Lots of legitimate concerns and issues with AI, but if you’re going to criticize someone saying they used it you should at least understand how it works so your criticism is applicable.

It is useful. Chatgpt performs web searches, then summarizes the results in a way customized to what you asked it. It skips the step where you have to sift through a bunch of results and determine “is this what I was looking for?” and “how does this apply to my specific context?”

Of course it can and does still get things wrong. It’s crazy to market it as a new electronic god. But it’s not random, and it’s right the majority of the time.

Yeah! First, I don’t think it would be weird to ask it elsewhere, but definitely ok to ask it here.

She said she wants the CCM industry to crumble - Christian Contemporary Music. If you’re not familiar it’s a very big niche, but essentially they imitate whatever music is popular but make a Christian version of it. And because for some people they’ll only listen to Christian music, it’s a captive audience.

Thanks for attempting an answer. I’ve got to say this feels laughable in light of what’s going on.

Let’s skip the “I have no basic survival skills” part (also skipping disease) and assume we find a nearby group of humans. If you approach first contact carefully they’d probably let you live with them in exchange for labor, giving you time to learn the language.

I think I have enough ambient exposure to modern technology that I could contribute at least 3-4 major innovations to my group over a couple decades. The challenge would be conveying and implementing ideas more than remembering them. You’re not going to get back to modern standards of living in your remaining time traveled years no matter how much you remember, but what little you can impart to others would earn your keep.

I don’t know what all the innovations would be, but germ theory and pasteurization come to mind.

I bought a size of pizza from a food truck in DC and it was so bad I threw it away. Which is saying a lot for pizza

Oh yeah, Cherry Springs State Park in Pennsylvania is cool. Probably not “worth traveling there from some other state before leaving the country” cool, but cool. https://maps.app.goo.gl/SQp261ecxj7exAJy8

Care to share other reliable sources?

Like I just said, I don’t think the way things have been going is the way they should be.

Your comment struck me as completely off base, but I thought maybe I’m wrong and did some googling and reading. I learned a few things (check out this Wikipedia), but definitely confirmed that the Haitian gangs are not “security against actual evil”. Kidnap for ransom, looting and massacres are not “resistance to occupation”.

There’s not some alternate state which is being suppressed, it’s gangs. Yes, Haiti should rule themselves, and to do that there needs to be security. Not saying the current approach is doing it, or that the U.S. should be the one calling the shots.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. It’s everywhere. The U.S. left Afghanistan and was replaced by a different centralized entity. One could argue how decentralized those “tribes” were, but regardless, after the U.S. departure they recreated a similar structure.

Complexity comes hand in hand with size. The OP is a chart of the different email providers. Can an individual run their own email server? Yes. And doesn’t it get more difficult after a certain number of users and require hiring specialists? Yes. But still, such large services exist, and a majority of users turn to them.

If the fediverse lives there will always be small servers, but we can expect to see really big ones. If we don’t want them to be corporate recreations of gmail and yahoo and hotmail I’d argue we should figure out a platform co-op/worker co-op model, including the necessary funding and specialists.

My argument isn’t about the fediverse specifically. It’s that centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and the lack of friction resulting from centralization can make it more competitive.

What is the reason the cost per user of hosting a Lemmy server goes up after a few thousand users? If it were say, you need more expensive hardware, that doesn’t necessarily disprove my argument. Just because a bigger investment is needed doesn’t mean it’s not cheaper per user or not more competitive. Just that you or I don’t have the capital, or that we might see centralization bad because we have bad experiences with centralized entities.

Also just because something is more competitive doesn’t mean it’s morally or aesthetically more desirable. The specialized army fed and trained by an empire overruns the brave and happy tribe of hunter gatherers.

What I’m saying is since we know the phenomenon of centralization occurs, we should try to subvert it as much as possible by introducing democratic structures.

We should have large semi-centralized services. But they should be democratically controlled.

Do you ever think about why cities form? Rural life has a lot of appealing characteristics, plus it’s the starting state of the world. Cities form because there is an advantage to size, proximity and specialization. If we had a new planet and completely evenly distributed the population across its land, we’d very quickly form cities regardless.

It’s the same with centralized services. It takes a lot of special knowledge and equipment to run an email service. The average Lemmy user may have those resources, but even here, how many of us run our own email servers?

It costs less per person in resources to add more users after the first one. So there’s an incentive to aggregate users together. And once you have a certain number of users, maybe you figure out some way to fund your operation, and you can pay more people to add features/capabilities. Soon your entity not only has more users, it’s more appealing than a plan vanilla email service, and you get even more users. You’re doing it cheaper and better than the DIYers.

I think centralization and size are naturally occurring. We should think about ways to exist and benefit from them, so something like Gmail but run as a worker cooperative.

If the person can do the work, why the deception? Is this like overemployed on steroids?

You’re doing all the stuff you suggested too, right?

I’ve been reading “The Power Broker” about Bob Moses, who built an insane amount of expressways in New York. This reminds me of multiple instances in the book where he planned the route in a way that didn’t seem to make sense until you learned that a powerful or wealthy person stood to gain from doing it that way.

I had waited a long time to have any kind of personal experience of God, and finally gave up. Like they said, the holy spirit was supposed to work in you, I prayed for it and looked for it for a long time. Since it didn’t appear, no reason to excuse the problematic passages or shitty people.

On this point it makes sense people are eager to explicitly identify slave owning as the primary driver for secession, because it’s the truth and there is still an active attempt to cover it up

The lost cause argument is something racist losers came up with after the war where they try to say it was more about states rights (and oh by the way slavery wasn’t so bad, many slaves like being slaves)

Some schools still teach this, I went to a “Northern” school and still had textbooks making this argument.

Your post seems to echo this by saying the South’s main thing was they wanted to be separate, even though that happened to include slavery, there were other reasons too. That’s not the case. When they seceded the south explicitly identified slavery as THE reason why they were doing it.

I’ve seen you say a few places in this thread that reducing caloric intake is related to eugenics. That’s a pretty strong claim to make without any evidence. Can you share any?