanding of the material it ingests - it can't, since it isn't actually an artificial intelligence. It can infer what things should look like, and it can do so well enough now to start fooling humans into thinking it knows what it's doing. We're in the 'uncanny valley' of generative language and code models. So that's one problem. It makes things up without understanding it, and can't reliably reproduce correct answers, only things that kinda look correct.

It's absolutely infuriating to people who actually understand the technology that we've taken to calling it "AI" at all. It's a stupid techbro marketing stunt and unfortunately for all of us it has stuck, and as a result we now all have to call it A.I., and only those of us with the right tech background to know better will understand just how misleading that label is.

The output is still garbage, but it's dangerously believable garbage.

Remember all those shitty chat bots that circulated around for a while? This is just that, but way more complex and easier to mistake for real intelligence. Imagine now, if you will, an internet full of such chat bots all set up by techbros and lazy hacks trying to cash in on the sudden easy ability to generate 'content' that can get past regular spam filters at a rate so fast that no human team can keep up with checking it all, and they're pulling this stuff down from the internet en masse to train their buggy models, then submitting it back to places that are indexed online where the next set of buggy models can ingest it, like an infinite Ouroboros of shit, so next thing you know you can't trust a damn thing you read anywhere, because it's all garbage generated from other people's garbage, and companies like IBM and Microsoft are even getting in on it.

And because the models learn based on statistical trends and averages over a large set of data? Guess what? This huge flood of new "A.I." generated data is now the norm, and as such it takes precedence over human generated data that by natural limitations cannot keep up with the speed at which the A.I. generated data is flooding the internet.

That's basically what's happening now. Because the average person making decisions about how to leverage this new, lucrative technology for profit doesn't understand (or care to understand) how it works or why it's a bad idea. All they see is the short term dollar signs from getting leg up on the competition by churning huge quantities of shit out faster and cheaper than any human can, in a market where increasingly only quantity matters, not quality.

It's already replacing journalists and authors as newspapers and publishing houses are getting backed up with a flood of "AI" generated submissions from people trying to cash in on it. A huge amount of recent content on the internet is entirely made up, imagined by these models, and very difficult to tell apart from actual researched information by real knowledgeable experts. Throwing this into the mix with the already problematic ecosystem of disinformation from entities like Cambridge Analytica, and even writing children's books to help human children learn to read? The future is very bleak indeed.

THINGS I HAVEN'T SPOKEN ABOUT (or only alluded to):

• The massive power usage
• Putting it into software that absolutely does not need it
• "Necromancing" dead people for clicks
• Making search nigh-unusable
• Further reducing the value of actual writers
• Mass layoffs because the idiots in charge think the tech can replace people (Spoiler - no, it can't)
• You know those shitty auto-generated "Radiant AI" quests in Skyrim that everyone hated? You know how whenever there's a randomly generated room in a game how you can tell just by looking at it that it wasn't designed with any semblance of thought? Like that but they want to use it for everything in games now.

Some Sources:

A ‘Shocking’ Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash, Scientists Determine

How Bad Are Search Results?

#First and foremost, let me say that I appreciate you actually engaging in a real discussion on Lemmy!

Why did I make this community? Well, mostly in response to the rest of Lemmy and the way many otherwise interesting discussion threads fall apart into downvoting and groupthink.

I don’t like people making baseless accusations. I defend people on all sides when people are wrong about their opposition. I hate it when people think they know what others think and project incorrect (and often evil) bullshit on each other. It’s important to be correct with solid reasoning and conclusions, not just one or the other.

I hate people being wilfully wrong because their group fetishizes a certain angle of the truth instead of the boring reality of the situation.

Ideas are important and I don’t feel we can get out of the current shitty slump we’re in with political discourse unless we clearly speak about and discuss the world.

So let's talk like people. What do you want to talk about?