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Joined 19 days ago
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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • I think this is quite a bad idea even if we totally set aside any ethical concerns with AI, solely because it increases the hardware requirements to run a Lemmy instance. I believe that a critical goal of federated services should be to reduce the barrier to entry for instance ownership as much as possible. The more instances the better. If there’s only two or three big ones, the problems of centralization appear again, albeit diluted. The whole point of federation is to have multiple instances. Already many survive on donations or outright charity. But AI increases costs immensely.

    I think it’s fine to add features that require more compute power if they have a vast improvement to user experience for the compute required. But AI is one of the most computationally intensive features I can think of, and the ratio to its value addition is particularly low. There’s so little content on Lemmy that you can feasibly view the entire post history of most communities in under a day of browsing, so there’s no real need for improved searchability - it’s just not that big here yet. And even when it does get that big, I think a strong search algorithm would be just about as effective, much more transparent, and most importantly not require instance owners to add GPUs to their servers.





  • In many ways I think rising prices could be great, but in reality, they won’t be. With the technology available today, we could have even cooler games than we do, and more games, and more great games. We could have more diverse and experimental games. It would be lovely if solo indie developers were able to make a living from making great games, rather than basically needing to chase a dream akin to getting drafted into the NBA. Game developers are seriously underpaid, it would be great if they got paid as much as other software developers, especially since their work is equally complex and usually more stressful.

    In reality, rising game prices will not help with any of those things, and will just make the C-suite richer. The one silver lining is that this may allow small indies to start charging a more livable realistic price for their games.





  • I can think of a few immediate benefits of this sort of protest and some potential benefits.

    Mainly this shows the populace they aren’t alone, or taking crazy pills, or in some kind of Twilight Zone. The media easily makes it seem like these strong views, anti Trump, anti Musk, anti DOGE, pro Luigi, etc… are extremist or minority, or maybe that believe have some gentle disagreement with Trump but nothing major. That can make people feel hopeless and like there’s no chance at things getting better, which discourages people from actually doing things to make things better. So this immediately provides some comfort and sanity to people, but it lays the groundwork to motivate people to do something more serious. Remember way back when the Tea Party movement was still considered fringe and extreme? Initially all that stuff was just protesting, all the way back to the Obama presidency. But in hindsight we can see how that laid the groundwork to embolden more serious action later which is at last coming to fruition for that movement. It’s a long process, very similar to gardening, hence those phrases about “sowing the seeds of XYZ”. For a long time the plant is completely non-functional, and then suddenly it abruptly bears fruit. But it does take continual prolonged watering.