And also without Erica. The real question is, who is she? Where is she? These are the answers we should all be demanding.

Either all of these people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what our currently accepted “AI” is, or I do. Or this is all just astroturfing by e.g. Agentic to make people think their shit is much more advanced than it is. I don’t even…

“People demanding that AIs have rights would be a huge mistake,” said Bengio.

Who is doing this? Until this article I have never seen a single example of this.

Guarantee you that if this ends up becoming a widespread thing, insurance companies will lobby hard to be the ones to help “calibrate” the AI.

The problem isn’t content, it’s engagement on the content. Folks complain that niche communities have no engagement, just a bunch of posts by a single person… but it feels like 95% of the time, if I comment on those posts, there’s no reply, not even from the OP, and that discourages further posting.

If you’re willing to engage on everything you post, I don’t see the harm in it, but at that point, why even use a bot? Why not just find content you like (or have the bot notify you of content), then post it yourself as an actual human?

Even if ads were a thing, they would be instance specific, unless they just took the form of posts advertising things (much like Reddit has) which personally I find to be toxic as hell. How would that money make it to content creators?

Personally, I’d prefer to read posts from people who want to post them because they have something interesting to share or something they want to discuss, rather than people who are trying to maximize engagement because engagement = income. There’s plenty of other places to go if you want to be fed that kind of content.

I think the sweet spot was 20-25 years ago when we had special interest forums with tight-knit communities around specific topics. It would be nice to get more engagement on Lemmy in niche communities, but I’d argue the way to achieve that is to go to other places where that content is posted, and share links to content on Lemmy, as a way to spread the word. Part of the problem there though is recognition, and if people see links to 20 different lemmy instances, they won’t associate those with lemmy as a whole, they’ll see it as all disparate things, and I’m not really sure how to solve that.

I can imagine that the Fediverse could develop remuneration models that are much fairer and more sustainable

What do you even imagine that would look like, without degrading the experience for everyone else? Not throwing shade, just curious what you’re thinking of. Like, who is hypothetically paying in these scenarios, and where is the money coming from? I think everyone would agree that if it’s coming from ads or anything similar, nobody is interested.

The best feature of Lemmy is that it isn’t as big as e.g. Reddit. I much prefer the size we have now to some big mega-site. Yes, there’s less content. Who cares? None of us need a constant stream of new content 24/7. It’s OK if you’ve viewed everything on your feed. It’s more reminiscent of forums from the late 90s / early 2000s, especially in the more mid-sized communities. I like that.

Do you know something about these particular pastors that the article doesn’t mention, or are you just generally hostile towards people who choose to follow a religion?

I had a horrible Amazon experience 3 or 4 years ago and haven’t shopped there since, so I’m probably remembering the time when it did work.

Closest thing you’ll find is likely to be prediction markets, but “whether it rains tomorrow” isn’t something that would be available unless it’s in the form of “Will X event be rescheduled due to rain?” or similar more boolean things.

Love the idea in concept. One major issue is the shipping. A major benefit of Amazon is just being able to add 20 things to your cart and get them all in like 1-2 boxes. In this hypothetical scenario, you’d presumably still have to handle checkout through each individual store, and if you ordered 20 things, you’d be placing up to 20 individual orders, each with their own shipping costs.

This becomes more problematic when maybe multiple stores you’re buying from sell multiple things on your list… ideal case would be to buy as many things from one store as possible, to consolidate shipping, but what if their prices for the individual items vary? Now you’ve got to search each individual storefront for each item and calculate the difference in cost. (This store sells item A for $2 cheaper but shipping is $3.50, is there another item I can add in to save shipping? They sell item B for $0.50 more, but I might save on shipping costs…)

Technically this is no worse than it is now if you’re shopping from a variety of stores rather than one megastore, but it would be a large barrier to adoption if you’re trying to capture some of the “fed up with Amazon but still like the convenience” crowd.

He’s even doing everything he can to actively kill clean energy initiatives to increase the dependence on it. He seriously cannot die soon enough.

He might have felt pressure to keep up with your dad due to just meeting them / wanting to make a good impression, and not realized how drunk he was getting. Doesn’t excuse his actions in the least, but might help contextualize them… given it doesn’t sound like this is something he would normally do.

Oh, see, that’s your problem. You’re supposed to put beans, rice, meat, cheese, lettuce, guac and whatever else you prefer inside those the taco shells or tortillas, not tasteless mush. I’m glad we got to the root of the issue.

Well, you’re entitled to your opinion, I suppose, even if it’s wrong.

This is a great suggestion. PS2 had some great games, the graphics were good enough that, while they obviously look dated today, it’s not difficult to play, and it’s still recent enough that the hardware is affordable.

You’re distributing copyrighted material so the short answer is “Yes”, but the longer answer is “Probably, but it really depends on a lot of factors that you haven’t disclosed, like your location. It could certainly get you in trouble with MEGA regardless; whether it will get you in trouble with the law comes in large part down to the laws governing wherever you live.”

The chances of anything coming of it are another matter entirely and you may consider it worth the risk if you feel that chance is low enough.

Spoiling your ballot is still a choice that makes a statement and sends a message without giving a vote to anyone, for what it’s worth.