People stay on mainstream corporate platforms no matter how badly they enshittify because that’s where everyone else is. They don’t want to jump ship unless everyone else will jump ship with them, and so nobody makes the first move.

Lemmy isn’t more popular because Lemmy isn’t more popular. Lemmy wants to be an alternative to Reddit, but the best thing Reddit had going for it was all the niche communities for fandoms, hobbies, and other interests. That’s something that just can’t exist here, because if you take a niche thing and multiply it by a niche platform, I’ll bet that I might very well be the only person on this platform who is into some of my hyperfixations. So people who want to talk about topics that have no community here, leave and go back to bigger platforms.

I’m still here to try and push for a better future, but I honestly don’t know how we can grow this place to the kind of critical mass it would take to really get the ball rolling.

How do they deal with CSAM and other illegal material? (I’m guessing the answer is that they don’t)

The bully who pretended to be my friend in order to hurt me.

When a thread on Reddit is deleted or removed, it just deletes the OP, but the comments remain. Here, the whole thing gets nuked, which really sucks.

No, the question is 6 * 9. The implication is that something is fundamentally wrong with the universe since that doesn’t add up.

Languags don’t get designed in a lab by a creator who comes up a consistent set of rules. Languages constantly shift and change as the people who speak them do. Languages borrow loanwords from each other, then proceed to mangle them. Slang arises, becomes part of the lexicon, becomes passe. Regional dialects drift apart but then mingle again.

And at no point does logic ever enter into the equation. Change just happens haphazardly.

There’s a pair of concepts in Linguistics referred to as prescriptivism and descriptivism. Prescriptivism refers to trying to declare a set of rules for how language should be. If your teacher ever told you that ‘ain’t’ isn’t a real word, that’s prescriptivism, and it’s bunk. Descriptivism is just a best effort to describe how speakers of a language actually use it. If English speakers regularly say ‘ain’t’, then it’s an English word. The fun thing about descriptivism is that there will always be holes and inconsistencies, because not all English speakers are necessarily speaking the same way.

Compare the English we speak today from Ye Olde Englishe. Many words are now spelled or pronounced differently from how they used to be. Many old words have been replaced by completely different ones. Syntax has changed quite a bit. And if you go far back enough, English used to be written with a different set of characters from the Latin alphabet we use now. But this all happened so gradually you can’t establish any clear dividing line to separate these languages, there’s no date on which you could say everything prior was Old English and everything after is Modern English. And if you look towards the future, 100, 1000, 10000 years from now, English won’t be the same as it is now either.

I started on kbin.social because at the time, Kbin’s feature set and rapid development pace sounded a lot more promising than Lemmy. Not to mention the controversies around Lemmy’s core developers.

Once kbin.social died, I jumped to fedia.io with the other refugees.

As others have pointed out, memories are extremely fickle. Fickle enough that I do not think it could be feasible to have any kind of fine-grained control over what to delete or replace. It’d be a bull in a china shop.

I think the only way it could potentially be done safely and properly is with a computer several orders of magnitude more powerful than a human brain, capable of copying the patient’s brain, running all kinds of simulations on it to figure out how to make the exact changes without touching anything else, then writing those changes back to the host. If we’re talking eventually, that could be an eventually, but a very very big eventually.

When I was in high school, the sequel to my favorite game didn’t get translated, so I convinced my parents to sign me up for Japanese lessons on the weekend. But I didn’t get all that far in it on account of having too much actual schoolwork to keep up with.

Last year I picked it back up again, just for fun, and I’m making a lot more progress using Renshuu than I did in a classroom environment. Earlier this year I bought one volume each of a bunch of different manga series, slowly working through the pile with the help of vocab lists from LearnNatively and Wanikani. So far I’ve finished Yotsubato, RuriDragon, and Look Back.

The entire cast of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Women should make the first move because I’m too shy to do it myself ;_;

The only thing keeping me off of Wayland is the fact that OBS window capture forces me to manually reselect every window every time.

If I’m commenting on an article, I’m not just talking to the person who posted the article here. So it doesn’t really matter who posted it.

✋👉✊👍

Scrapers aren’t using the LLM to scrape. They just gather data the old fashioned way, by spoofing a web browser. Then the LLM can use that data, but that step comes later.

Doing this just makes you sound like a Homestuck character.

There are valid arguments for and against, but I really don’t think the word ‘authoritarianism’ is at all applicable here.

The internet is how I found groups for my most niche interests. I already know that some of my favorite games do not have any kind of local scene near me, but at least I can still play online. Some of these games I have to travel out to tournaments to play in-person once or twice a year, and I know those events wouldn’t exist without first building up an online community to organize from.

Qanon