OpenStars
@OpenStars@discuss.online
- Comment on AI Is Creating New Jobs But Millions of Workers May Not Be Ready 29 minutes ago:
They got their clicks though - the rest is someone else’s problem (according to their POV).
- Comment on And forgot it when waking up 1 hour ago:
In that case… carry on then!
- Comment on Snarkaeopteryx 15 hours ago:
Sarcasticism
- Comment on And forgot it when waking up 20 hours ago:
And true = 1 hence √ = 1, I’m glad we figured this out!!
- Comment on And forgot it when waking up 23 hours ago:
Um, actually… I think the square root operation takes precedence over the division.
- Comment on That would be petrifying 23 hours ago:
Okay so what happens when they take all of Earth’s most precious resources with them when they leave… you know what, fuck it we ball, let’s roll out!
- Comment on That would be petrifying 1 day ago:
Uh oh, nuance and subtlety detected - in the direction opposing the approved echo chamber opinion (may it live forever, and which definitely has clothes on), Lemmy will now commence the downvote brigade.
Oh shoot I almost forgot to preemptively throw up my own protective defenses - “I <insert name here> do solemly declare that Microsoft is an evil corporation, named after a soft dick, which must be opposed by all means necessary… and henceforth pledge to only use (Arch) Linux forevermore.” (Ha! As if we all weren’t already doing that!🤪 Right!? R-right!!! R-r-right???)
- Comment on That would be petrifying 1 day ago:
Okay here me out, are you really saying that you don’t want him to go to Mars?
I do. Or anywhere else really. Ideally hell. I mean even if hell did not exist, make one and then go to it. (Or I guess it would really be the other way around? 😜)
But you know, Musk fucking off to Mars is also okay with me. Better there then here anyway.
- Comment on Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks 1 week ago:
That should help! 😃
- Comment on Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks 1 week ago:
The first paragraph in the article says:
Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware.
So… yes. All someone has to do is register to become the new owner of the previously non-existent resource and then they can serve up whatever content they wish to the slop machines.
- Comment on AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made “large-scale, disruptive actions” 1 week ago:
It made their human workers 70% less efficient. You know the solution to that don’t you… MORE AI!
J/k, and btw this actually seems like a good article to read, acting as a cautionary tale about reliance upon this high unstable technology in its current (HAHA!) state.
- Comment on I guess we doin UAVs now 1 week ago:
Lesbian pilots of the world unite - who’s with me!? 🤪
- Comment on Tesla’s Robotaxi gets caught crashing through bollards, just as it readies the purpose-built Cybercab for public roads 1 week ago:
Tech-pilled people that naively believe whatever they read, especially in previously believable sources of “news” that have since sold out.
- Comment on Had it coming 2 weeks ago:
Skibidi
- Comment on LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins – Sean Carroll podcast w/Dr. Chandra Sripada 2 weeks ago:
I already posited that LLMs may perform lower-level thinking. Also, in the reference you linked to read their third stated limitation. Perhaps one day some kind of AGI will do “higher-level” aka more realistic thinking… but not yet. Which, I want to add, is not entirely relevant to their utility to us as humans.
Talking about “thinking” gets us distracted from what can actually be done, though if we do want to do it then we’d need to come up with a working definition of what “thinking” actually is.
- Comment on Lemmy or Piefed? 2 weeks ago:
Yes the .zip admin team - for both PieFed.zip and Lemmy.zip - are highly worthy of respect in that regard (plus all other regards that I have seen as well).
About the hidden blocklist aspect though: that’s the thing - Lemmy hides the communities that an instance admin team has blocked, and PieFed does too, so in that respect they are identically opaque.
So moving on, people have claimed that PieFed also has a series of “hidden blocklist features”, but everything that I have seen about that claim demonstrates that is untrue. It’s been months now but iirc there was even direct links provided to the actual portions of the codebase. These blocklists are NOT “hard-coded” as claimed - they are opt-in, just like the PieFed.zip situation offering that choice to the users, except in this case it is a decision offered to the instance admins. Opt-in is the polar opposite of hard-coded, the latter being worse than opt-out? Opt-in is the most friendly an option could possibly be?
Although those options are fairly opaque iirc rather than transparent, that much seems true. At least with PyLova you know what you are getting, while with PieFed the experience could in theory vary greatly all the way to the more authoritarian, walked garden style PieFed.social to the more free and open and choice-providing PieFed.zip. Which to me seems analogous to the spectrum between Lemmy.ml (an instance that falsely claims to be merely one for discussions about FOSS, with next to zero mention of its more political leanings) and Lemmy.zip.
Again, yes PieFed allows more censorship features, but against the backdrop of it just plain offering more features overall. All of which an admin is free to either turn on or leave off. The two software platforms truly look equivalent to me then, in terms of offering free speech.
With the exception of the vote quota that is, which low-key changes everything. The trajectory of PieFed edits is trending ever more towards authoritarianism and opacity rather than transparency - again, not that Lemmy is a bastion of transparency either, so they both get rather poor marks there, plus PieFed at least bothers to notify someone when they are banned from a community, so overall it might even be ahead… although with a trajectory that looks like eventually it could leave it behind, regardless of whether it currently is now or not. Does that make sense? Lemmy does a lot worse than people admit to knowing, and even if PieFed is not as bad as certain specific claims have made it out to be, it is not perfect either.
Which puts an exceedingly large burden on each and every instance admin team to try to pick up the slack left by the gaps in the software, and thus the .zip team should get all the more credit for rather successfully navigating this whole minefield even as it provides services for both platforms.
- Comment on LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins – Sean Carroll podcast w/Dr. Chandra Sripada 2 weeks ago:
The difference between the cash register and an inference engine is the training data. Also, barring something like mechanical failure, I would trust the calculation of a cash register (that has previously been demonstrated to function with high fidelity, and barring any major incidents such as dropping it onto the floor that might make me question the relevance of those prior tests to its current performance).
But the results of a LLM “calculation” - and I mean this with total sincerity - might be something like:
“What is 1+1=”?
“Answer: 6, 7!! 🤪”
Or in ye olden times, one expected response might be “ur mother!” or some other flippant remark… exactly like a small child, imitating others might do. Monkey see, monkey do => the principles undergirding LLM technology? It does not understand what it sees, hence it does not “know” when to apply what answer, only going by the most popular (whatever the weighting scheme is - probably highest upvoted answer on Reddit?) string of words seem to be associated with the question.
- Comment on LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins – Sean Carroll podcast w/Dr. Chandra Sripada 2 weeks ago:
He admits himself that nobody really knows how people think, and so all the talk about LLMs looking like they are “thinking” is based purely on vibes rather than reality.
Then again, the thought occurs to me to ponder, how many actual humans really think also? Do 4-year-olds? Do <insert name of opposing political party here>?
That thought experiment helps me to understand. Even if an LLM does perform a kind of “lower thinking” - i.e. mere imitation, of the kind that a monkey or even a 6-year-old human child might - even then, I still would not trust it to vibe-code anything for me.
And it most definitely does not “think think” i.e. higher-level thinking, though again, neither do many humans, seemingly the largest majority of the time.
- Comment on Lemmy or Piefed? 2 weeks ago:
RE: Dessalines vs. Nutomic
Interesting, and noted. Though when they send out the calls for funding I thought they included both. I do think that Nutomic became more the public-facing side. I don’t know what Dessalines has been doing lately.
Instances hiding certain communities from main feed is a pretty normal thing, as long as it’s instance-level
Yes and surely PieFed provides this functionality as well? I don’t know that with 100% certainty or even really at all but it stands to reason? So it’s not that PieFed does it while Lemmy does not do it - they both do it, though PieFed provides a means to do it a lot more often.
Then again, have you read the comments in pretty much any Reddit post where people complain about Lemmy’s tankies and/or toxicity? It makes sense to me: tankies freely state that they wish death to all Western civilization, including and especially not only those on the Right side of the political compass but also those not far enough on the Left… and what is Reddit full of if not primarily American and secondarily European centrists, i.e. those very people marked for death and destruction? I am talking about people that did not feel that we were too confusing - they passed the first hurdle of checking us out, passed the second of choosing an instance on which to make an account, and many (the ones I pay attention to most) report having remained here for literally several years. They adamantly state that they will never, under any conditions, return to the Threadiverse.
But I wonder… especially since 3rd-party apps do not show instance names by default, how many of such people had a run-in with Hexbear trolls and did not know how to block them all - i.e. might return if they could be assured that no hexbears would be here to harass them any longer? Or maybe it wasn’t the hexbear trolls, perhaps it was the tankie debate-bros - MANY of those are among the most respectful people to dialogue with and I can somewhat to even really enjoy the discourse despite differences in opinion - however many MORE are not respectful, and seem to relish aggravating people. Though moderation is hellish here, with most people willing to do so having either quit entirely or at least stepped back from moderating.
Hence PieFed is stepping up to offer a safe space where people can play and be more free of that toxicity. It’s different than the Tesseract dev situation for the plain & simple fact that the features are opt-in, not even opt-out or particularly mandatory i.e. hard-coded as people have so often claimed.
i.e., PieFed itself merely facilitates but does not push forward the censorship issues. Lemmy also has censorship of its own - e.g. the slur word filter. Or it would be better to say that Lemmy facilitates the decisions of individual instances, supporting them if they wish to have a slur word filter running on their machines. Though on the spectrum where they both do that, PieFed does offer more features - both overall, and with respect to this specific, like it does for pretty much all issues actually. If an instance wants to avoid them though, then simply leave them turned off, as they are default anyway.
Sorry I got off a bit ranting - I 100% agree that the key is transparency. PieFed can do whatever it wants, as too can Lemmy, but when things are done in secret then people start to get pissy. Both Lemmy and PieFed have a long way to go to increase transparency in their respective codebases, particularly about these censorship matters. e.g. why not offer a page that lists communities currently being shadow-banned? It already does this for instances being federated/defederated with. Except if it did this, then it would no longer be "shadow-"banned and would instead merely be called “banned”:-).
And in the matter of the modlog too, PieFed is ahead of Lemmy, in offering greater transparency in bothering to send a notification upon a moderation event. Lemmy would do well to add such - but notifications have been around for several years, as too has the modlog, but connecting the two is apparently not a priority. Though if you look at the number of moderation events occuring on Lemmy.ml, apparently a great deal of time is spent curating the content and userbase on that instance. Also, Dessalines refuses to allow donations that are sent to enhance Lemmy to be used solely in enhancing the Lemmy codebase (the only way would be to send donations directly to Nutomic), so many of those funds (we also are not told now much) are being used to spread the political ideology of the dev.
Whereas for PieFed, at least at the moment, most of the donations are seen to be creating changes to the PieFed software.
Anyway it’s not like PieFed is authoritarian while Lemmy is not authoritarian - both are, just in different ways. Though the trajectory of PieFed is increasingly leaning towards that end, more so than it did previously, and also like Lemmy in its earlier days, not doing so great a job at keeping those beliefs out of the software itself. Both are somewhat political (these days, PieFed more so, at least within the software itself), PieFed offers more features overall but also is more problematic to someone valuing freedom of speech, even while simultaneously offering more “rights” to the end-users than Lemmy, in some ways but less so in others.
Clear as mud now, right!? 😜 My TLDR is that the PieFed software itself is fine, either for someone installing their own instance or if you trust the instance admin team to resist Rimu’s trending towards authoritarianism - like PieFed.zip looks really impressive, and quokka is even running the PyLova fork that straight-up hard-coded removed most of the more controversial features.
- Comment on Lemmy or Piefed? 2 weeks ago:
Ultimately I think you are correct but a lot of the details here are slightly to majorly incorrect. For instance, unless something has changed, wasn’t Dessalines rather than Nutomic the main dev, with the former having started the code and then brought in the latter later on?
Lemmy most definitely shadow-censors people’s experiences too. Did you know that every Lemmy instance - not just ML - has a hidden list of communities that it shadow-bans? Some instance admins are extremely friendly and go out of their way to publicly declare this fact, but most do not, and unlike the listing of (de)federated instances, Lemmy inherently chooses to hide rather than display this information. Lemmy.ml also by default acts as the arbiter of what communities are allowed to be suggested to new instances upon first installation (though both this setting and the communities themselves can be adjusted later by someone who knows what they are doing and how to accomplish that).
Most of the manner in which Lemmy is opinionated though shows up in the features that are less obvious or non-existent rather than displayed right in your face like PieFed does. e.g. PieFed chooses to bother to notify end-users when a moderator bans them from a community or even an entire instance, while Lemmy merely buries that information deep in the modlog and most people either never find out or only do so months to literally years after it happening. Do people have a “right” to know such? PieFed prominently displays such so vehemently declares yes while Lemmy merely remains merely silent, a more implicit but equally vehement no. Likewise, upon deletion of a post Lemmy displays a page that acts like it never existed in the first place and in fact looks more like a server error than content issue or acknowledgement of the facts of the true situation, whereas PieFed by default deletes only the OP’s contribution yet keeps the comment section intact, available to anyone with the original URL (mods can override this though).
That said, PieFed’s vote quota shadow-censoring contributions from users on other platforms - Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. - without disclosure of that fact is fairly heinous, and particularly the manner behind its rollout (in defiance of all advice to the contrary) may be the forerunner to spelling out loss of confidence in the entire software project, provoking fears of additional such changes coming in the future, without notice and against all push-back. PieFed is quite opinionated indeed, and also seems to be veering away from Reddit-esque “social media” and more towards a professional, serious-content-only microblogging style.
That said, most of the criticism against PieFed has been shown to represent outright disinformation, as digging deeper most accusations were shown to be not just slightly but blatantly false (though despite that the original post remains up without having been corrected), hence made (and spread) by people without knowledge of how software works. e.g. most of the “hard-coded” features turn out not only to not be hard-coded after all, but outright (and extremely friendly) opt-in rather than opt-out (unfortunately not the vote quota though - that one is opt-out).
Someone installing their own instance can get a great deal out of running PieFed rather than Lemmy, with the former’s significantly enhanced feature set, while for people relying upon a public instance your experience will be affected far more by choice of admin team than the software that they choose to be running under the hood - especially if you are accessing it via a 3rd-party app like Voyager that offers only rudimentary access to many of the bells & whistles only accessible on PieFed anyway, like user and post flairs, polls, combining together comments across all cross-posts, categories of communities which represent user-customizable and shareable topic feeds, the initial account sign-up wizard, etc.
So a lot of what you related here about PieFed filtering out content is not fully true - like lemmy.ml’s extremism it applies to the PieFed.social instance itself, and yes it is possible to turn on that same filtering by choosing the opt-in feature upon installation of another instance (much like installation of a Lemmy instance can by default populate itself with communities that are acknowledged i.e. not banned by Lemmy.ml), but an instance admin can also make different choices too. For instance the vote quota can be essentially disabled by assigning it to a ridiculous value that would be impossible for an actual human being to reach.
Overall: PieFed is a shiny and new, fast-paced, but also opinionated and controversial project. Whether it’s going to be a “peace of mind” or “power tripping dev hellscape” software is only for you to experience.
This is… entirely accurate, sadly. Fortunately as you mentioned there is the PyLova fork actively working against these censorship features, plus adding new ones of its own, for instance admins that don’t want to have to put in all the effort to do so entirely on their own.
I hope this was helpful to get you started in your research to show that the situation wrt PieFed is nowhere close to being as bad as people have presented it to be (though certainly far from ideal, and at its core still somewhat valid in that it is quite opinionated software and becoming more so all the time), nor is the situation wrt to Lemmy all sunshine and rainbows and anywhere close to being as free of censorship as people make it out to be (though in the end it does manage to keep its politics out of the software better, hence someone may choose to place their hopes into it as a better option in the future to maintain freedom of speech).
- Comment on Lemmy or Piefed? 2 weeks ago:
The Lemmy dev team likewise has pretty extremist views, and notoriously goes much further to censor and limit what uses can do… but crucially, less of that (not fully zero, but less relatively speaking) makes its way into the software.
If you were running your own instance, I would pick PieFed, hands-down with barely any resistance to that personally. Most of the controversial features are even opt-in (rather than opt-out), and such extremely nice onboarding features both for users new to the Threadiverse and those new to installing instances (e.g. the docker container) making setting one up a breeze, especially in comparison. Or there’s the nice PyLova fork that goes even further beyond merely disabling those controversial features by having outright removed them from the code, plus adding a few new features on top.
But if you are using a public instance, I see now that your choice of admin team has far more to do with your ultimate experience than whether it runs Lemmy or PieFed. Quokka even switched from Lemmy to PieFed and I think it was sh.itjust.works that announced that they would do likewise in later 2026. Either way, your admin team decides whether they want to run things in an authoritarian fascist manner, or democratic, or anarchist fashion, and especially if as an end-user you are accessing your instance via a 3rd-party app like Voyager, you will notice such things far more than what software it is running under the hood.
- Comment on Lemmy or Piefed? 2 weeks ago:
I feel like the social credit system, like most descriptions of PieFed features by people who have barely glanced at them before complaining about them exceedingly publicly, is quite misunderstood.
For one thing it does not affect 99.6% of users, as Rimu mentioned somewhere in this thread. And for another, you have to be downvoted like 10x more often than upvoted to receive that label - which is also temporary. A single comment (or handful of them) won’t do it - you need to consistently be bucking all of the trends, in a MAJOR way, to receive this label. Think: going into a Linux sux community and trying to say that Linux is superior - I mean, objectively speaking “duh” (says me who uses multiple OSs on a daily basis), but read the room, you know? They specifically made the community to crap on Linux, so let the babies whine in peace rather than incel your way into correcting them inside their safe spaces? When people have the choice of man vs. bear, don’t be the reason that people choose the bear…
But mainly: it’s just a label. It does nothing whatsoever to actually filter the content - there are no options to make use of the label in that fashion. And several times the label has proved helpful to me, like I was going to write a reply to someone but then I noticed the label. A quick glance at their post history confirms that the new account is a far-right leaning recent refugee from Reddit, who will be uninterested in all of my “facts” and “truth”, and I quickly see the futility of even attempting to try. So I don’t bother, and I am grateful to the label for alerting me to the likelihood of having ended up with that same opinion, but only after having learned the hard way.
Though labels are up to the recipient how they want to make use of them? Sometimes I decide to simply ignore them, particularly in certain contexts, while other times I follow through a bit to see if they are justified to my eyes. Irl has “reputations” as well - so why not here, particularly when they are useful and people want them? When applied gently and optionally, they can be useful tools.
The vote quota thing though - that is wholly bad, I agree there. It’s especially heinous since it shadow-censors people’s contributions without disclosure of that fact. The reputation indicator purely works for the behest of an end-user, but the vote quota applies also to users of other PieFed instances (even those that have disabled the vote quota), and also those of Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. Worse, there is zero method whereby e.g. a Lemmy user could check in advance to see if their contributions are going to be censored. Basically any community housed on a PieFed instance that uses vote quotas can be throwing out contributions with no modlog entries, zero explanation or notification of it ever happening, and especially no ability to know in advance when it will occur. And users on those PieFed instances that have their votes constrained will also have their votes discarded even when attempted to be offered onto communities housed on Lemmy instances.
A great deal of the criticism about PieFed’s features has been demonstrated to be based upon outright disinformation - e.g. supposedly “hard-coded features” are not only not hard-coded, but turned off by default hence opt-in rather than opt-out, an extreme rarity in software and very friendly actually - but the vote quota criticism is imho totally valid as it is an extremely unfriendly and insensitive thing to do to others (even though somewhat rare, if that matters to anyone). i.e. PieFed is quite opinionated in its features offered. Personally I see Lemmy as doing likewise - though more in features not offered than in ones implemented (e.g. why choose to not notify anyone of a moderation event happening to them? do they have a “right” to know or not, if they are e.g. banned from a community?) - but not to the same degree, with PieFed going much further than Lemmy in terms of injecting the politics of its dev team directly into the codebase (though each feature can individually be disabled by instance admins, or just use the PyLova fork that has tweaked these settings already, plus added a few new features on top).
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
I-i-it’s YOU, isn’t it⁉️
YOU are the one who wants me succeed, aren’t you ⁉️
T-t-thank you ☺️😍
- Comment on New website lets drivers check whether their license plate has been searched on Flock database 2 weeks ago:
Juicy and delicious 😋
- Comment on safety poster 2 weeks ago:
Nerdy pigeons should be my band name. You know, if I knew how to play music, or had a band ^or^ ^had^ ^friends^ (/s for at least one of these).
- Comment on Love Wins 2 weeks ago:
Bc when you plug something into the socket wrong, it always causes a full nuclear explosion! Yeesh, how did you not know this already…? (/s)
- Comment on Shitcoin 3 weeks ago:
Perhaps for people who already own a home, but for those who don’t, it may be closer to being accurate?
- Comment on Climate goals 3 weeks ago:
Perhaps the person is super glued to the bicycle, so while walking would still be theoretically possible, that bike is coming along either way as well… 😜
- Comment on Life of the party 3 weeks ago:
Only until the meds wear off.
- Comment on Meta Caught Paying Nazis to Post on Facebook 3 weeks ago:
Your instance is quite a bit cut off from the rest of the Fediverse, although even so the news of Friendica has made waves - e.g. beehaw.org/post/521802 with >800 comments.
Friendica is fairly niche though, and suffers from a lot of problems. For one, as a Facebook replacement it relies upon your family members and close friend group to also use it - but unless you act as tech support and install it onto their machines for them (alongside Linux and everything needed for them to self-host), then how else will you be able to communicate with them on that platform?
And it more or less does need to be either self-hosted or at least hosted exceedingly often, since it does not scale well and users of the project have started begging for technical support from outsiders (not a great example of the latter but see this informational post).
In short, there are reasons for its lack of spread so far. I do not know if those issues are solvable - though by now perhaps they already have been? It’s just a very different model from the more semi-anonymous platforms like the Fediverse, which can make things challenging.
