True… I suppose. Fortunately there are instances that have downvotes disabled. In the settings of your account you can also hide downvotes.

I prefer Slashdot style mod points to upvotes/downvotes as there is an opportunity cost to voting. I find it fosters more interesting and less echo-chambery discussions.

I got no clue what “Slashdot” is. Wikipedia says:

Slashdot (sometimes abbreviated as /.) is a social news website that originally billed itself as “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters”. It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section where users can add online comments.

It doesn’t really explain how the voting system works there. Mind to explain it?

No that’s a horrible idea. It should be up to the Admins and Mods to decide what speech is allowed in their instances and communities. Making downvotes have a negative effect would only encourage bad actors to create accounts solely to downvote people, which will in turn create a black market of buying downvotes, to censor post you don’t like, and upvotes, to up censor votes you like.

This agricultural industry around farming accounts to downvote would overwhelm the Admins with account applications. People could also create instances for se sole purpose of making downvoting bot accounts. You might say those instances could be blocked. True, they would. But this could go from bad to worse considering that this could open the door to instance Admins themselves doing downvote based censorship, since they can create has many accounts as they want.

Also, I fell like this is relevant:

The whole point of the Fediverse is since we all want different things from our social media and people will always disagree on something, it is better to have different independent instances, which federate and defederate to create a nice environment for all. People who disagree on something (like whether nsfw content or curse words should be allowed) so much to the point of ruining their experience, they can just go to instances where that content is blocked, instead of spending an eternity arguing over it. This allows for diversity of thought and opinion over the whole system.

I had no idea u/UniversalMonk@lemm.ee even existed lol. Congratulations u/SelfProgrammed@lemmy.today, you just advertised this guy’s account to who knows how many people.

What? The only thing stopping the oligarch from buying an army and enslaving everyone who can’t fight back is the fact that the government has a bigger army to stop them before they have time to even think about it. Monopolies of violence. It’s not that hard to figure this out.

The only reason why “ownership” even exists is because the government’s army serves as a threat to anyone who even thinks about disrespecting it. Without is, nothing is stopping someone who can exert more violence than you from stealing everything you thought you owned.

Well, it was only a matter of time till the bot got to me!

Funny you put quotes on the word liberal. You know words have meanings and definitions right? I know many people don’t bother to check a term’s meaning and end up miss using it, but that does not detract from the fact that the word still has meaning.

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

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually warring views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Note that liberalism defends the right to private property (AKA Capitalism). (Also, private property and personal property are two different things.)

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

On authority, by Frederick Engels 1872

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

Interested in astronomy you say? Well mander.xyz describe themselves as a “An instance dedicated to nature and science.”. They have a astronomy community with, some activity - !astronomy@mander.xyz. I’m not on mander so I don’t know how things are there, but I pretty much don’t ever see anyone complaining about it.

feddit.uk is a UK instance. So there might be some interesting things there for you.

lemmy.ee is known for not defederating unless absolutely necessary.

On the topic of defederating, lemmy.world is somewhat disliked due to their defederation happy tendencies. For the most part, though, this whole instance wars thing is mostly due to disagreements on what kind of political discourse should be allowed. Instances like lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net and lemmy.ml are a bit too left-wing for many people from the center-right to handle: the world views are just too different.

I could rant about the dam instance wars, but it is not what you came were for.

wtf did I just read?

AIs don’t summarize, they just shorten text.

AI art being inherently “plagiarising”

Yes it is, simply due to the nature of the “training”/“learning” process, which is learning in name alone. If you know how this mathematical process works you know the machine’s definition of success is how well it’s output matches the data it was trained with. The machine is effectively trying to encrypt it’s data base on it’s nodes. I would recommend you inform yourself on how the “training” process actually works, down to the mathematical level.

AI using as much energy’s crypto , the AI = crypto mindset in general

AI is often push by the same people who pushed NFTs and whatnot, so this is somewhat understandable. And yes, AI consumes a lot of energy and water. Maybe not as much as crypto, but still, not something we can afford to use for mindless entertainment in our current climate catastrophe.

AI art “having no soul”

Yup. AI “art” works by finding pixel patterns that repeat with a given token. Due to it’s nature, it can only repeat patterns which it identified in it’s training data. Now, we have all heard of the saying “An image in worth a thousand words”. This saying is quite the understatement. For one to describe an image down to the last detail, such detail that someone who never saw the image could perfectly replicate it, one how need more than a thousand words, as evidenced by computer image files, since these are basically what was just described. The training data never has enough detail to describe the whole image in such detail and therefore it is incapable of doing anything too specific.

Art is very personal, the more of yourself you put into a piece, the more unique and “soulful” it will be. The more of the work you delegate to the machine, the less of yourself you can put into the piece, and if 100% of the image generation was made by the machine, which is in turn simply calculating an average image that matches the prompt, then nothing of you is in the piece. It is nothing more than the maths that created it.

Simple text descriptions do not give the human meaningful control over the final piece, and that is why pretty much any artist worth their tittle is not using it.

Also, the irony that we are automating the arts, something which people enjoy doing, instead of the soul degrading jobs nobody wants to do, should not be lost on us.

“Peops use AI to do «BAD THING» , therefour AI ISZ THE DEVILLLL ‼‼‼”

It is true that AI is being used in horrible was that will take sometime to adapt, it is simply that the negative usages of AI have more visibility than the positive usages. As a matter of fact, this node network technology was already in use in many fields before the Chat-GPT induced AI hype train.

can’t trust anti AI peops to actually criticise the tech

Correct. It is well known that those who stem to financially benefit from the success of AI are more than willing to lie about it’s true capabilities.

veeeeery powerful tool for self-education

You know these are pattern recognition machines, right? And not an actually reliable source of information, right? These are hallucination machine which sometimes gets right simply by virtue of such truthful statements being repeated often enough in the data for the machine to pick it up. It can give contradicting answers depending on what keywords you use. As such it is of little education value.

If anything, it makes self-education harder, as search results will be filled with perfectly SEOed LLM article with no quality standards and complete disregard for the truthfulness of the text written, poisoning the well of knowledge the internet was supposed to be. And as a bit of irony, these poor quality pattern-based texts will later be used in future machine learning databases, thus lowering the quality of said data, causing the machine’s own decay.

AI just screams “lazy” and “lack of care”. If they don’t care that every article they put out has a completely unnecessary AI image in it, what guarantee do I have they care about any of the content on their website?

If they can’t afford an image then it’s better to have none than to give money to a company that will DDOS their servers with web-scrappers.

In my eyes, AI = Complete disregard for quality control.

We should probably still allow links to archives/alternative front ends because screenshots of content can be forged. But yeah we should not give those sites more traffic and only link to archives/alternative front ends if necessary.

Yup. Its seems like it.

Funny how any mention of it being a paid service is only at the bottom of the page.

Does anyone know of any alternatives?

Yup. These “AI” machines are not much more than glorified pattern recognition software. They are hallucination machines that sometimes get things right by accident.

Comparing them to .tar or .zip files is an interesting way of thinking about how the “training process” is nothing more than adjusting the machine sot that it copies the training data (backwards propagation). Since training works is such a way that the machine’s definition of success is how well if copies the training data:

• If the output is similar to the training data, then it is a success
• If the output is different for the training data, it is a failure

Why am I not surprised? People who know nothing about these things think we just created a brain simulation: they think it’s magic! While those who are tech-savvy know just what these things can and can’t do and know just how unreliable they can be.

Yes… we should probably ban Xitter links… but maybe allow other front ends? You know, because screenshots can be forged.

Why don’t you asked them yourself? !askchapo@hexbear.net

Probably a bad idea to ask about a Marxist instance on a .world community, since .world is known to be quite biased against Marxism.

Sorry! I added it now.