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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I mean this might my personal deficiency that other people don’t have… but if I see a comment I disagree with and then I see that it has been upmodded heavily, I get a greatly increased urgency to shit on that comment to make people see how wrong it is. Totally toxic and encouraged by the scoring system.

    As with anything, this is intended behavior but perhaps taken too far by some people.

    A points system is the best way to get a sense of what other people think, and whether your views are generally accepted. When you’re in a social setting, you can tell from nonverbal clues (e.g. if you start saying something and people frown/inch away, you know they don’t agree). This is valuable.

    When you see something upvoted highly that you don’t agree with, OR something downvoted highly that you agree with, it could be one of two scenarios:

    A. You’re right, but people generally have misconceptions about the issue.

    B. You have a controversial take on the issue.

    It’s not always clear which of these it is. That’s why a lot of internet yelling matches devolve into some variation of “downvoted for truth” or “downvote all you want, facts are facts and you’re just blind” - people think it’s B, the person arguing thinks it’s A.

    To combat this, you need the following:

    1. Reasoning and critical thinking skills are important. At the most basic, learn to distinguish fact from opinion, but also learn to understand an argument.

    2. Be humble. Don’t approach it from a “I must win this argument” mentality - try and understand why they’re thinking that way.

    3. Pick your battles. Sometimes you just have to disagree and walk away. Nobody is going to give you a prize for making the last comment in an argument.

    Of course, it’s easier to just not look at the numbers. But then why not just… not use lemmy/reddit/internet forums? If this isn’t giving you any pleasure, why read/comment at all?








  • There’s a difference between a sapient creature drawing inspiration and a glorified autocomplete using copyrighted text to produce sentences which are only cogent due to substantial reliance upon those copyrighted texts.

    But the AI is looking at thousands, if not millions of books, articles, comments, etc. That’s what humans do as well - they draw inspiration from a variety of sources. So is sentience the distinguishing criteria for copyright? Only a being capable of original thought can create original work, and therefore anything not capable of original thought cannot create copyrighted work?

    Also, irrelevant here but calling LLMs a glorified autocomplete is like calling jet engines a “glorified horse”. Technically true but you’re trivialising it.