I like subject vs identity because I enjoy discussing issues and I enjoy seeing familiar people in the discussions, but I don’t like being followed and following is hard for me. I might love your thoughts on Star Wars but you also post a lot of cat pictures which I’m neutral about and sports which I don’t like.

So if I follow you and see those three subjects, two posts I have to cognitively tune out. If I follow a Star Wars board, I get your thoughts and potentially two other people’s thoughts in those same three posts.

I like that. On Bluesky (or TwX/Mastodon) I have to find people who mostly post about things I want to see. It’s hard and it’s not conducive to massive follow/follower counts which is normally the measure of success.

I also find myself feeling constrained to only post things my followers are interested in, because as an individual I’m just not that fascinating. So I post less and less as my follower count goes up.

Because of all that, subject vs identity is the most natural way to divide up social media to me. I’d be happy to brainstorm other ways, though.

To hear it told on Bluesky, it’s the better blocking tools and the culture of “we don’t have to put up with these assholes.”

shrug

I’ve been off Twitter for years and even before that I probably posted less than a half-dozen times per year. I mostly prefer subject-based social media (here) over identity-based, but I’m looking to surround myself with people who talk about something other than politics because the last Trump presidency I just couldn’t handle the constant tide of horrors.

I just need somewhere to escape all that and if not, I’m going to be in a really mentally unhealthy place for the next four years.

I think this is probably a really good point. I have no issue with AI generated images, although obviously if they are used to do an illegal thing such has harassment or defamation, those things are still illegal.

I’m of two minds when it comes to AI nudes of minors. The first is that if someone wants that and no actual person is harmed, I really don’t care. Let me caveat that here: I suspect there are people out there who, if inundated with fake CP, will then be driven to ideation about actual child abuse. And I think there is real harm done to that person and potentially the children if they go on to enact those fantasies. However I think it needs more data before I am willing to draw a firm conclusion.

But the second is that a proliferation of AI CP means it will be very difficult to tell fakes from actual child abuse. And for that reason alone, I think it’s important that any distribution of CP, whether real or just realistic, must be illegal. Because at a minimum it wastes resources that could be used to assist actual children and find their abusers.

So, absent further information, I think whatever a person whats to generate for themselves in private is just fine, but as soon as it starts to be distributed, I think that it must be illegal.

So what happens if Russia fires up the chat bot and finds 4 times out of 5, it advocates for a surprise first strike?

I mean today, no one is going to leave that kind of decision to an AI, but tomorrow? When the AI is wired into every system and can coordinate an attack or defense 90% faster than humans?

I swear Asimov wrote a story about that…

I have access to AI integrated with my IDE. It mostly guesses at the line I’m going to write. It probably gets it right 50% of the time.

It also very, very often suggests stuff that works but isn’t very good. Like it offered some convoluted suggested for adding audit fields to Firebase. Ultimately it did suggest the solution I went with, but only after starting down the road of stupid ideas.

Like, if your code base is pretty good and you just need to tweaks stuff that is already good enough that’s one thing. I frequently look at the code base and wonder if it was implemented by someone who really knows Java at all.

I suppose it might be fair to assume a huge technology company would have their shit together, but technically I work for a huge tech company… just not the same core business. Tech enough that we have a whole mess of internal AI tooling to create AIs for specific things.

We can create an AI agent, but we can’t follow simple fucking rest standards.

Anyway it’s hard to quantify, but I get less mileage out of integrated AI tools than I do bouncing ideas off ChatGPT.

trying to fit this square shaped solution into circle shaped holes

This exactly. AI is great for certain things. What everyone tries to use it for, like the bullshit in this article, is not great.

It’s not a lie, it’s just not what most people think it is. There’s a lot of ignorance and a lot of lies about AI.

Was it Google who claimed 25% of their production code last year was written by AI? Microsoft? Anyway, I’m going to call bullshit on that right now. Or they require a curious amount of bullshit code to run their business.

So what’s the pros and cons of Mint on Ubuntu vs Mint on Debian? I’m more familiar with Ubuntu, and that’s what I’m running on my PC now, but I’m thinking about trying to go back to Mint.

Main things I’ll need to install is development tools (VSCode, IntelliJ, docker, java) plus Firefox, Discord. I’m also running KDE Plasma - it’s nice, but also I don’t really have a strong opinion so if I wasn’t i wouldn’t care all that much. Nvidea graphics, AMD cpu.

I’m a bit frustrated by the weekly or so discord updates and it would be nice if auto update or apt upgrade would just update it, but maybe that’s a completely separate concern.

Anyway if you time to respond I appreciate it. If not that’s cool too. Have a good one!