Perhaps “we” (users in general) could be a bit more strategic with this. Reddit admins have a noticeable disdain for the smaller subs there, and yet they are [were?] what shaped Reddit the most, and made it fun. They are bound to have some grievances with Reddit; and even if the Fediverse is rather small, here they’d have some room for growth that they wouldn’t with the competition of larger subs.

Mods had power because they were united and reddit couldn’t replace all of them at once. Instead, they picked them off one by one.

My guess is that they decided that the little fictitious power that they had over their communities was worth dealing with an obnoxious administration, that outright belittles them as “landed gentry”. As such, they never actually planned any sort of migration out of Reddit, and instead rationalised their decision to stay there as “we’re thinking on the users”.

Friendly reminder for everyone here - not just the poster above - that the topic of this community is Reddit. There’s lots of leeway for off-topic, but this sort of discussion about instances and geopolitics is bound to create unnecessary conflict here.

kbin.social could be an option, and thankfully I have an account there. I’m not doing it by votes but by the overall “feel” of the community.

Note that I’m happy moderating a community about Reddit (even if myself don’t give a damn about it any more), as long as people retrieve some value from it, and I can do so from a good instance.

Thank you. I’ll consider it.

Do you have other accounts with more activity, specially in this community?

If I close down this comm, I’ll do it as you said - disable posting, but keep the content here. One of the roles of this comm was to document the downfall of Reddit, so it doesn’t make sense to delete it.

Without going too much into details: I strongly disagree with a few recent decisions of the instance admins, regarding another instance and a community within lemmy.ml, to the point that I feel uncomfortable moderating a community here. As such I’m asking the community here for a few options, on what you guys think that I should do with our comm - get new mods, migrate the comm, close it down, something else?

I wish that I could be more explicit on this, but talking about the issue in the open might lead to administrative actions, dunno.

Why?

Theoretically for the meat, sold mostly in Brazil, Uruguay, and Latin Europe*, at a comparatively low price for seafood. In practice for the fins, sold mostly in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and China.

What makes it worse is that Brazilian norms are notoriously sloppy on what you can sell as “cação” (shark or ray meat), including 40 species, quite a few of them vulnerable, and a lot of times the person buying it has no way to know. And if you tell people “only buy cação if the species is listed, otherwise you might be eating a threatened species”, they’ll usually whine and tell you the equivalent of “I dun unrurrstand, y buy dat one? Dis one is cheaper lol lmao”.

*the link is in Portuguese but I can translate it if anyone so desires.

It’s hard for Google to claim that they’re focusing resources (e.g. dev time), given the list of features being removed. As one of the HN comments said, quite a few of them “seem to fall under the umbrella of “features that actually make the assistant an assistant”/connecting the assistant to other apps”. In other words, integration - that’s core functionality for an assistant and they likely know it.

Yup. Google consistently gets rid of features or services that it deems unprofitable. And that’s fine, really - as long as you don’t pretend that you’re doing it for the users.

To be fair in modern phones there are some features that if removed would make the user experience better.

I hear ya - for example, the SIM toolkit being able to send you pop-ups (phone providers use that to spam the users).

We’re removing some underutilized features in Google Assistant to focus on delivering the best possible user experience.

Is this the non sequitur used nowadays to explain removal of features? “We’re removing it to give you a better experience”??? That’s bloody hilarious.

Be honest at least dammit. If you don’t want to maintain a feature, because it’s against your best interests, say so. Users are not stupid, and should not be implied to be stupid with this idiotic “it’s for you lol” discourse.

(I don’t even use Botnet Assistant.)

When I saw this in some mander comm I immediately thought “yeah… it goes into Linguistics humour, folks there will enjoy it”.

The settlement is right at the border of what would be controlled by the Inca government, two millenniums later. It shows that there’s some decent access to the region from the west than you’d be led to believe, with the Andes in the way.

As such, if they find other cities further east, I’m predicting that, culturally speaking, they’ll resemble nothing this one; even if they happen to be roughly the same size.

People ate maize and sweet potato, and probably drank “chicha”, a type of sweet beer.

“If you don’t have chicha, any small thing will do.” (reference to a certain song)

Serious now. Potentially yucca too - it grows right next door, and if they got maize from North America then they likely traded for crops.

Relevant detail: Ottoman Turkish ⟨فستق‎⟩ fıstık borrowed it from Arabic ⟨فُسْتُق‎⟩ fustuq, that borrowed it from Middle Persian - the same variety as Greek and then Latin did. So odds are that the f-variation was caused by Arabic rendering a foreign [p] as [f], and probably predates Persian itself internally undergoing a p→f shift. Source.

Definitive proof of a Catalan vs. Daco-Romance link! /s

Sorry for the question, but where are you from? I learned this with my mother, so I don’t know if it’s something common here (Brazil) or something that she picked from her Polish or Italian relatives.

4chan was always called the asshole of the internet, but it’s more like the mouth of an extremely drunk internet ready to vomit on you.

I agree too much with the text to comment anything meaningful about it. So let’s see the comments…

One aspect of the spread of LLMs is that we have lost a useful heuristic. Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts. […]

Although I agree with the title, I also don’t think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. Articles written by interns or Indian virtual assistants about generic topics are pretty much as bad as most AI generated material […]

Both comments reminded me a blogpost that I wrote more than a year ago, regarding chatGPT-3. It still applies rather well to 2024 LLMs, and it shows what those two tech bros are missing, so I’ll copypaste it here.

###The problem with GPT3.

Consider the following two examples.

Example A.

GPT3 bots trained on the arsehole of the internet (Reddit), chatting among themselves:

1. LPT: When you’re planning your next vacation, be sure to consider the cost of airfare and hotels. You may not have the money to go on a luxury trip, but at least you won’t have to worry about the economy when you leave! // You’re worth it!
2. (to #1) This is great advice! I definitely need to start considering the cost of airfare and hotels when planning my next vacation. Thank you for the tips!
3. (to #2) I completely agree! When I’m planning my next vacation, my number one priority is to make sure that it’s worth the cost. Thanks for the advice!
4. (to #2) Keep up the great work!

The grammar is fine, and yet those messages don’t say jack shit.

• #1 - the so-called “life pro tip” is fairly obvious, since people are aware that airfare and hotels cost quite a bit. It is not informing the reader about something potentially missed.
• #1 - “You may not have the money to go on a luxury trip” is extraneous, no matter how you interpret it, as it’s directed towards people who won’t fly and spend time in hotels.
• #1 - How the hell are you expected to worry less or more about the economy, depending on how you plan your vacations?
• #1 - you’re worth… what? The vacations? Not worrying about the economy? Something else?
• #2 - needlessly repeating a huge chunk of #1.
• #3 and #4 - it’s clear that #1 and #2 are different participants, #2 provided nothing worth thanking, and yet it’s still being thanked. Why?

Example B.

Human translation made by someone with not-so-good grasp of the target language.

Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.

The grammar is so broken that this excerpt became a meme. And yet you can still retrieve meaning from it:

• Captain, Mechanic and Operator are the crew of a ship
• Captain asks for info
• Someone is trying to kill them with a bomb
• Operator and Mechanic inform Captain on what happens
• CATS sarcastically greets the crew, and provides them info to make them feel hopeless
• Captain expresses distress towards CATS

What’s the difference? It’s purpose. In (B) we can give each utterance a purpose, even if the characters are fictional - because they were written by a human being. However, we cannot do the same in (A), because the current AI-generated text does not model that purpose.

And yes, assigning purpose to your utterances is part of the language. Not just what tech bros are able to see, namely: syntax, morphology, and spelling.