Everyone gets their start somewhere.

And you can be sure that the old hats are making sure to record and broadcast everything. So when the jackboots inevitably see a black person and start unloading with “rubber bullets” and tear gas, people will see.

Tumblr was already in a bad place and was further cannibalized by instagram (and reddit).

Reddit still has no meaningful alternatives. Yes, we like lemmy. Most people don’t and won’t. They want corporate social media. Just look at how long it took people to leave twitter. And they only did once BlueSky had open sign ups.

My money is on a bunch of “protest” posts and subreddits to track this and people mostly just sit around and not care. With a lot saying “I don’t need porn on reddit, I have the internet” while completely ignoring things like trans erasure.

…

Excusing what? Someone called out the “free speech absolutist” hypocrisy. You assumed they were talking about Github or Microsoft for some reason. I corrected you.

Maybe learn how to contribute to a conversation?

This is being done by trump and musk.

Microsoft just own the company where this is being discussed because the people actually doing the work are treating it like any other software project.

Like I said. It took years for people to leave twitter and it was only because bluesky had open sign-ups.

They don’t want the fediverse. They want giant corporate sites that make things “easy” and involve no thought.

So no, lemmy is not an alternative to the vast majority of reddit.

Just in the interest of anyone who thinks this person had even the slightest argument:

To summarize. musk is not the de jure “fed”. he is very demonstrably de facto. But hey, apparently reddit loves everyone enough that they are going to fight a federal government that has made it clear they don’t give a shit about any actual laws or constitutionality.

Oy

That is the beautiful part of it. It is a fundamental brain block in like 99.999999% of “The Children”.

In an old life I had to deal with this. Maybe one in every hundred interns we had realized how similar matlab and fortran were. The rest just immediately locked down because it wasn’t python or, in rare cases, C++.

Honestly? Same

But that is why lemmy and mastodon aren’t alternatives. it sucks but… yeah.

And FEDERALLY he has no leg to stand on. Are you intentionally missing my point here? He wouldn’t be asking FEDERALLY. He would be asking PERSONALLY, because Spez glazes him. The FED has no rule of law they can use to force a site to link to another.

Tell that to USAID or all the other orgs he is gutting.

They say in the comment section of a post on a alternative. C’mon, you’re just being contrarian at this point.

Again, lemmy is not an option any more than mastodon was an option for twitter. For many reasons, people only want to go to large “simple” corporate owned websites.

Maybe you should actually educate yourself on a topic before you comment on it, hmm?

What is the fed going to tell them, specifically

musk IS “the fed” at this point. Pay attention

It died because there was an alternative AND digg shit the bed with v4. If just being a alternative was enough we’d be on voat or tildes right now, which came well before Lemmy.

Yes. it is almost like we need both. And there is still no alternative.

The greatest and most vital of government secrets are safe. Because no chance any of those kids understand fortran or cobol.

They’ll just delete it rather than try to understand or modify it. But small victories.

If it gets big on the media reddit admins might force things, but prob not. I have a buddy who mods one of the subs that banned twitter links and he said admins were backing mods there.

Reddit is not your friend (or your friend’s friend) and they are happy for a way to increase engagement up until they get told by the government that they need to let twitter back in.

Reddit Corporate is not going to fight for your rights.

There was no alternative to digg… until reddit. Any big site can fall off.

And do you know why digg died more or less overnight? Because there was an alternative.

We don’t have that alternative. So… that is why I referenced twitter which was a 2020s problem event rather than digg which was late 2000s.

Anecdotal, but reddit is REALLY cracking down on users regarding the protests related to the US/North America tariffs. There is a very murky line as to what reddit corporate wants people to say and not say regarding the protests people are organizing on corporate owned social media because sure.

Same with the inevitable pushback against blocking twitter.

That said: I sincerely doubt it will go anywhere. It took YEARS for people to leave twitter and that was only because a different corporate owned social media, bluesky, had open sign-ups. There is no alternative to reddit.

So we might see a small burst of newbies on lemmy. They’ll likely get driven away by the usual suspects.

Ah. Thank you for actually finally citing yourself.

I actually HAD seen that before so:

1. .Protonmail Behaves like a CIA/NSA “Honeypot”: This is an incredibly sensationalized point that boils down to them having a really shit TOR page. And, agreed. But “In fact, the only other websites that operate like this are suspected NSA/CIA Honeypots.” is very much false. LOTS of sites are configured in a really shitty manner which gets back to people having to understand the tools they use.
2. Protonmail Does Not Provide “End to End Encryption”: Yeah. Which gets back to what I have been saying the entire time. If you actually care about your security, encrypt your own emails. Nobody should EVER trust a company to do encryption for them when it actually matters. Which speaks to the quality of proton as a service, not it being a “honeypot”
3. . Protonmail’s Was Created Under CIA/NSA Oversight: That article is almost entirely them just repeating that same inflammatory statement over and over. But it boils down to having issues with something coming out of MIT research which is a prestigious school with government grants and very questionable side hustles for some professors. The reality is that almost all software is at least “incubated” under very questionable circumstances because… people gotta eat and the people doing the kind of research that makes “cool stuff” tend to get government grants (well, not as of two weeks ago but…)
4. .Protonmail is Part Owned by CRV and the Swiss Government: Which is not the CIA?
5. CRV, In-Q-Tel & the CIA : I am not seeing a direct link to Proton Corp other than “Additionally, The mastermind, cryptographer & back end developer that created Protonmail, Wei Sun, now works for Google.”. Which… okay? If it was written properly that doesn’t matter. If it wasn’t then… encrypt your own emails.
6. Protonmail Follows CIA Email format & Metadata Requirements: "There are several ways to store emails, and Protonmail has selected the format that the CIA requires. ". Yup. Smoking gun right there. They chose the wrong standard. Yes, I would like it if they encrypted that metadata on principle. But it doesn’t matter. If they are compromised, they have that metadata anyway. Again, encrypt your own communications and maybe don’t use your personal accounts when you are discussing super sensitive topics?
7. . Swiss MLAT Law Could Give the NSA Full Access: Are we back to the Swiss being a CIA front?
8. Protonmail Uses Radware for DNS/DDOS Protection: So now it is Mossad who controls Proton and all they have to do is compromise a DDOS filter. Again, encrypt your emails.
9. Protonmail Developers Do Not Use Protonmail: if not wanting to eat your own dogfood means you are a CIA operation then Uncle Sam owes me a lot of money.
10. Protonmail engages in illegal cyberwarfare: They did a “hack back”, Okay? Fuck 'em, but okay?
11. Protonmail has a history of Dishonesty: Yeah, there is no bias in that list at all

You see, when you actually post a link to stuff people can discuss what you are talking about and explain why you are misinformed and clearly referencing a somewhat deranged hit piece.

The main takeaway from that? They are, at worst, as bad as gmail. Except with a much smaller customer base and at least more open that they want you to pay for functionality rather than not question what google is doing with your data.

And, as proton themselves even say: if it actually matters, encrypt your own emails. That way Proton Corp don’t have anything they can give to their CIA/Mossad/Swiss overlords.

you want me as an ally, your tone lost me…

If the only way you care about people protecting their privacy and very selfs is if someone is nice to you and cuddles you and thanks you for spewing uncited nonsense…

There was a blog post by a website called Privacy Watchdog (if I remember correctly), I can’t find that website anymore nor the blog post,

Yeah. And trump totally read an article somewhere that black trans people are the root of all evil. He can’t find it right now, but totally trust him on that.

I don’t know if you are just this stupid or if you are actually trying to undermine those who are trying to make educated decisions on what they should or should not “trust” communication wise (you’ll note that I all but say “don’t trust proton. protect yourself”).

But either find that mystery article so that people can make educated decisions or shut the fuck up.

I am not making arguments for US politics. I am not here to give you “something (you) can use in future discussion with others”

I am telling you that you have no evidence whatsoever but you are spewing bullshit. You are just as bad as trump making up bullshit about how he read a report that nuking a hurricane would solve all problems. Your argument is literally “I think I heard somewhere”

We are all scared. We are all trying to protect ourselves. Maybe you can be an ally instead of an agitator, hmm?

Sorry, just to check: your evidence is “I think I read it somewhere?”. If it weren’t for “weak argument, dismissed” being too “cringe” even for ME…

If you have evidence, please actually provide it. If you don’t, please shut your opinion hole.

And

she was the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council Chair of the Future of Internet Security

That actually seems like a good background to have for working on software/products like this?

Also, people should actually LOOK at what proton “promises”. Mostly it boils down to limited protections and suggested tools to protect yourself. Which is why, as a company, I like them. They aren’t promising to fight all the governments of the world. In fact, they are pretty open that they are gonna roll over because they don’t know you. But what they do claim to turn over? Combine that with some opsec and personal encryption and you are in a really “good” place for someone who has a warrant out on them.

Contrast that with all the companies that DO make wild claims about having zero data and being willing to go to nu-gitmo for their customers and blah blah blah.

The reality is: if you are doing something the CIA should care about, you… probably shouldn’t be doing email at all. That said, there are ways to reduce your risk factor and they almost all boil down to communicating with trusted and vetted individuals where you can actually encrypt communications yourself rather than relying on a company to do so.

But if you are mostly just pirating shit or writing graphic lemons about threesomes involving trump, xinnie, and putin? Meh. You can do a lot worse.

They didn’t “pay vassalage to trump”. They spewed the same libertarian tech bro bullshit that most companies trying to cozy up to a new administration did. And the damage control responses align with that.

It isn’t particularly good. But on the list of “privacy” corporations that are potentially honeypots, they still rank fairly low.

Last I heard, current AI will devour themselves if trained on content from other AI. It simply isn’t good enough to use, and the garbage noise to value ratio is too high to make it worth filtering through.

Yeah… that is right up there with “AI can’t do feet” in terms of being nonsense people spew.

There is nothing inherently different between a picture made by an LLM and a picture drawn by Rob Liefeld. Both have fucked up feet and both can be fixed with a bit of effort.

The issue is more the training data itself. Where this CAN cause a problem is if you unknowingly train on endless amounts of ai generated content. But… we have the same problem with training on endless amounts of human content. Very few training sets (these days) bother to put in the time to actually label what input is. So it isn’t “This is a good recipe, that is a bad recipe, and that is an ad for betterhelp”. It is “This is all the data we scraped off every public facing blog and youtube transcript”.

Its also why the major companies are putting a big emphasis on letting customers feed in their own data. Partially that is out of the understanding that people might not want to type corporate IP into a web interface. But it is also because it provides a way to rapidly generate some labeled data because you know that customer cares about widgets if they have twelve gigs of documents on widgets.

I see AI as basically a magic box containing an approximation of skill but lacking understanding and intent.

And what is the difference between someone getting paid to draw a picture of Sonic choking on a chili dog by a rando versus an AI generated image of the same?

At the end of the day, we aren’t going to see magic AIs generating everything with zero prompting (maybe in a decade or two… if the world still exists). Instead what we see is people studying demand and creating prompts based on that. Which… isn’t that different from how hollywood studios decide which script to greenlight or not.

Even if you take a piece from the social media of an independent artist and make a meme out of it or something, so long as people can find that artist, it can lead to people hiring them

1. That is a BIG if
2. You are literally arguing that it is fine for people to “work for exposure”

AI can not exist without a constant stream of human art to devour

That is, sadly, incorrect. What IS true is that AI cannot be “born” without massive amounts of human content. But once you have a solid base model (and I do not believe we currently do), you no longer need input art or input prose. The model can generate that. What you DO need is feedback on whether a slight variation is good or bad. Once you have that labeled data you then retrain. Plenty of existing ML models do exactly this.

And, honestly? That isn’t even all that different from how humans do it. It is an oversimplification that ignores lead times, but just look at everyone who suddenly wants to talk about how much Virtuoisity influenced The Matrix. Or, more reasonably, you can look at how different eras of film are clearly influenced by the previous. EVERYONE doing action copied John Woo and then there was the innovation to add slowmo to more or less riff on wire work common in (among other places) Chinese films. And that eventually became a much bigger focus on slow mo to show the impact of a hit and so forth.

There is not something intrinsically human to saying “can I put some jelly in my peanut butter?”. But there IS soemthing intrinsically human to deciding if that was a good idea… to humans.