I’m not the above poster, but I really appreciate your argument. I think many people overcorrect in their minds about whether or not these models learn the way we do, and they miss the fact that they do behave very similarly to parts of our own systems. I’ve generally found that that overcorrection leads to bad arguments about copyright violation and ethical concerns.

However, your point is very interesting (and it is thankfully independent of that overcorrection). We’ve never had to worry about nonhuman personhood in any amount of seriousness in the past, so it’s strangely not obvious despite how obvious it should be: it’s okay to treat real people as special, even in the face of the arguable personhood of a sufficiently advanced machine. One good reason the machine can be treated differently is because we made it for us, like everything else we make.

I think there still is one related but dangling ethical question. What about machines that are made for us but we decide for whatever reason that they are equivalent in sentience and consciousness to humans?

A human has rights and can take what they’ve learned and make works inspired by it for money, or for someone else to make money through them. They are well within their rights to do so. A machine that we’ve decided is equivalent in sentience to a human, though… can that nonhuman person go take what it’s learned and make works inspired by it so that another person can make money through them?

If they SHOULDN’T be allowed to do that, then it’s notable that this scenario is only separated from what we have now by a gap in technology.

If they SHOULD be allowed to do that (which we could make a good argument for, since we’ve agreed that it is a sentient being) then the technology gap is again notable.

I don’t think the size of the technology gap actually matters here, logically; I think you can hand-wave it away pretty easily and apply it to our current situation rather than a future one. My guess, though, is that the size of the gap is of intuitive importance to anyone thinking about it (I’m no different) and most people would answer one way or the other depending on how big they perceive the technology gap to be.

4K HDR

Normally I use kdenlive to edit video, which supports 4K AFAIK, but although that doesn’t support HDR it looks like DaVinci Resolve supports both.

Taxes

That’s surprising. Turbotax and Quickbooks have online options, and there are a few native apps like GnuCash, but I haven’t used them—TurboTax works for me.

GarageBand

Yeah that’s too bad. I hear good things about Ardour, though. Also, bandlab if you’re okay with a webapp.

Netflix

I only stream on an actual TV, not my computer, so I haven’t done this in a while, but I thought you could do this in Firefox with DRM enabled? If not, seems like there are addons which enable it. Might be outdated knowledge.

vector illustration

Fun is hard to come by

git client

Git clients all suck for me, CLI is the way to go. However, my co-workers that use git clients all use GitKraken (on macOS) and that is available on Linux, too.

screen recording was also painful

Won’t argue with you there. Don’t know why it doesn’t have first-class support in many distros. I hear OBS Studio works well for this if you want to do anything fancy with the recording, otherwise there are plenty of apps for this (Kazam might be a simpler choice).

barely meets my use cases

I think really (considering the above) your main issue is that you just have some strong software preferences. There are certainly ways to meet most if not all of the use cases you listed. It requires a big change in workflow, though.

For what it’s worth, I find that most of the issues with software alternatives in Linux is that everyone often recommends free/GPL replacements, which are invariably worse than the commercial/non-free software the user is used to. But there is paid software in Linux land, too, remember. In my case, I have often found that if I can pay for the software it will be better, and if there’s a webapp version of something non-free it will often be better than the native FOSS alternative. There are many notable exceptions to that rule, but money does solve the occasional headache.

The tea was then sold at a price of 2/- per pound, undercutting the price of smuggled Dutch tea, then priced at 2/1 per pound. This is secondary to the fact that the tea still was taxed at -/3 per pound, meaning the price was really 1/9 plus thruppence tax

Ahhh, it all makes sense now

worst fucking timeline

Again, your numbers are completely and totally wrong to begin with, proved by the very article you replied to—I’m just ALSO saying that even using your wildly incorrect numbers you’re still wrong in yet another way

Not only does the article you replied to show that your numbers are completely wrong, but your comment isn’t even internally consistent… 462,657 is like 3% of 16.2 million, not less than 1%. What are you smoking?

Kind of, in that embedding anything from a site you can’t trust is inherently risky, but I’d say it’s not actually that bad, for two reasons:

1. iframes are much better sandboxed than they once were, and are much safer now than their reputation suggests
2. you probably wouldn’t be embedding from any old instance; I assume you could embed from an instance you use and trust as long as the post is federated to it

That’s a very interesting suggestion and I’d love to see it done, actually, regardless of what I’m about to write.

The problem is that mods aren’t bot sweepers or disinformation sniffers. They’re just regular people… and there are relatively few of them. They probably have, on average, a better radar than most users, but when it comes to malicious actors they aren’t going to be perfect. More importantly, they have a finite amount of time and effort they can put into moderation. It’s way better to organically crowd-source these kinds of things if it’s possible, and the kind of community Lemmy has makes it possible.

Banning these comments makes the community susceptible to all kinds of manipulation, especially in the run-up to a US election (let alone this one). The benefit of banning these comments is comparatively very minimal: effectively removing one type of ad hominem attack in arguments that have always featured ad hominem attacks, in one form or another.

You must have missed my point, which was entirely about education of new and under-informed users. Reporting is invisible and does not have that benefit.

I think that public call-outs of suspicious behavior is the only real and continuous way to teach new or under-informed users what bots and disinformation actors (ESPECIALLY these) sound like. I don’t remember the last time I personally called out someone I thought was a paid/malicious account or a bot… maybe never have on Lemmy. But despite the incivility, I truly believe the publicity of these comments is good for creating a resilient community.

I’ve been on forums or aggregators similar to Lemmy for a long time, and I think I have a pretty good radar when it comes to identifying suspicious account behavior. I think reading occasional accusations from within your community help you think critically about what’s being espoused in the thread, what the motivations of different users are, and whether to disbelieve or believe the accuser.

Yes, sometimes it’s used as a personal attack. But it’s better to have it out in the open so that the reality of online discourse (extremely frequent attempted manipulation of opinions) is clear to everyone, and the community can respond positively or negatively to it and organically support users that are likely victims.

You think the people you’re calling “NeoLibs” above are Reagan fans? Your criteria for neoliberal policies is “supports Ukraine and Israel at the same time” and “is aware of the current reality of Russian disinformation tactics”? Neither of those have anything to do with neoliberalism. I don’t think you know what “concern trolling” means, either.

I see, so you just use the term “NeoLib” to mean “people you disagree with” rather than “people with neoliberal political beliefs”

The fuck are you talking about

Dems controlled both houses of congress. What stopped him from pushing his public option plan then?

Manchin and Sinema, mainly, but also the 60-vote filibuster threshold. Forgot already?

then why are people worried about project 2025 and “dictator on day 1” Trump?

Because reasonable people don’t want the president to attempt authoritarian rule in order to progress his agenda. The fact that it is possible to do that is a big fucking issue and yet here we are, watching it happen with Trump. That doesn’t mean Biden should do it. It should not [and cannot be allowed to] happen at all.

That hasn’t been my experience /shrug

Hm, you know, you’re right, that’s a fairer point than I expected. I think what I hadn’t appreciated (but do now, after thinking through your reply) was how much “back-pressure” the new home construction puts on the market. The current median house price is about double that 200k-equivalent figure, and while the growth in median house size doesn’t directly account for all of that, the availability of new houses is effectively throttled by the size increase so the prices of all houses rise.

I think it was hard for me to imagine, because I have a fairly small house (1800 sq. ft) bought recently, no garage, built in the 50s, oil heating (very old), and it was 600k. Which is massively expensive compared to 200k and has none of the “big excessive new house” traits you’ve mentioned. Median is median, though, I suppose.

This is a gross oversimplification and in part just illogical. Yes, new small homes would help everyone out. But compare house prices to purchasing power then vs. now. It’s absolutely incomparable to 1960. That’s not because of square footage. And car ownership as an input here makes no sense. The costs of a downpayment and mortgage are simply out of reach for many people irrespective of car count. I say all this as a homeowner.

Aw man. That made me switching between tearing up and laughing so many times. What a great one.

keep diggin’ that hole

Sure, yeah, that must be it. No need to self-reflect any further.