chicken
@chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Lemmy feels less anonymous than Reddit, because there are less users and its easier to be remembered. Similar to a small town where everyone knows each other. 2 days ago:
You may not have been anonymous to the people in your immediate community, but you were largely anonymous to the people outside of it, which is something that has been systematically dismantled in various ways through history. Even things as basic as last names are there to make you visible to outsiders.
From Seeing Like a State, p59:
The invention of permanent, inherited patronyms was, after the administrative simplification of nature (for example, the forest) and space (for example, land tenure), the last step in establishing the necessary preconditions of modern statecraft. In almost every case it was a state project, designed to allow officials to identify, unambiguously, the majority of its citizens. When successful, it went far to create a legible people. 38 Tax and tithe rolls, property rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual’s identity and linking him or her to a kin group. Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing.
IMO the felt anonymity of Reddit, that comes from the fact that hardly anyone cares to remember your username and you don’t directly experience scrutiny, isn’t that useful. What really matters is the potential for someone to look over everything you’ve written (and if they have administrator access, connect that to IP, email, browser fingerprint etc.), and use that information for their own purposes, regardless of their having any connection to or legitimate personal interest in you. In that respect, Lemmy isn’t much better (it kind of can’t be when the premise is publicly posting writing to the internet), but it isn’t worse either.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 days ago:
It’s really hard, I tried for a while and gave up. Way too many things to pay attention to and get right at once, while doing something dangerous.
- Comment on YSK You don't need Teflon pans for nonstick 2 days ago:
Don’t properly nonstick pans mostly not use teflon anymore anyway?
- Comment on AI use damages professional reputation, study suggests 4 days ago:
The final experiment revealed that perceptions of laziness directly explain this evaluation penalty. The researchers found this penalty could be offset when AI was clearly useful for the assigned task. When using AI made sense for the job, the negative perceptions diminished significantly.
Yeah I was gonna say, seems like the kind of thing that would depend a lot on what it is being used for and how.
- Comment on [NEWS] Mangadex hit by massive DMCA takedown, 700+ series gone 4 days ago:
Are these even available on torrents?
- Comment on New York Bitcoin Miners Are Buying Up Power Plants—and Communities Are Fighting Back 1 week ago:
Besides the climate implications, this highlights the centralization risks in Proof of Work mining; the only way to mine Bitcoin profitably is if you have some kind of privileged access to electricity with effectively low ongoing cost, and that access is gated by government regulation.
- Comment on Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI 1 week ago:
What’s basically being said is, making an AI powered software local-only doesn’t make a difference and doesn’t matter. But that’s not true, and the arguments for that don’t seem coherent.
- Comment on Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI 1 week ago:
But the company hasn’t collected it, because it doesn’t have it. Your computer has it. So long as it stays on your computer, it cannot harm your privacy. That’s why there is such a big difference here; an actual massive loss of privacy, vs a potential risk of loss of privacy.
- Comment on Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI 1 week ago:
Software that is designed not to send your data over the internet doesn’t collect your data. That’s what local-only means. If it does send your data over the internet, then it isn’t local-only. How is it still happening?
- Comment on Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI 1 week ago:
So you don’t think collection of user data is a meaningful privacy problem here? How does that work?
- Comment on Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI 1 week ago:
Even with Recall, a hypothetical non-local equivalent would be significantly worse. Whether Microsoft actually has your data or not obviously matters. Most conceivable software that uses local AI wouldn’t need any kind of profile building anyway, for instance that Firefox translation feature.
The thing that’s frustrating to me here is the lack of acknowledgement that the main privacy problem with AI services is sending all queries to some company’s server where they can do whatever they want with them.
- Comment on Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI 1 week ago:
I don’t see how the possibility it’s connected to some software system for profile building, is a reason to not care whether a language model is local only. The way things are worded here make it sound like this is just an intrinsic part of how LLMs work, but it just isn’t.
- Comment on Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI 1 week ago:
The use of local AI does not imply doing that, especially not the centralizing part.
- Comment on Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI 1 week ago:
I don’t care if your language model is “local-only” and runs on the user’s device. If it can build a profile of the user (regardless of accuracy) through their smartphone usage, that can and will be used against people.
I don’t know if I’m understanding this argument right, but the idea that integrating locally run AI is inherently privacy destroying in the same way as live service AI doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
For that you would have to completely change how currency is issued and managed. Money is created by being borrowed directly or indirectly from the central bank, and the reason it is possible for those loans to later be repaid is because even more money is loaned out later, so it’s not going to be a game of musical chairs where there isn’t enough money going around to pay them all back, they keep bringing in more chairs. There is always an increasing amount of money in the system, and they make it that way on purpose to keep things running the way they want them to.
Personally what I hate about this setup is, a person who meets the requirements to obtain a business loan can now take this money that was created out of thin air, use it to coerce labor out of people who have no way to get money other than working, and keep the profits. What if our lives would all be better off working a bit less? Too bad, that decision isn’t up to us, how much we must work is indirectly decided by monetary policy, which the average person realistically has zero influence over, and the goal is a high level of “economic activity”, ie. as many people as possible subject to financial coercion.
- Comment on Game design question : how to make a "trapped" player character? 2 weeks ago:
Here’s an idea: gameplay sort of like Goblin Cleanup, you have various chores you have to do cleaning and arranging the various levels of the tower at night while the dragon is home, and your work has to pass an inspection. Then during the day you are locked in your room, and have some ability to watch a prospective rescuer attempt the dungeon crawl without your direct input. But you can strategically place items, enemy spawns, and Dark Souls style hints to try to tip the scales. So kind of like a tower defense in reverse where you are trying to lose.
- Comment on Fediverse Corporate Sabotage 2 weeks ago:
Complex requirements for social media websites to verify the identity of users, respond to spurious automated takedown requests, provide authorities with backdoors, etc. I think instead of explicit bans, it’s more likely they pass a regulations that are made for large websites with lawyers and algorithmic moderation, which are in practice not something fediverse instance operators can safely deal with and go against the basic values of the open internet.
- Comment on Mistakes were made 3 weeks ago:
Eye infection time
- Comment on 4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere 3 weeks ago:
If that was the case he could have deleted /pol/ and banned its users. 2016 would have been a great time for that.
- Comment on As literally everything gets more and more expensive, Everspace 2's devs say screw it, let's make our upcoming DLC cheaper 4 weeks ago:
That’s not even necessarily them being nice, if your audience can suddenly afford less, that changes what the optimal price would be for maximizing sales * price. The cost of producing an electronic copy of a DLC is zero.
- Comment on The Social Network That Can't Sell Out: Understanding Mastodon vs. Bluesky 4 weeks ago:
Open source code doesn’t mean open API though. Bluesky seems to have made a whole thing out of their technical architecture, and I get the arguments that it’s centralized in practice, but wouldn’t it mean basically scrapping the whole thing to lock down third party clients? Even if that didn’t mean anything I think multiclients could be a good idea anyway, if people were using those and there was a Reddit situation, some portion of users would want to stay with the same clients rather than using whatever proprietary app they try to push.
- Comment on AI is like an evil villain's henchman: "Yes sir, you're absolutely right, sir." "Great idea master!" "My apologies master, I should have known what you meant from the start. Forgive me master.” 4 weeks ago:
Fair, I use Open WebUI + Ollama personally but it’s slightly tricky to set up, wasn’t aware there were open source options with a built in model browser and hardware compatibility estimates
- Comment on PSA: I want a law for PC games to be offered in physical versions again 4 weeks ago:
If we’re wishing for things that probably won’t happen, how about a government agency for game preservation? Source code gets submitted before release, approval for sale is conditional on them being able to successfully build and deploy it. Then 20 years later it gets automatically published to the public domain. That way even online only games will end up being preserved.
- Comment on Is 4chan dead forever? Where are the refugees going? 4 weeks ago:
One possible reason I’ve read is that the people moderating it have had their identities leaked, so imagine being the person responsible for banning 4chan users and now also they know who you are, seems like a very unappealing thing to volunteer for.
- Comment on The Social Network That Can't Sell Out: Understanding Mastodon vs. Bluesky 4 weeks ago:
I don’t use these so maybe I’m missing something, but why would you have to choose? Bluesky is centralized but it seems like its design is committed enough to open technology that it would take them a long time to walk it back, and in the meantime there shouldn’t be barriers to using unified clients that put content from both in the same interface, and possibly override any opinionated content algorithm from the company (not sure if that’s feasible or not).
- Comment on AI is like an evil villain's henchman: "Yes sir, you're absolutely right, sir." "Great idea master!" "My apologies master, I should have known what you meant from the start. Forgive me master.” 4 weeks ago:
LM Studio is probably the easiest way
- Comment on U.S. Added to Global Human Rights Watchlist Over Declining Civil Liberties 4 weeks ago:
CIVICUS outlines the state of civil rights through five categories—open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed, and closed. “Open” is the highest ranking, meaning all people are able to practice liberties such as free speech, and the lowest is “closed.”
The U.S. has been classified as “narrowed.”
So, we used to have a 5 star rating, but have been demoted to 4 stars
- Comment on Determining the reason no one replied to your Lemmy post. 5 weeks ago:
Any details you could share about how you obtained and processed the data, it seems like there’s a lot of interesting things that could be done with this but I’m not sure where the best place to start would be
- Comment on 'There Are So Few Of Us Left': Even Full-Time Games Journalists At Big Websites Are Feeling It In 2025 5 weeks ago:
These explanations make sense to me, but they seem to conflict a little with what’s being said in the post, where it’s implied that game journalism sites get a decent amount of traffic but it isn’t worth as much because advertising as a whole is collapsing somehow:
It doesn’t matter how many millions, or even tens of millions of people are reading a website if the means of financially supporting that writing are evaporating.
- Comment on 'There Are So Few Of Us Left': Even Full-Time Games Journalists At Big Websites Are Feeling It In 2025 5 weeks ago: