Spzi

Because religion evolved to thrive in us.

It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.

Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.

Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.

This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.

This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.

While you guys kind of have a point, the specific argument you put forward is rather weak. Transportation accounts for an almost negligible part of the overall emissions of a product. Bulk freight cargo is super efficient. If you want to moan about transportation emissions, look at single people sitting in tons of steel making short trips.

The point you still have is that emissions are caused in the process of satisfying a demand. Consumers do have a partial responsibility. However I would object in that the problem cannot be solved from the consumer’s position. It is a market failure. Markets have no incentive to internalize their externalities, that has to come from a different place; e.g. politics. Carbon pricing is an interesting mechanic, since it utilizes that same argument for good.

That’s true. A lot more could be said about this, on various levels in various directions. Ultimately I don’t think this systemic crisis can be solved on a consumer level. The attempt leads to the status quo; different subcultures with some people paying extra to calm their consciousness, while most don’t care or cannot afford. I’m afraid if we try to work with individual sacrifice against economic incentives, the latter will win.

It’s also true that some companies use their economic power as a political lever, to influence legislation in their favor. Or as a societal lever, to sway public opinion in their favor. I guess this meme here tries to address that. I honor the motive. Just the chosen vehicle is broken. With mountains of evidence supporting the cause, however, there are plenty of other, perfectly fine vehicles available.

This meme is so wrong it is deliberate misinformation. The Guardian made an article which is probably this meme’s source. It even linked to the original source, the Carbon Majors Report. But blatantly misquoted the CMR. For example, CMR says something like “100 fossil fuel producers responsible for 71% of industrial GHG emissions”, but The Guardian (and meme posters) omit the italic bits.

What do they mean with producers? Not companies like Apple or Heinz, but simply organizations which produce fossil fuels. Duh. Shell, BP, but also entities like China’s coal sector (which they count as one producer, although it consists of many entities). CMR also states 3rd type emissions are included. Which means emissions caused by “using” their “products”, e.g. you burning gasoline in your car.

So yes, the downvoted guy saying “Consumer emissions and corporate emissions are the same emissions” is pretty spot on in this case, albeit most likely by accident. Rejected not for being wrong, but for not fitting into a narrative, which I call the wrong reasons. Please check your sources before posting. We live in a post-factual world where only narratives count and truth is just another feeling, because of “journalism” and reposts like this. Which is the infuriating part in this particular case. I guess you want to spread awareness about the climate crisis, which is good, but you cannot do so by propagandizing science and spreading lies.

All that from the top of my head. Both the ominous TG article and the fairly short report are easy to find. In just a couple of minutes you can check and confirm how criminally misquoted it was.

Eventually, things settle at almost perfect ratios. Everything between creates some kind of friction.

What does it even mean to bruteforce creating art? Trying all the possible prompts to some image model?

Doesn’t have to be that random, but can be. Here, I wrote: “throw loads of computation power, gazillions of try & error, petabytes of data including human opinions”.

The approach people take to learning or applying a skill like painting is not bruteforcing, there is actual structure and method to it.

Ok, but isn’t that rather an argument that it can eventually be mastered by a machine? They excel at applying structure and method, with far more accuracy (or the precise amount of desired randomness) and speed than we can.

The idea of brute forcing art comes down to philosophical questions. Do we have some immaterial genie in us, which cannot be seen and described by science, which cannot be recreated by engineers? Engeniers, lol. Is art something which depends on who created it, or does it depend on who views it?

Either way what I meant is that it is thinkable that more computation power and better algorithms bring machines closer to being art creators, although some humans surely will reject that solely based on them being machines. Time will tell.

That depends on things we don’t know yet. If it can be brute forced (throw loads of computation power, gazillions of try & error, petabytes of data including human opinions), then yes, “lots of work” can be an equivalent.

If it does not, we have a mystery to solve. Where does this magic come from? It cannot be broken down into data and algorithms, but still emerges in the material world? How? And what is it, if not dependent on knowledge stored in matter?

On the other hand, how do humans come up with good, meaningful art? Talent Practice. Isn’t that just another equivalent of “lots of work”? This magic depends on many learned data points and acquired algorithms, executed by human brains.

There also is survivor bias. Millions of people practice art, but only a tiny fraction is recognized as artists (if you ask the magazines and wallets). Would we apply the same measure to computer generated art, or would we expect them to shine in every instance?

As “good, meaningful art” still lacks a good, meaningful definition, I can see humans moving the goalpost as technology progresses, so that it always remains a human domain. We just like to feel special and have a hard time accepting humiliations like being pushed out of the center of the solar system, or placed on one random planet among billion others, or being just one of many animal species.

Or maybe we are unique in this case. We’ll probably be wiser in a few decades.

This ambiguity is what I had in mind when I read “let me be clear”. Though now I get it.

Romantically speaking, aren’t we all just genitals with attached life support?

For those who don’t know what Firefish is: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Firefish%3F

Started smoking cigarettes.

How accurate is this description?

How about give the users control over the algorithm? Akin to Lemmy, where we can at least choose one of many sorting algorithms, including chronological. But I only use ‘New’ when checking out specific communities. For the actual feed, I very much prefer an algorithmic approach.

I don’t see it as the platform’s responsibility to “create an unbiased recommendation algorithm without creating echo chambers”. Give me the means to prevent that, yes. But please let me decide for myself wether I want a wide or narrow range of topics, and which flavor.

you telling me that I’m not allowed

You are not your Lemmy account, and you are specifically not one single Lemmy account. If you don’t like the policy of an instance, you can try to change it or go somewhere else. Ok right, in the attempt to influence policy, you can play the ‘you telling me that I’m not allowed’-card.

Now that I think about it, the most uncensored Lemmy experience is being logged out. Every content is visible, no middle man can hinder you to visit these sites. It’s a bit like when a public library decides to organize their books into separate rooms. Would you call that censorship because you have to walk between the rooms to access all the content?

Censorship would be fitting if certain content would be erased from the library. I think that’s only possible on Lemmy if all instances agree.

Don’t mind OP. Write it for the audience. I loved your first response and would appreciate to read more.

its also a bit of wishful thinking

Then it’s more a fediverse utopia than a fediverse analogy :-P

Honestly, I think we should stay true to what it is, not to what it might become. We don’t know if, and when.

It’s better to not wake expectations than to disappoint them.

what’s stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles?

For Lemmy:

• Onboarding. Newcomers should not have to decide which instance to use. They know nothing to make that decision. An algorithm should make an educated guess. Even a random pick might be better than forcing them to choose. Manual choice should still be available as an advanced signup method, but the default should be as quick and simple as possible.
• Account Migration. The lack thereof only increases the pressure for making a good choice for your first instance. If we could easily migrate accounts, this would also ease the signup burden. 3rd party tools exist, but this should be a core feature.
• Discovery. There exist dozens of tools for discovering communities, which shows how bad the built-in search function is. This should be a core feature with no need for 3rd party tools. I should not have to care wether someone else from my instance already searched for the same community or wether I’m the first.
• Stream Aggregation. I signed up to loads of niche communities (which do get new posts), but never see any of those in my stream, no matter which mode I choose. I even started to unsubscribe from big communities to give smaller content a chance, to no avail. This effectively hides original and interesting content from view, and makes the overall experience more boring.
• Remote Instance Posts and Comments. When looking up a specific post or comment, I probably cannot do so while being logged in. Which means, I can read it, but cannot interact with it.
• Remote Instance Communities. When browsing the communities of another instance (for example, a themed instance like mander.xyz), I can only do so while being logged out. When I find an interesting community, I have to manually copy the link, search for it in another logged-in tab, find it again, to finally subscribe.
• Lack of Niche Content. It’s getting better, but we still have a long way to go. This probably needs more general growth, but some technical aspects (like Stream Aggregation, Discovery and Remote Instance Browsing) also make it harder for niche communities to gain traction.
• GDPR Compliance. A private person and a public institution (which publishes educational content and videos) explicitly mentioned to me that they cannot join Lemmy since Lemmy cannot assure GDPR Compliance. I don’t know wether that’s true, just reporting the reason.

Overall, it still requires significant willingness to either accept missing features and content, or jump through technical hoops to regain some.

My experience on other fediverse platforms was similar, which most often resulted in me staying away from that particular service for now.

While I don’t fully share that sentiment, I acknowledge it’s a point frequently brought up.

So, looking for a compromise … is there hope in growth? Like, with numbers big enough, it should become feasible to have an instance which strictly blocks all political leanings of ‘your despised flavor’, and still have enough content to look at.

Would that be a solution for you, for example @awwwyissss@lemm.ee or @PP_BOY_@lemmy.world? Lemmy as a whole would still have ‘bad stuff’, but there would be a ‘clean instance’ which you can recommend, from which no ‘bad stuff’ can be seen.

I simply skipped thinking about better wordings for ‘some expressions’. Please bear with me. I didn’t mean to judge.

I was trying to address a point that is frequently raised by people that gave Lemmy a try but are not planning to stay: seeing the same content posted across a few similar communities hinders content discovery, and just provides a worse browsing experience than centralized solutions like Reddit.

Not trying to be mean, but … you’re making a post about redundancy because other people make posts about redundancy? :D

In these other posts, a frequent answer is: Reddit isn’t that much different. A popular example is /r/gaming or /r/games or whatever. Apparently there are multiple subs for the same topic, sometimes with little to no differences.

Then some people object “but that’s not the same, they have different names”, to which others reply “on lemmy, the full name includes the instance, so we don’t have same name communities here, either”.

I think, bottom line, the two platforms aren’t very different in this regard. On both, users can create new subs/comms even if the exact same content already exists. And they do. Sometimes both survive, sometimes not. On both, users decide “with their feet”.

One relevant difference might be that in the Fediverse, redundancy actually has value. It protects against defederation, unstable servers, servers disappearing.

I still see value in combining duplicates. When I see a new community popping up, and I know a very similar thing already exists, I might leave a note in the new community wether they might want to participate in the other community instead. Just in case they were not aware it exists.

But aside from the Fediverse-specific reasons for duplicates, there are additional general reasons, which is why we see the same phenomenon on reddit. For example, people might dislike the moderation in the ‘original’. Or one might allow bots, the other not.

While this is my point of view (“it’s a non-issue”), I also note it’s a topic which is frequently brought up. Apparently, it’s frequently seen as an issue. This may be rooted in perception (including the fact that reddit is monolithic, falsly leading to the misconception it would only have one sub for one topic, all while it still has plenty of redundant duplicates) and communication (I got the feeling the fediverse’s federated structure is sometimes over-emphasized and creates more worries than necessary).

We probably will get technical solutions like grouping on a user-view level. Maybe some apps already have that. GitHub issues exist.

Aside from technical solutions, people can vote with their feet. It is of course perfectly fine to address and re-address the topic. This might help consolidate similar communities. Personally, I think having a few redundant communities is healthy for the nature of the fediverse.

I’m subscribed to four communities named "fediverse@"something. Yes, it’s a bit annoying. But it’s also good to have backups, in the sense that I never know which instance might defederate from my own or from others who also use these communities.

Not sure what the point of this post is. Do you want people to vote on which to keep, and which to discard? They already do that. People subscribe and unsubscribe, post or don’t, as they please. Apparently, we continuously vote on having four (probably even more) redundant communities.