Honestly, I think part of it is that having an entire community of people suffering depressive symptoms becomes a depressing environment.

I’m sure I heard this in a Brene Brown video, but in order to be able to help someone else, you need to be in the right place yourself. Two empty glasses can’t help fill each other. And most people can’t help an entire community of struggling people, one glass can’t help fill fifty, it’s futile and self damaging to try. It’s why we have professionals that do one on one therapy.

And, this might be unpopular, but I think historically this is why we have priests too. I’m not religious, but I think that community offers that to some people.

Sometimes people need to vent, and some people aren’t lucky enough to be in a position where they can vent to anybody, but I don’t know if diving into a community where you expose yourself to everyone else’s problems too is the solution. Things like addictions counseling are controlled, with professionals at the helm, and often in small spaces, with a prescribed meeting time and an end.

I don’t think you need to wait years for user friendly Linux tbh! I recommend checking out Linux Mint. It’s basically designed for people used to Windows and handles the technical stuff for you.

You can do almost everything through the GUI rather than the command line, so for things like updates, it’ll show you a little notification in the corner by the clock like you’re used to, you open up the software manager, and click the update button.

And most software nowadays can either be downloaded through an app store like interface, or by downloading an executable file from a website.

And if you’ve ever used a mac, there’s a time machine equivalent built in (timeshift). So you can set up an automatic backup daily/weekly/etc and if you mess up something, in most cases you can revert back to a point when it wasn’t messed up.

I say give it a shot, you can always go back if it’s not for you! But usability has improved so much in the last few years.

Not the poster you’re replying to, but I’m assuming you’re looking for some sort of source that neural networks generate stuff, rather than plagiarize?

Google scholar is a good place to start. You’d need a general understanding of how NNs work, but it ends up leading to papers like this one, which I picked out because it has neat pictures as examples. https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02200

What this one is doing is taking an input in the form of a face, and turning it into a cartoon. They call it an emoji, cause it’s based on that style, but it’s the same principle as how AI art is generated. Learn a style, then take a prompt (image or text) and do something with the prompt in the style.

Sorry, rereading it and I think I was unclear. I’m saying that this community moved from tumblr, to twitter, and now to mastodon. I quit this community at the twitter stage when it became too detrimental to my mental health.

But this community uses moderation as one tool to enforce cliques, rather than to actually prevent abuse. Or, you could say, this community has a history of using moderation as a form of abuse.

Alongside that, this community has a history of inciting witch hunts over the most petty things. And they will be happy about what the moderators are doing within their own clique.

I remember artist tumblr in the 00’s. Participated, then moved over to twitter in the 10’s before I got sick of it. This looks like another continuation of that same community.

They can do what they like, but this reeks of the exact same kind of drama and mobs that, for example, drives fanartists to attempting suicide because they painted a character’s skin a shade too light. (Zamii070, if you’re curious.)

These sorts of communities form an echo chamber that, frankly, can be absolutely horrible for kids. Yeah, they can do what they want in their house, but I’m staying far the fuck away.

Over the last five years, I’d click a link to Stack Overflow while googling, but I’ve never made an account because of the toxicity.

But yeah, chatGPT is definitely the nail in the coffin. Being able to give it my code and ask it to point out where the annoying bug is… is amazing.