8
submitted 6 months ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/nba@lemmy.world

Sounds like I'm trying to be controversial, but I'm really not. Nor a Luka hater (I'm a fan). I'm just thinking out loud here ...

It's just that watching the first two games of the finals, I can't shake the feeling that the Celtics make him look small. Not physically, but in terms of the power he has over the game, even though he's probably the best or top 2 of the players on the court.

It just feels like being 1 way and ball heavy is too often just too much of a weakness, especially while watching Brown, Jrue and Porzingis (and even Tatum managing his slump) be impactful all over the court in ways that connect together as a team.

Meanwhile Luka is too often getting frustrated with his shot not going down or not getting the call he wanted and clearly wanting to wait for the next offensive possession to have another go at his favourite moves (though being frustrated with his team makes sense, but TBF he's had some frustrating turn overs too).

Like, it feels like this finals could be the beginning of a story about Luka being this mercurial and prodigious offensive player that never wanted to (or could) take care of his weaknesses enough to get a ring.

I'm not calling it or anything ... it's just what I'm coming away from the first two games with ... in part because while the Celtics (especially with Porzingis in) are the better team I don't think they've played well and have still made it look clearly one-sided while it doesn't feel like Luka is a miraculous hero who just needs some help.

23
submitted 6 months ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

I'm sure this will get clarified in the release notes for 19.4, and I'm probably annoyingly jumping the gun ... I'm just curious.

Otherwise, I find it cool to see this feature come out!

17
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/science@lemmy.ml

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16562180

I'd certainly seen this exoplanet somewhere in my mainstream news world somewhere ... so nice to see a breakdown here from "Dr Becky" about how the science isn't so clear cut.

Anyone else able to provide insight on what the possible outcomes of the newly acquired data will be?

EDIT: what's with the downvotes? Genuinely confused ... is there some rule/culture against youtube videos or something?

148
submitted 6 months ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

Seeing more "cake days" pop up lately, it seems we're approaching (or in) the 1 yr anniversary of the Reddit migration.

It's kinda sweet actually that we all get this reminder of it with the pickup in "cakedays".

It reminds of my seeing the wave happen. I was on lemmy before the migration (not a flex, I joined mastodon in the twitter migration and explored the other fediverse platforms around looking for a reddit/forum alternative) ... and followed a bunch of communities over on my mastodon account. Early last year many of these communities were fairly quiet (or at least quieter than now) and so I didn't really see any of them in my mastodon feed. I'd actually forgotten that I'd followed them. I'd heard word about the API stuff over on Reddit, but I knew something was happening when I started seeing more and more posts in my masto feed that confused me ... it wasn't clear where they were coming from. Double checking I'd see that they came from lemmy communities I'd forgotten about ... and I realised I was seeing lemmy literally come alive!

All these cakedays are kinda the same thing ... a sort of internet equivalent of a weather event or season.

71
submitted 7 months ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

This is just to followup from my prior post on latencies increasing with increasing uptime (see here).

There was a recent update to lemmy.ml (to 0.19.4-rc.2) ... and everything is so much snappier. AFAICT, there isn't any obvious reason for this in the update itself(?) ... so it'd be a good bet that there's some memory leak or something that slows down some of the actions over time.

Also ... interesting update ... I didn't pick up that there'd be some web-UI additions and they seem nice!

35
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

Just a general observation I've made in my time on lemmy.ml, which I figure is attributable to lemmy the software, that may or may not be useful.

I'm talking about writing comments to posts (or replies to other comments, not sure if I've seen a difference).

And, just anecdotally, it seems that the longer the instance has been up without a restart or update (AFAICT of course), the longer the time between me clicking the Reply button and the time that the request is completed.

Usually, the first sign in my experience that the instance has been restarted is that this latency speeds right up to being almost instantaneous.

Anyone else notice the same or on other instances? It might be a clue to performance issues??

EDIT: applies to posts too (including this one incidentally)

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 86 points 7 months ago

Yea, car congestion isn’t about industrial transport, it’s about personal transport. All of the people commuting to/from work etc in single person occupied tanks.

24
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

It recently struck me recently that a number of users mostly scroll the All feed. This came up in a conversation where people were discussing how their main usage of lemmy was to scroll All and then rely entirely on blocking to refine their feed.

Now whether that's a pathological instance of Hyrum's law of all possible uses being relied on or an intended or fair use of a lemmy/reddit system, it does strike me that a substantial portion of the user base doing this likely has an effect on what happens within communities and the ability for communities to define themselves.

Thoughts and speculations (and perhaps paranoia/exaggeration):

  • I don't know what happened on reddit in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if a relatively high proportion of users rely on All as described above compared to reddit in order to "fill out" their feeds more due to the smaller user base here.
  • A higher amount of All-feeders means fewer people willing to invest, contribute to or even care about specific communities.
  • This likely means community migrations away from toxic mods, or, starting new communities can run into more friction or less engagement.
  • Which, arguably, becomes a problematic feedback cycle in which All becomes a "better" feed than curating a set of subscriptions.
  • Perhaps a clear mechanism for this to manifest is that anyone can up/down vote anything, which means All-feeders can influence what appears in Subscription-feeders' feeds by imposing their tastes/preferences on posts' scores. In fact, if All-feeders are substantial in number and activity relative to Sub-feeders, this could be a sizeable influence on post ordering across lemmy/threadiverse.

Now I don't know if any of this is really a problem at all, I'm just thinking out loud here (as, to make my bias clear, someone who doesn't get using the All).

As far as Lemmy design decisions go:

  • Should non-subscribers be allowed or disallowed to vote on posts/comments in communities they're not subscribed to? My intuition on this is obviously not (ie, disallowed) and that the All feed is just for browsing not participating. For me, it's about enabling communities to form their own identity and sub-culture that doesn't get pushed around by others.
    • How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.
    • You could limit voting to those who have a subscription to the community, but then anyone could just easily subscribe and then vote while sticking to All. And that'd be harder to implement too I'd imagine.
  • Maybe communities should be able to control this behaviour. Private and local-only communities are apparently on the road map. Excluding non-subscribers from voting seems like a reasonable continuation of such options.
    • To get even more annoyingly complex, I could imagine communities having the option to exclude down votes or exclude down votes for non-subscribers. I'm sure that'd raise issues for some people's feeds as non-down-voting communities might unreasonably rise to the top or something. But if multi-communities come along, and voting in All is off or not guaranteed, this feels like a non-issue to me.
39
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

cross-posted from: https://hachyderm.io/users/maegul/statuses/112442514504667645

Google's play on Search, Ads and AI feels obvious to me.

* They know search is broken.
* And that people use AI in part because it takes the ads and SEO crap out.
* IE, AI is now what Google was in 2000. A simple window onto the internet.
* Ads/SEO profits will fall with AI.
* But Google will then just insert shit into AI "answers" for money.
* Ads managed + up-to-date AI will be their new mote and golden goose.

@technology

See @caseynewton 's blog post: https://mastodon.social/@caseynewton/112442253435702607

Cntd (Edit):

That search/SEO is broken seems to be part of the game plan here.

It’s probably like Russia burning Moscow against Napoleon and a hell of a privilege Google enjoy with their monopoly.

I’ve seen people opt for chatGPT/AI precisely because it’s clean, simple and spam free, because it isn’t Google Search.

And as @caseynewton said … the web is now in managed decline.

For those of us who like it, it’s up to us to build what we need for ourselves. Big tech has moved on

35

With the VisionPro hype already dead (maybe forever?), bad or tasteless iPad ads, purposeless updates to iPad, Apple dropping their car project, and reaching out to OpenAI or Google for AI services ... it certainly feels like it to me. They've at least run into their limitations recently however much they want to find the "next iPhone".

With the VisionPro, I always thought it'd flop and so predicted that it'd be the end for Cook. I'm still holding onto that prediction.

24
submitted 7 months ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

In this case, it's one specific channel: https://diode.zone/c/andybalaam_lectures/videos?s=1. That is, !andybalaam_lectures@diode.zone. It's run by @andybalaam@lemmy.ml / @andybalaam@mastodon.social

AFAICT, federation hasn't been working from this channel to lemmy for ~3 months, for all the instances I checked (perhaps a particular lemmy version broke things?).

EG:

By comparison:

I'm not following anything else on peertube so I don't know how common this is (and I couldn't find anything on the GitHub issues), but different behaviour on mastodon and lemmy would superficially indicate that it's a lemmy problem, which would be a shame given that lemmy is much better for consuming peertube.

13
submitted 8 months ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml

A little thread I wrote on masto after watching this talk by Bret Victor and reflecting on their stated ideals for how computing ought to be designed.

19
submitted 8 months ago by maegul@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.

Man's population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man's intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits.


Quote from Doglas Engelbart provided in this talk by @bret@dynamic.land (Bret Victor).

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 72 points 10 months ago

I feel like this is an underrated idea. Resonates with the whole thing of making a subset of the internet simpler and just like documents, as with the simpler protocols like Gemini etc.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 78 points 1 year ago
  1. This is about replacing humans with machines and making more profit. The framing around difficult to work with models is a distraction. The AI problem was always a capitalism problem. And here it is in full swing. Buckle up and brush up on your Ludditism people!
  2. As with AI and shopped imagery and porn, the unrealistic beauty standards problem is about to get ridiculous. There may be a moment coming not too far off where beauty is just not a human thing anymore. Which may be catastrophic (like people can’t have sex with each other anymore) or oddly liberating.
[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 78 points 1 year ago

Yea it feels like something has been rotten with the ads industry for a long while. I’ve read a few pieces here and there about how it could collapse and that it’s built almost entirely on dumb lies. But it’s still here.

I’m no economist, but my best guess is that it’s a little like war and the effort we put into it. Complete trashy waste almost all the time, except for when one person or country decides to put effort into it, because then you have to as well or run huge risks. We’d all be better off without ads, including brands/companies, but when one is doing it every company has to too.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 77 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Someone put it well, if insensitively, about Sam Bankman Fried (FTX etc):

Not actually smart but just LARP-ing the “Aspy genius” persona.

However accurate that take is or offensive, I think it captures something about how nerd culture has gone mainstream and how it’s perceived.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 77 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So I think people here need to be mindful of how much they don’t know about animal testing, how easy it is for the topic of animal testing to become inflammatory and how much musk-hate makes that even more likely.

Animal testing and experimentation is happening all over the place. And in such work accidents to happen, as with any surgery. And a common measure to prevent suffering is to euthanise. In fact I think euthanasia is prescribed so often that it’s controversial, but you should keep in mind that any animal experimentation setup is likely to have an intentionally antagonistic relationship between experimenters and animal carers and ethicists.

There are groups deeply and actively opposed to animal experimentation of any sort and will infiltrate and target labs and try to expose them any way they can. There’s a real chance that something like that is behind these revelations. Point is that it’s often not objective and misleads you into thinking the targeted lab is particularly bad when it’s actually just a selected target for political reasons.

All of which is NOT to condone animal experimentation (I’m a vegan for example). But you really should be mindful of how dumb media hype around this issue can be.

If you’re outraged for instance, when was the last time you ate meat and how well do you think that animal was treated both before it’s killing and even during? Better than the monkey in this story? Hell, when was the last time you ran over an animal in your car and did you really need to be driving at all? Did that animal die peacefully? Did you even realise?

How many benefits come to both humanity and animals too from progress from animal experimentation and is that worth some of the mistakes and suffering caused?

These are some of the better thoughts IMO, where musk hate is really not relevant here. From what I could tell from the article, it did not seem odd at all. If you care about animals, take the issue seriously and don’t make it about one very famous person who’s cool to hate right now. Animals, and humanity, frankly deserve better.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 71 points 1 year ago

One of the subtly weirder conversations I’ve ever had was when someone was whinging about their home country’s dumb driving laws. Curious I enquired further until it became clear they thought everyone should be able to get at least a little tipsy while driving because what else were you supposed to do on the long commute home from work.

Never hated cars and car people more than in that moment. What was weird was I never would have been able to tell that that person held those views.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 76 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Non profit foundation is awesome to see. It will probably the general structure of all significant long lasting institutions on the Fedi.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 79 points 1 year ago

ActivityPub (the protocol used by the fediverse) has recently had a proposal to expand it incorporate marketplace exchanges of information. See the proposal, and a discussion thread

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 74 points 1 year ago

This seems somewhat important. Things, even major institutions in the internet, can be very generational. Never thought about that in terms of Wikipedia before.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 72 points 1 year ago

For all the annoyance, a silver lining is that lemmy.world is testing lemmy at a relatively high scale lemmy doesn’t see anywhere else and so aiding in the development of the software and architectural guidelines for instance management.

[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 75 points 1 year ago

So, not that parallel communities are at all bad, I feel like it's warranted to ask why this community when we've already got the dedicated startrek instance and its communities: https://startrek.website/, such as !startrek@startrek.website and !risa@startrek.website?

At this point in the growth of lemmy, I feel like unneeded duplication without any reason doesn't really help things. Should a community die we can always start new ones where ever we want. But splitting things and making it harder for users to navigate the space probably isn't a good idea unless there's something you want to achieve with this community?

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maegul

joined 2 years ago