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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • While I agree with you 100% that programming can be affected by the programmers biases, there’s a much simpler problem that face recognition was having a hard time overcoming. At least when it was a main topic about a decade ago, sensors were having a lot of problems with the low contrast of some black people’s faces. Anyone who’s had a black friend and was a shutter bug will know what kind of problems you can run into when trying to get a proper exposure and not make a black person disappear completely from a photograph. It was just an inherent limitation of the technology they were using. The last statistics I read was something like between 20 to 30% positive matches, which we know damn well is too low for it to be a workable technology. The success rate on Caucasian and lighter skin tones weren’t even that great. There was still something like a 60% false positive match rate. The software may have gotten better over the past decade but we all know that whether it did or not, they’re still going to use it.


  • That’s the whole point. They’re surprised that it’s happening so fast. The acceleration at which things are happening has gone far beyond anything they predicted. My local area hit 40°C a couple of days ago, the highest recorded temperature on record since we started taking temperatures. We’ve had constant temperatures in the high 30s for the past 2 weeks. I can’t remember temperatures this high and I’m almost in my fifth decade on our little blue dot. The icebergs that we see every year failed to show up this year because of the large amount of melt happening in the Arctic, something I can’t remember seeing in my lifetime. I know what I’m saying is all anecdotal but there’s also plenty of evidence supporting global atmospheric warming that’s backed up by scientific data.


  • It’s just like the old adage that history repeats itself. All the streaming companies are starting to do the exact same damn thing cable did. They’re starting to bloat their own products and expense them completely out of normal working schmoes price bracket.

    The early 2000s was Paradise for cord cutters. The whole purpose of moving away from cable was the smaller individualized payments. Now if I want to watch all my shows legally I’m approaching cable tv package prices again. I’ll be damned if I ever get trapped into that cycle again. Now the streaming networks are bombarding us with advertisements that compare the cable was when I cut cord 20 years ago. And they’re slowly getting worse.



  • I know it’s getting into conspiracy realms, but there seems to be a large right-wing buyout of social media. Reddit and Twitter two of the best Independent News sources in North America I’ve already been hit and even though people will argue they are not true new sources, they allow smaller groups to be heard globally. Young people don’t realize how limited news broadcast were before the 2000s. Almost all media was owned by about 50 people worldwide and good luck getting something published that wasn’t in their agenda. You could see it throughout the 50s and 60s as people being labeled radical when their views didn’t coincide with the media magnets. I try not to be an alarmist but I think we’re heading for another dark ages.





  • And once again what stops the user from blocking them theirselves? People have the ability to block individuals and whole subdomains, why not do it theirselves?

    What percentage of people have to be posting hate on a specific topic before a certain server decides to defederate them? I’m in no way advocating hate speech but what happens if you have a large server with just two instances causing trouble? The owner believes in free speech and doesn’t want to block anything but there are dozens of other instances on that server that are behaving normally, with thousands of people using it daily? Do you block that server to your entire user base because of two instances? Do you make all of the other users on that instant suffer because of that? Or do you leave it up to your own users to make their own decisions?

    Regardless of how this goes in the end I think the instance operators should have clear and open policies before people decide what servers they want to join to begin with.


  • I think the general idea behind Lemmy and activity pub was not to have all the instances and groups on one server to begin with. It’s just that some of the older users of Lemmy/kbin/mastodon, already had the servers up and running instead of people creating own self-hosted instances.

    The intention was more for one server to host one instance on a specific topic and then federate with the rest of the community. That server would just be in control of that one instance, like a subreddit on Reddit’s main site.

    Instead what you had was three or four people who were used to the back end software, creating a bunch of groups or letting be created a bunch of groups on their instance. This is going to centralize the population to certain servers instead of ending up with thousands of small federated servers.

    And once the personal belief systems and moderation start seeping into all groups on that server we’re going to see problems. The more control one single person has, the higher the likelihood is that they’re going to start abusing the power in some way, even if they don’t think it’s an abuse their selves.