Bullet vending machines? Just in case you find yourself running low on bullets while out and about in the city? “Damn it. They’re out of Snickers bars so I guess I’ll just settle for some 9mm.”

Waking up when the weather changes:

In the spirit of the thread, here’s a meme I’ve stolen from someone else’s recent post (want to give credit where due) in case you get criticized for your plundering ways:

How about we just avoid the long arguments and jump to the end:

• Pro-Biden: Biden is only a war criminal. Trump will actually ruin the USA while being no better (or even worse) internationally. It’s a loss for no gain. If Trump wins I’m going to blame anyone who voted 3rd party or didn’t vote. We need people to vote Biden regardless of their ethical/financial concerns about the billions being sent abroad and how they are being used. It’s that important to stop Trump and MAGA.
• Anti-Biden and also Anti-Trump: Democrats never meaningfully change to court any voters left of center. Every 4 years they bank on their Republican opponent being so awful that it scares people into voting Dem because “it’s the most important election ever”. Biden has crossed the line by participating in Israeli crimes in spite of most Americans wanting otherwise. If he loses you should blame his policy and Democrat apathy to our concerns instead of us - we’re sick of having to support the lesser evil. Threatening to vote 3rd party or withholding our vote is the only way left to meaningfully demand change and proper representation of deeply important concerns.
• Pro-Trump: Popcorn time while we watch libs argue and vote for our (literally painted) golden leader to “restore” an impossibly perfect past that never existed. Even if he acts like a dictator for a while sometimes that’s what is needed.

There. After so many of these threads I can near guarantee 90%+ will fall roughly into those categories.

To people who aren’t sure if this should be illegal or what the big deal is: according to Harvard clinical psychiatrist and instructor Dr. Alok Kanojia (aka Dr. K from HealthyGamerGG), once non-consensual pornography (which deepfakes are classified as) is made public over half of people involved will have the urge to kill themselves. There’s also extreme risk of feeling depressed, angry, anxiety, etc. The analogy given is it’s like watching video the next day of yourself undergoing sex without consent as if you’d been drugged.

I’ll admit I used to look at celeb deepfakes, but once I saw that video I stopped immediately and avoid it as much as I possibly can. I believe porn can be done correctly with participant protection and respect. Regarding deepfakes/revenge porn though that statistic about suicidal ideation puts it outside of healthy or ethical. Obviously I can’t make that decision for others or purge the internet, but the fact that there’s such regular and extreme harm for the (what I now know are) victims of non-consensual porn makes it personally immoral. Not because of religion or society but because I want my entertainment to be at minimum consensual and hopefully fun and exciting, not killing people or ruining their happiness.

I get that people say this is the new normal, but it’s already resulted in trauma and will almost certainly continue to do so. Maybe even get worse as the deepfakes get more realistic.

Reddit doesn’t function like a real business (i.e. most of the work is unpaid volunteers, users and especially mods). There’s no genuine site-wide code of ethics beyond what will actually get them criminal charges. The written rules don’t matter - many moderators are unpaid bullies who permaban if their feelings are hurt and ignore questionable content they agree with. That system of banning users based on opinion kills discussion of “unapproved” views and sorts people into forums where their favorite opinions (and often outright hatreds) are popular. Loathe a particular race/gender/political ideology etc? Just find a subreddit where the mods agree and you’ll be fine saying some truly terrible stuff. Read the bloodthirsty posts on r/worldnews and tell me if the site-wide rules on not promoting violence or racism apply. For these reasons and more I don’t think anyone should be buying into their IPO because they aren’t a reliable business.

I don’t know if Lemmy is different because I’ve been here for less than a month, but at least here it feels like you can have different opinions and the worst that happens is you eat downvotes. Plus a lot of the really unethical takes are usually checked pretty hard in my (limited) experience by the users, which doesn’t happen when the only other voices are basically guaranteed to agree with you (a la most of Reddit).

The rest of this is just my Reddit survivor tale so if you don’t care stop here. I got invited to the IPO on the same week I got a 3-day site-wide ban after appealing a subreddit permaban for a fairly popular comment that the US should stop funding Israel and give the money to Ukraine (on a post about how the US is having trouble finding money for Ukraine). In those words, no hate speech or racism etc. When I asked why I was banned I got a 4-word insult as the only communication back. I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist, but it sure felt like I was being deliberately censored/punished for high-ish profile “dangerous” anti-Israeli opinion. May not be the case, but it was my first site-wide ban ever for a comment that broke no written rules.

My Reddit account is 13 years old and in 2023 I think I made about 100k karma, primarily with comments about history, education, and in one case a post about how awesome sperm whales are. My experience mirrors what I’ve read happens to others enough that Reddit has lost my participation (I’ve only posted 2x in the last 3 months, down from a few times daily) and my faith. I only go back to check on specialist communities (video game tips etc) and almost never participate anymore. Frankly I hope it either changes to allow for discussion or dies.

Closets have no need to worry about being phased out so long as there are Republican politicians who secretly love LGBTQ+ sex. “It’s happened so many times that it’s almost become predictable at this point. The louder someone is about the righteous conservative Christian lifestyle they’re leading, the more likely they are to be stepping out on their wives or having secret gay affairs because if there is one thing you can count on in life, it’s for Republicans not to practice what they preach.”

I’m 43 and rarely have aches (certainly nothing that would qualify as chronic), but I also regularly walk to and from the gym to weightlift. There’s a saying “Movement is Medicine” and so far it seems to be proving true for me. Maybe if you don’t use it you lose it.

Wow, I never knew about that and it’s not just a small fee either. This 2020 article has it at 9,500 Euro/10,300 USD. “Some observers worry Nature’s €9500 publishing fee is so high that it threatens to divide authors into two tiers—those at wealthy institutions or with access to funds to pay, and everyone else.”

It’s already hard enough getting funding in some fields of science without that kind of added expense to put your data out there. Definitely sounds like you’re right to call them out.

It’s interesting reading quotes from that article like: “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.” and “After you’ve been dead for 100 years, are people going to be able to get access to the things you’ve worked on?”

It reminds me of problems the US military is having with refitting/upgrading old ICBMs. From the 2021 article, “Minuteman III Missiles Are Too Old to Upgrade Anymore, STRATCOM Chief Says”: "Where the drawings do exist, “they’re like six generations behind the industry standard,” he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. “They’re not alive anymore.”

It’s sounds like the danger is we’ll be able to access the science (or just trust it’s true) but in some cases we’ll be unable to retrace our steps.

I agree. I’m talking about how quickly we’re going to have strategies in place to deal not how quickly we’ll have it all figured out. My guess is we have at best a year before it’s a huge issue, and I agree with your take that figuring out human vs. AI content etc. is going to be an ongoing thing. Perhaps until AI gets so good it ceases to matter as much because it will be functionally the same.

I 100% agree the genie is out of the bottle. People who want to walk back this change are not dealing with reality. AI and robotics are so valuable I very much doubt there’s even any point in talking about slowing it down. All that’s left now is to figure out how to use the good and deal with the bad - likely on a timeline of months to maybe one or two years.

This is Kyle Hill’s video on the predicted impact of AI-generated content on the internet, especially as it becomes more difficult to tell machine from human over text and video. He relays that experts say within a year huge portions of online content will be AI-generated. What do you guys think? Do you care that you may soon be having discussions/arguments with chatbots more often than not on popular platforms like Reddit, X, YouTube, etc?

Thanks for the suggestion, done.

I’m sure a LLM trained on Reddit conversations will be a well-balanced, polite, and reasonable conversationalist and not a contradictory mess trying to figure out which brand of spite is most acceptable. Remember in 2016 when Microsoft plugged the chatbot “Tay” into the internet and it went full psycho Nazi in 24 hours?