loobkoob

I wouldn’t recommend ChatGPT for factual information at all (at least, not without validating for yourself afterwards), but I think it’s quite good for helping you mull over or develop ideas, and for finding “soft answers” to things.

I used it recently to suggest a font to use, for instance, and found it much, much better than trying to use a search engine. My font knowledge isn’t particularly high at all - I know what serif means but that’s about it as far as technical knowledge, and I wouldn’t recognise or categorise most fonts - but I was able to describe what I wanted to ChatGPT and narrow it down:

• “I want something more friendly than that”
• “less professional”
• “more wonky”
• “less rounded”
• “less uncomfortable”

And so on. I could be somewhat abstract with my requests and it still mostly seemed to understand what I meant. Eventually it suggested something that fit my requirements pretty well. Trying to find a similar suggestion via a search engine would have been very difficult, I think, and would basically have just relied on me stumbling on a “top 10 fonts for X” listicle that happened to cover my requirements.

ChatGPT is fantastic within its specific niche (assuming you know how to feed it prompts properly and how to interpret its outputs - it’s a tool thats usefulness very much depends on the operator) but I definitely wouldn’t want it to replace search engines.

“It’s absurd that we live in a society where people feel the urge to tell me to greet them with ‘sallam alleykum’”.

There’s already a huge difference between what happened and your example here. Your example is “people saying you must do X” . What happens when it comes to gender is people asking, “please do not do X”.

They’re not saying you must refer to them as, for instance, she/her, but rather asking that you do not refer to them as he/him/they/them/whatever. You’re free to just not use pronouns to refer to them at all if that suits you better - you can refer to them by name instead. You’re left with plenty of options and only a handful of restrictions.

Your example, on the other hand, is completely restrictive; you must take this single course of action, and there are no alternatives.

For what it’s worth, I do think we’re in a fairly transitional stage (ha) of how we as society deal with transgenderism. I think people being made to change their pronouns in order to feel comfortable is silly. Not because those people are silly - they’re just doing what they can to feel comfortable with the restrictions society has placed on them - but because society and language are silly.

Why do we refer to people by gender at times when it’s completely irrelevant? Someone having a penis, or male hormones, or whatever other “masculine qualities”, is irrelevant 99% of the time when I refer to them as he/him. If I say, “Donald Trump? Yeah, he’s a corrupt idiot,” then why does him having a penis have any bearing on the language I use there?

And why do we have such gendered roles in society? Why can’t men just wear dresses and make-up and link the colour pink and still identify as men? Why can’t women cut their hair short and wear baggy clothes and like engineering projects and lifting weights at the gym and still identify as women? I guarantee that if we could remove all those kinds of gender associations, you’d see a lot less trans people.

People transition because who they are and what they like, and what society says they have to be (based on their gender) are at odds with each other, and it’s literally easier for them to change gender in order to be allowed to be themselves than to change society. Being trans isn’t some kind of personal failing; it’s a failure of society to accommodate people who deviate even slightly from its rigid roles and expectations.

The ideal future, such as I see it, is for there to be no trans people because no-one feels a need to transition - they can just feel comfortable and accepted as they are. But until then, you need to recognise that there’s a societal issue and stop being a part of it. It takes such a small amount of effort on your part to use the pronouns someone requests, or to avoid using pronouns at all, and it makes such a huge difference to them to be gendered properly. So just be a decent, respectful person and accommodate their wishes and stop making their life worse.

The Expanse is the first thing that came to mind for me as a counter-example when I read your first comment so I’m glad to see you mention it! It even plays on the exceptionalism idea in book/season 3 and 4 where Holden seems special because >!Miller is appearing to him!< and because >!he isn’t affected by the eye parasites!< only to explain those things away with reasoning stemming from events that already happened in previous books. And any exceptionalism that comes after that is largely due to the reputation or skills characters have built for themselves rather than because they’re “chosen ones”.

If you haven’t read the books, I really recommend them!

Dude, what the fuck kind of comment is this?! I have no love for spez whatsoever, and would happily see him lose all his money and landed gentry status. But your comment is just unhinged.

So as per @Kierunkowy74’s reply to me, limiting (basically what I described) is a feature on Mastodon already. It basically just sets things to follower-only mode on a per-instance basis. I’m not sure how well that would translate to the threadiverse, but I do think some level of opt-in integration would be best.

To go on a slight tangent: I’ve never used Imgur as anything other than a image hosting site, but I’m aware it has people that use it as a social network in its own right. Whenever I’ve hosted anything on Imgur in the past - even images that don’t need any context - I’ve noticed it always ended up downvoted and sometimes with some negative comments, while the reception on reddit was generally far better. It doesn’t bother me - like I said, I just used it as an image host - but it’s clear Imgur has its own culture. Threads could be the same, and trying to merge its culture with ours could prove difficult.

I don’t know what full-on federation with Threads would look like, but federating vote counts could definitely lead to Threads culture overwhelming threadiverse culture. But I assume that’s also something that can be done on a per-instance basis; I know kbin (which I use) already doesn’t federate downvotes from other instances, for example.

I’m not sure I have a fully-formed opinion on it all yet, unfortunately. I don’t like the idea of cutting Threads off completely unless they do something to earn defederation. I think finding a way to smoothly federate with Threads could give the fediverse a boost in users that could be significant for more niche communities that haven’t managed to find a large enough audience yet (because yes, I’m still missing some of the smaller communities from reddit). But I do also think there are very valid concerns about both the long-term and immediate impacts Threads could have on the fediverse.

That sounds like a good solution. I don’t want to need an account on a different platform to see Threads, but I also don’t want the feeds to just be overrun by Threads users, and that seems to achieve that.

I guess the ideal situation as far as I’m concerned would be for users to be able to choose that setting on an individual basis. Obviously anyone can set up their own instance and achieve that, but being able to do it without being an instance admin would be the best.

Personally, I would like to be able to follow individual Threads users if I so desire but not have Threads content showing up in my All feed. I don’t know if that’s possible with how federation/individual blocking currently works, but it would be the ideal, I think.

I don’t think it’s about capitalism/socialism/communism at all for a lot of them at this point. They have a fairly simple ideology: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And their enemy happens to be their own government.

How about using the name for a racing pinnace instead?

A reverse image search comes up with a lot of pictures that have been taken in this exact location. I’ve no idea which is the original, unfortunately.

Also the visuals change with every episode to reflect where all the key ships and stuff are in the system!

I hate that male artists do it, too. Spectacle and visuals are a part of live shows, of course, but I wish recorded music could stand on its own without relying on sex appeal or any kind of visuals in order to sell.

I hate that how hot she is or isn’t has any bearing on her music’s popularity.

As a non-American:

I feel like hyper-capitalism and America’s borderline corporatocracy is responsible for this. So many Americans feel like they’re being lied or taken advantage of in order for corporations to profit.

The suspicions about “Big Pharma”, for instance, almost make sense to me if I try to consider it from an American perspective. Healthcare is insanely expensive there, and being told you need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars “for your own good” is enough to make anyone suspicious. Especially when you see men posting their itemised hospital bills online where they were billed $300 for “women’s sanitary products” - it’s very clear these companies and healthcare providers are willing to be dishonest in order to profit. So American people start to distrust the entire industry/field.

Of course, when you look at it from a global perspective, or especially from a perspective of a country with nationalised healthcare where the same profit motives don’t exist, it seems absurd. Just because the American companies are scummy doesn’t mean the science behind medicine is wrong or a lie.

And it’s the same across so many other industries. American companies take advantage of consumers, consumers start to distrust them. American people have been conditioned to distrust or be sceptical of so many things at this point that a lot of people feel like their own judgement is the only thing they can trust. Of course, not everyone has the critical thinking skills for that to actually be true, nor does everyone have the education in every single area for it to be true. And for those people with weaker critical thinking skills, having some charlatan come along and say, “well we all know you can’t trust X, Y and Z, so what if A is a lie as well? And trust me, you can trust B” makes them think, “oh wow, they’re right about not being able to trust X, Y and Z, maybe they’re right about A and B too”.

And so your Donald Trumps, your Alex Jones, etc, gain power and influence, and the people who follow them feel smart because they can “see through the systemic lies”. It doesn’t matter that half of what they say isn’t provably true because (to their followers, at least) it could be true.

So I don’t think it’s just American exceptionalism that’s responsible. I think the whole system’s so broken that it’s conditioned people to be sceptical and distrustful about everything, and to try to take advantage of the broken system when they can.

It’ll potentially just end up like emails (which are also federated, after all), where Gucci employees get an @gucci.com email address and an @gucci.com ActivityPub handle.

Option 1 also isn’t necessarily as bad as they make it seem. If you suddenly gained super speed and your perception of time altered over night then, yes, you’re suddenly going be spending a lot more time in your own head relative to before and it’s going to take some adjustment as best, a lot of therapy at worst. But if you’re born like that, surely it’d just be normal for you and you wouldn’t necessarily know anything different?

The other option that wasn’t mentioned is that you can “turn on” your powers and the world feels like it goes into slow motion around you, and then you turn them off again afterwards and it’s all back to normal.

That one appears to have turned out to not be the case, fortunately. He wrote up a very long post with a lot of receipts (which is worth a read). He filed a libel suit against his two accusers, which ended up being settled out of court with a large payout in his favour and with the accusers retracting their accusations, categorically saying he had never sexually abused either of them (or any other women to their knowledge).

It was satisfactory enough for me, personally.

Ideally, OP’s crawlers will just come from their own instance that other instance owners can defederate from if they want to opt out.

For me personally, the plot doesn’t matter all that much anyway. What I love is Douglas Adams’ prose - the plot’s mostly just a vehicle for that - and I feel that doesn’t really translate to film. The perfect example:

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

It’s funny. It’s succinct. It’s very descriptive. It doesn’t just tell you that the ships were hovering, it draws comparison to bricks which conjures up images of blocky, inelegant ships, and it gives the impression that the way they’re just stationary in the sky is somewhat unsettling or surreal. I think it’s quite impressive how much such a short sentence manages to convey really!

Translating it to film, and having shot of some blocky, inelegant ships hanging in the sky, doesn’t manage to capture the same humour or feeling that that short sentence in the book does, at least for me. And it’s the same throughout the whole series, but that line is probably the easiest example to bring up. Some books translate really well to film and the imagery in the film ends up being far better than what I could imagine myself on the fly, but that’s not the case with Hitchhiker’s Guide at all.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide radio series has a fair amount of narration so the prose still shines through in that.

I had similar issues with the various Dirk Gently adaptations, too. And I find I have the same issue with screen adaptations of Terry Pratchett’s work for similar reasons. Without Adams’ or Pratchett’s wonderful prose, it often tends to feel very B-movie-esque to me.

BBC/HBO did a TV adaptation of the full series, aptly called “His Dark Materials”. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I did the books, but it was a good adaptation (and much better than The Golden Compass).

The books won a bunch of awards and were very well received when they released. The first one, Northern Lights (The Golden Compass in the US) came out in 1995 so it was fairly popular for a few years as the “premier” young adult novel, but it ended up being dwarfed in popularity by Harry Potter once that released (as did, well, everything else on the planet).

I think the books were a little less popular and well-received in America. In part because Philip Pullman is a British author, so obviously he got more attention here in the UK. But also, quite a few Christian groups - particularly in America because, let’s be honest, most evangelical Christian groups are American - took issue with His Dark Materials’ world and themes. It doesn’t paint the church in a good light at all, and the series’ God analogue, The Authority, is pretty tyrannical. Although, funnily enough, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, was one of the biggest supporters of the series - he felt it basically highlighted the dangers of dogmatism and attacked the ways religion could be used to oppress rather than Christianity itself - so obviously not all Christians were offended by the series.

Anyway, yes! Not only is the world fantastic (and it only gets more interesting and wild as the series goes on) but it also handles the characters really well. The way it handles the main characters - children who age into teenagers throughout the series - developing feelings for each other and discovering sexuality was done in a really thoughtful and age-appropriate way (for the characters and the audience). It addresses some interesting philosophical concepts, too, including some religious ones - I’d say the spirit, the body and the soul is a pretty key theme throughout, albeit not necessarily in the same way Christianity approaches it

I’d start by reading the books - Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass - and then watch the TV series. He’s also written other books in the world - some novellas, and (currently) two out of three books in a second trilogy called “The Book Of Dust”.