Yes, the cheapest ones might have some risks, I mostly presented it as an example of what the opposite extremity looks like. There is a lot in-between, something a bit more expensive is even more guaranteed win. For example last time I used Hetzner, I had a server with 64gb RAM, 2TB SSD, and 16 cores Ryzen for something like €34/month. Hetzner support is very decent and they’re very well known, have decent reputation and been providing their services for a long time.

I’m talking about 3d software one, and author obviously talks about that one too.

Maybe the problem is that they are using ridiculously overpriced enterprise services like AWS or Azure, which provide their own solutions for a lot of common things like backups, replicas, logging, etc, but cost 100x more than what you can get with DIY on some cheap VPS if you’re fine with spending 1.25x more time.

Also, given that the instance is called “infosec.exchange”, you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.

Why not, though.

I wonder why it needs so much money for infra? Last time I rented a VPS it was €7/month for 8 Core Xeon E5 V4, 12 GB DDR4 RAM, 150 GB SSD/NVME, Unlimited Traffic, 1 Gbps Port.

If Blender had a patreon or coffee or kofi, I would happily subscribe to something like $3/month. I know artists that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers and their minimal plan is $3. Blender could achieve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers eventually imo. To make things interesting, they could release prebuilt binaries of some subprojects like NPR fork, only to subscribers, also they could do partnership and paid plugin giveaways every month to subscribers. It just needs a bit of dedicated SMM work. One-time donations just don’t hit the same. I do those maybe once a year or two, and don’t do another one until I get the feeling “it’s been a while”.

we’ll just pay artists to produce training data en masse’.

If they want to make sure it was actually drawn specifically for them and not generated by other AI or stolen from internet, they’ll need to ask timeline of work. And people doing commissions like this with also timeline provided will ask considerable payment. The smallest I’d expect is like maybe 30$ per small drawing of beginners. But it might as well be 300$ or more per drawing for pro works. Even with 30$, are they really able to pay that? How many drawings they need? Can they spend millions on this?

Maybe it’s just your subscriptions? I don’t feel the same way. Just curate your list more actively and make sure to browse communities from global pool of instances.

My first guess with this would be: they were read-only, then they wanted to post something or write a reply to someone and at the time considered it to be a one-time thing and created sort of “throwaway account” for that specifically, but then they kept visiting the place and it kind of just stick with them. Yet again, my guess might be completely wrong. But at least this is one of the possible motivations behind such accounts.

That looks like the perfect outfit for a stroll to the Totem of Earth!

Some benefits of federation for a system like this is possibility of integrated-into-one-system project comments, friends/subscriptions and user/project search/discovery (also by tags).

What I personally miss in every single one of recommendations in this thread is: they’re all timeline-based, without a good way to showcase and arrange content. When I want to showcase my projects (be it code or art), I’d want them to be structured in arbitrary ways on my profile that make most sense at the moment, and I’d want to be able to rearrange them at any moment. ArtStation gets this right, Github also to some extent - they have pinned projects on your profile that you can showcase and rearrange.

So Medium and Substack are similar? And Ghost is also an open-source alternative to Medium as much as it is alternative to Substack?

Never used Substack, can someone please explain how this is different from lets say Medium?

I had this feeling half a year ago, that’s when I moved to Lemmy. Still have accounts everywhere, just trying to keep them read-only.

Nothing? In practice, if this were to happen on a noticeable scale it would mean Lemmy has gone mainstream. That said, within a federated system, it’s entirely possible to create isolated, defederated webrings - for example, networks consisting solely of invite-based instances. If something like this becomes a necessity, it might lead to formation of multiple such webrings and they might even decide to federate with each other someday.

From what I know this is called dyskinesia and wiki article has some possible causes listed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyskinesia

I’ve seen some medication list this as possible side-effect. Don’t know anything else about it.

Interesting. I immediately see first two replies as LLM, third sound like a generic pre-LLM bot autopost, the last one sounds kinda legit. Because it’s so short and forward, it’s really hard for me to see LLM behind it. I don’t know what they’re talking about though, maybe it’s easier to spot the bot from semantics POV.

With technology like this, it’s only a matter of time before big players start using it all over the internet, whether for commerce, propaganda, or pushing their agenda. So it’s interesting to observe an amateur trying it right now and sharing their findings. If anything, it might give us a glimpse of what the future holds.

Do you generate replies in a custom way every time, adjusting the prompt and supervising the result, or do you have fully-automatic system? If you do use any sort of manual intervention on per post basis, whatever you’re doing is not going to work as a bot.

With human post-processing it’s definitely more complicated. Bots usually post fully automatic content, without human supervision and editing.