• 5 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • I’ve got an app called SmartNews that pulls news from lots of different sources and aggregates them. My feed is set up to pull news only from the front pages of AP and Reuters - which seem to be mostly unbiased sources that both sides get info from for their articles and they use unbiased titles. I skim to the end of my feed (which isn’t very long, maybe 20-30 articles) read a half dozen of them, and that’s my news for the day. Every other media source has news and politics 100% filtered out.

    I feel like it’s enough info for informed decisions and topical conversations with my coworkers, but not so much that I dwell on news in my off time.











  • Till We Have Faces by C S Lewis will always be one of my favorites. It’s a retelling of a Greek tragedy that got totally ignored in modern media. The story follows the life of a princess in ancient times. She’s ugly and not ladylike, so everyone - subjects, employees, and her parents - all prefer her sister. But her sister is spirited away to marry a minor god and the main character is left to take care of the kingdom.

    The story is told in three parts, all of which are kind of like diary entries. Part one sets up the plot, part two talks about how she handles being queen, and part three is her on her deathbed regretting most of her life decisions. Watching the character grow and face the consequences of her actions isn’t something you normally see in a book, and it’s even better because it’s in first person.

    C S Lewis is such a well known author and the book was praised by Tolkien, but for some reason most avid readers haven’t even heard of it. If you like stories about psychology or the human condition it’s a great read (Although I’d recommend the audiobook if you can get it.)



  • Slightly unrelated, but I was just talking with a friend about how we’re going to have similar issues with young artists trying to copy ai. As is, many young artists will turn to cartoons instead of real life when starting out. Their work is a bastardization of a bastardization, with serious flaws in anatomy, gravity, light, and depth. They go on to call those mistakes their “style” and point to other artists making those same mistakes to normalize them. Since “style” isn’t something they think they need to improve on, they may become good artists overall while having severe, glaring holes in their skillet that any professional can see. You can sometimes even tell when someone started out because “90s anime” or “10s cartoon network” made specific stylistic choices that changed over time.

    So I think ai is going to cause similar problems. Newbies will copy what looks pretty to the untrained eye and learn an ai based style. Then when they become more popular they’ll be fed into ai as reference material and perpetuate the problem. Even worse is actual professionals may turn to ai instead of real life references or a desk mannequin. Then their skills may degrade because they rely too much on improper tools. (I’ve already seen this becoming an issue with photoshopped reference photos.)

    Anyways, that’s my $0.02




  • The two biggest contributors to the original lemmy code are pro china and pro russia respectively. No one is sure how strong their opinions are, but there is a lot of fear mongering because their PFPs on GitHub are political. They created the first instance, lemmy, and the second, lemmygrad, using the same ip address.

    Now, there’s two important things to keep in mind. Lemmygrad, which is a “tankie” (highly political) group, is set up separately from the main lemmy group. Not only does this keep lemmy from being highly political, it also allows all other groups to defederate from lemmygrad while staying connected to lemmy. Most groups have lemmygrad defederated by default.

    In my opinion, this is the right way to do things and there’s nothing to worry about. But there are some people who think that since the creators are pro china and russia that it could be an attempt to “poison the well” of federation from the beginning. It comes from a biased belief that anything to do with the red scare is bad by default. The creators are not funneling money into political campaigns. They’re not asking everyone to agree with their beliefs or pushing their opinions in non political groups. They’re not able to remove communities that disagree with their philosophies.

    Lemmy’s code is open source and it is easy for moderators to block political content if they choose. There’s going to be people with differing opinions. People who are socialist, or conservative, or anarchist are capable of creating good things. Plenty of people still buy from chick fil a or nestle even if they disagree with the group’s politics. As of now there is no issue. However, reddit refugees are currently sensitive to a) preexisting problems from reddit that could carry over into fediverse and b) leaders disagreeing with their beliefs.

    TL;DR: it’s something that could potentially be a concern in the future, but isn’t a problem right now. With new users on edge it’s likely being blown way out of proportion.



  • Absolutely! A lot of people seem to think a protest is shooting yourself in the foot and complaining about it. No, a protest is causing a ruckus so that everyone - protestors or not - get frustrated with the target of the protest. The point is to screw up search results on Google. The point is to make the “front page of the internet” an empty shell.

    I went on reddit briefly to see if anything I subscribe to is polling to extend their blackout. r/DCcomics had a poll filled to the brim with “stay open, I’m slightly inconvenienced!” comments. These guys have clearly never been a part of or needed to protest for their basic rights before.


    • I’d recommend 9 parchments if you just want to play together. My roommate’s got a play list similar to yours and he’s obsessed with it right now.
    • I’m not one for multiplayer, but if you ever do two player my favorite is wizard of legend. I usually play solo. If you play with friends it’s fun though since you can design complimenting loadouts and you get different dungeons.
    • Trine is a puzzle platformer that’s fun but can be frustrating if you’ve got a “smash everything” friend with you. It’s 3 player IIRC.