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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Replacing Biden was always a good idea, and the opposition always had the argument of “Biden is unfit for the presidency yet is still being pushed by his party, therefore the Democratic party is dumb”; but now prominent Democrats have (correctly in my opinion) called for Biden to be replaced. So there’s no going back now. If they don’t, the oppisition now has an even stronger argument: “Biden is unfit for the presidency, members of his own party have called for his replacement, yet he hasn’t been replaced, therefore the Democratic party is really dumb”.

    Finding a candidate that energizes voters and creates a big turnout is hard, but not impossible, the 2020 primaries have minted several candidates and raised their profile.

    Funnily enough, AOC turns 35 this October, she’s too young by like a few months if i get this right?





  • I feel like AI companies have been scraping Reddit for their datasets already since the beginning and without permission. In fact, unless there’s been a regulation change that i’m not aware of, i’m not sure why they would have Reddit “sign away” the data when they can just scrape it.

    Also dubious if the current form of AI has a future. They seem like they should revolutionize every sector when you look at their capacities, but in practice their applications might be more limited than we thought?

    Anyway, if Reddit does go public i will be deleting my account within the hour. The only reason i haven’t yet is that i’ve been a moderator of the same subreddit for eight years and it’s the only thing that’s been consistent in my life in that time, i’m kind of attached. The reason i will is i didn’t sign up to create value for shareholders, i signed up to create value for a community.










  • Shifting the power from a CEO to an instance admin is a massive improvement.

    One has autocratic control over the entire site, potentially hundreds of millions of users, investors breathing down their neck, server infrastructure, and other systemic pressures; meanwhile, a fediverse instance admin has autocratic control over nothing but their own instance, a few thousand users at most, with the only money and hardware involved being their own.

    The fediverse is incredibly more horizontal and decentralized than any corporate social media, the improvement is massive. And i’m a believer that vertical structures and concentrations of power are at the root of a lot of problems in society, so this is gravy to me.

    But yes, it’s worth remembering that it’s not completely decentralized, and admins still have absolute power over their instance. My Mastodon instance admin doesn’t want us to use the name GIMP to refer to the open source image manipulator; they say “gimp” is a slur aimed at disabled people, which i’ve never heard before in my life.