• 2 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 30th, 2023

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  • Question: is PieFed the new kid on the block? Or has it been around for just as long as Lemmy or even longer?

    I just love to see these platforms competing whilst working together, in the sense of adding to eachother, making the entire thing bigger and bigger. I’ve known for a long time that this is possible, but to see it happen is beautiful. Surely this allows for way more innovation and customization than closed source apps could ever realize. It makes me confident that the Fediverse will flourish, more than it already is.


  • I am all in favor of hating Musk and all his products, but I think you’re right. It seems rather unlikely that they would instruct their LLM to go out of its way to give fascist replies. That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be instructed to not give fascist output, which apparently it hasn’t been. Sadly, increasingly people form their view of the world based on the output of LLMs, so it would be helpful if these LLMs would help create worldviews that are beneficial to humanity at large, or at the very least prevent ones that are evidently harmfull. Which begs the question, who is to decide what is helpful and what is harmful. Musks answer is probably ‘freedom of speech, who is to say that we can’t spoonfeed hate to little children’. Which seems to me to be an example of when ideas of freedom turn into nihilism. But where they’re right is that government should also not be the one who tells people how to view the world. It’s people who should tell government, and the reverse, though perhaps well intended, is itself rather dangerous. I think the solution, as per usual, is to free it all up, make FOSS LLMs, and let people choose the limitations which they deem proper. I would certainly not want my kids on ‘freedom of speech’-style unrestricted AI, just like I don’t want some amoral nihilist as my kids’ school teacher. I want someone who teaches them love, kindness, forgiveness, harmony, honesty, sincerity, etc.


  • I feel like there is momentum in Europe to switch to FOSS. Europe knows that the US cannot be trusted any longer. And this cannot be undone. Europe is striving for independence. Huge amounts of money are being spent on military sovereignty right now. All of us here on Lemmy know digital sovereignty is equally important. Recently an ICC prosecutor was cut off from his MS account because the US doesn’t like the Netanyahu arrest-warrant. These things don’t go unnoticed. It shows that technological dependance is not innocent, it can and will be used against us.

    We need to use this momentum. Get involved, mail your representatives (municipal, provincial, national, federal), get petitions running, mail newspapers, go to political party conventions and get this on the agenda. It won’t fix itself. This problem is somewhat abstract and the solutions are just slightly too complicated for the general public. Most people don’t know what FOSS means. If we want this to change, those who see it and understand what needs to be done, need to get in to action.






  • If the EU liberates itself from US tech dependence through FOSS, we don’t only liberate ourselves, we liberate the world.

    If the EU invests massively in free and open source software, pretty soon all across the world countries will hop on the FOSS-train.

    If FOSS catches on, it shows to the world the power of collaboration. A power we have mostly forgotten, thinking that competition is a better idea. But competition alone is shit. To give an example. Here in the Netherlands we’re very proud of ASML, a company that makes the machines needed to produce microchips. They’re famous because they’re unique, in that no other company is able to produce these machines. It’s a competitive success, but obviously it’s holding us all back. If they’d share their knowledge companies across the world could try to improve on these machines, speeding up innovation. I’m supposed to think China’s corporate espionage is a crime, but to be honest I feel like not sharing such crucial information with the world is the actual crime. The power of collaboration is easily underestimated, let’s give it a try.



  • “You can’t remember their favourite song, so you try to login to their Spotify account. Then you realise the account login is inaccessible, and with it has gone their personal history of Spotify playlists, annual “wrapped” analytics, and liked songs curated to reflect their taste, memories, and identity”

    Instead you could track your listening habits on ListenBrainz. In doing so you safeguard yourself from Spotify ever restricting access to your data, data which they consider theirs. For ListenBrainz of course you must be willing to share your data freely, but it will be for the benefit of all, whilst if you don’t it will only be used for the benefit of Spotify corporates. You’ll help facilitate a healthy online music ecosystem, because people can built apps on top of the ListenBrainz dataset. You can get recommendations from algorithms of your choice instead of having to rely on Spotifys algorithms.

    Not working for Listenbrainz in any way, just an enthousiastic user that plugs it when he sees fit :)