LLMs are an awesome technology. They have their flaws. The companies behind them are totally unethical. The hype is insane and it is insane how many crappy AI integrations are popping up everywhere. Business models are in many cases not there. There is a real fear of job loss. But this tech is here to stay and you can do awesome thing with it. People totally misunderstand the whole energy usage issue. People are abusing ChatGPT & Co for things it is not build for and OpenAI actively encourages them.

But I really think that this community here has gone too much in the direction of AI hate. Even if somebody posts a great and substantial article, it will get downvoted because AI is in the title. And I really would like to discuss current AI here without people simply downvoting everything they do not like without having read the article

Have you even read the article?

Funfact: Ich war die Tage in Frankreich und da gab es im Lidl deutsche Lebkuchen als Frühlingsgebäck mit Osterdeko im Rahmen der “Deutschland/Alpenwochen”

You have a point, but let’s not pretend that Google, Meta, Twitter, X, TikTok or AliExpress are better names. Companies also have really weird names

That single satellite is toast at the start of every major conflict

You could make a really fun time trial by using these

Check out https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ - they are really good work preserving websites that are going down by scraping them with a network of distributed “warriors”. You can run one on your hardware and contribute to saving the web for the future

What is the current wisdom about having an android device always plugged in? Some people say that it will kill and pillow the battery, but does it really?

Be a good user. Post great content. Start awesome communities. Make Lemmy a great place to be on and users will come. You can’t convince users to switch networks just because of some technical details. But if the best memes are here and Reddit is drowning in a sea of bot reposts, people will notice. If you google for something and the best answer to your question is not on Reddit, but here, people will notice. If cool people are hanging out on Mastodon and not on X, people will notice. If the one place on the internet to discuss some niche topic is on Lemmy, people will come.

So don’t go preaching, do cool stuff here!

WordPerfect really comes from a different time. Good look reading the stuff from your iOS notes app that saves everything somewhere in the cloud and that has no export option in 10 years.

It’s not just about upgrading. It’s also about being able to repair your computer. RAM likes to go bad and on a normal PC, you can replace it easily. Buy a cheap stick, take out the old RAM, put in the new one and you’ll have a working computer again. Quick & easy and even your grandpa is able to run Memtest and do a quick switch. But if you solder down everything, the whole PC becomes electronic waste as most people won’t be able to solder RAM.

I think that we need to talk about the history of software and social software here, because the current status is kind of crazy:

• Most of the big platforms didn’t invent what they are currently doing. Reddit is basically a forum. They had a great innovation with their voting idea, but functionally there is little difference between the many webforums we had before and Reddit
• Twitter is a microblog, which already tells you about its origins. There were blogs before twitter, on their own servers, talking to each other with pingbacks and RSS
• YouTube, well, basically just shows you videos, which of course was done before by people on their own servers

So basically most fediverse is not emulating existing platforms, but trying to go back to an internet we had before the big platforms took everything over. And with ActivityPub we have the protocol to ease some of the pains that the decentralized internet before the web 2.0 era had. F.e. you had to create an account for each individual webforum, which really sucked if you just wanted to ask a question or share something. Reddit with its one login totally took over, because you could participate in many subforums. It was easier to just hop into /r/cooking to ask a question about your lasagna then to find the relevant lasagna forum and register there.

Ehrlich gesagt fehlt mir die Vorstellung, was an einem eingerichteten Thunderbird “zu schwierig” sein soll. Wenn das die Baseline ist, dann wird der User auch mit Gmail, Web.de, Outlook und allen anderen Clients scheitern.