mrmaplebar

ChatGPT No thank you.

I mean, you can make whatever you want. And I get it, to quote The Clash, I’m pretty bored of the USA too.

Of course, an IP block isn’t going to work because an American like myself can just use a VPN in another country to get around it. And yes, the moment you start federating with other instances you’re going to come across American stuff again, so unless you isolate your instance (which you could do… but then people are unlikely to join it) you’re gonna have to deal with Americans.

With that said, I actually think it’s a great idea for people to make regional fediverse servers, not necessarily to block out Americans in an attempt at digital nationalism/isolationalism… But to make sure that the infrastructure of the internet is not so America-centric, and to make it so that there is always a place to talk about local issues and events that matter to you, in your native language.

Even as an American, I feel that right now the internet is far too reliant on American infrastructure, services and communities.

I’d love to see, for example, Japanese lemmy server, an Italian mastodon server, a German peertube server, a Brazilian pixelfed server, a Canadian misskey server, and so on.

I just think that banning Americans and American topics is probably not an effective way to do it, particularly because there are lessons to be learned for us all about what is going on here right now.

I don’t disagree that we need more positive and high quality hobby content. Sure.

But personally I’m so sick of dudes complaining about “political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling”, whatever half of that banal nonsense is even supposed to mean…

In fact, I’d go as far to say that people who whine about everything being “political” is a bright fucking red flag to me. My immediate assumption upon reading that is “this person is a Trump supporter who voted for this exact shit to happen because they want it to happen, and they don’t want to be confronted by the fact that other people don’t.” I know exactly what kind of people don’t want to hear about “politics” anymore now that Trump is elected, trampling our institutions, and fucking everything up. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, right?

Starting to think, huh?

I think that sounds pretty solid to me. Realistically you should count on having 3x drives for your important data:

1. The main data drive(s)
2. Drive(s) for redundancy, mirroring the data drives. (I use btrfs RAID1 for this.).
3. Offline local hard drive(s) that you keep somewhere relatively safe that you occasionally backup to.
4. (Optionally) Some kind of offsite backup.

So if you plan on having 2TB of data, you’ll ideally want 3x 2TB drives. 2 in the PC mirroring eachother, and 1 in a closet or safe that you plug in and backup to a few times per year. (With bonus points if you can get another 2TB of off site or cloud storage to also backup to, in case of catastrophy.)

As for how you build it, I think it doesn’t matter too much. Its possible to use whatever random spare PC parts you have to make a decent home server, imo. A lot of people on YouTube and Reddit have all kinds of fancy servers in a rack, but an old repurposed desktop can be fine. ( I would probably use new, decent quality drives though.)

Cool! This one is new to me. Nice to see that it has good bluesky integration, too.

I’ll assess them: they are incompetent and talentless.

That’ll be $20.

Yeah. I’m not sure why the AI clipart shit has to be everywhere these days. It’s all very low quality shit.

Well… I’d be curious to know how anyone would argue that AI generated code is GPL safe, especially considering they are often using black box, binary blob models trained on mystery code from all over the internet, with zero attribution or license information, and with some of it almost certainly being proprietary.

Are we going to start ignoring the very licenses that we created.

Having tried Cosmic, I’m not totally convinced it’s good enough to be ready for prime time, but that’s pretty subjective. Overall I think it’s good to have another DE in the scene and at the very least Cosmic is a good start.

Putting aside my ethical and cultural issues with training generative AI for a second, I have no idea what the appeal of this stuff is as a product.

Like, if they want me to pay a monthly subscription, what do they expect me to do with it? I have zero interest in chatting to a computer that’s not thinking and is just stringing together words based on probabilistic bias, and I have zero interest in making or consuming AI-generated media. I don’t want an AI “girlfriend”, nor do I want an AI to play a video game for me. Finally, I don’t see the value in having an AI tell me things that it summarized from various internet sources when we all know that the chances of it “hallucinating” (aka: making shit up or generally being totally wrong) is extremely high and basically unavoidable.

So, aside from the basic novelty of talking to your computer, what the hell is the point of all this?

Personally I wouldn’t pay $2/month for LLMs, let alone $200/month…