Kichae

@[email protected]

Astronomer & video game data scientist with repressed anger

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Kichae ,

Using chatgpt for searches

I cannot stress this enough: LLMs are not, have never been, and quite likely never will be search engines. You may as well ask your a auto-complete questions.

Kichae ,

So ultimately, it's about the union, and the celebrities are a key way the union leverages its members to get game studios to sign union contracts.

If studios want the big celebrity actor to say 5 or 6 lines in its game, then they need to sign with SAG-AFTRA, and that means accepting some rather strict restrictions on hiring on-union VAs for the other rolls.

UAW strike Day 4: GM threatens to send 2,000 workers home, Ford cuts 600 jobs ( www.npr.org )

Union strategy: 13,000 autoworkers at the three Midwest plants, about 9% of the unionized workforce at the Big Three automakers, were the first to walk off the job. Now, more workers are temporarily out of work as the automakers are asking hundreds of non-striking workers not to show up to work....

Kichae , (edited )

Imagine you’re Biden and you hear about this railroad strike. Your advisors are telling you if the strike goes through how many rail passengers are stranded in the middle of nowhere, how much food is just going to go to waste and not make it to various towns, which factories manufacturing hospital equipment will be without material and unable to continue production.

Strikes are supposed to be inconvenient. A strike that is not inconvenient garners workers no leverage. Interfering with a strike because it is inconvenient is union busting.

On top of a gigantic economic impact there could be deaths associated with the strike.

There are deaths associated with a lot of things that the administration is not acting on. Why was this one special?

Imagine you’re that guy and have to make the call to say nope, I don’t care, the strike continues.

Imagine you're that guy, and your call isn't to tell the rail companies to negotiate in good faith and get the strike dealt with.

He sided with the companies, not the workers. He did so publicly, and with the weight of the state.

There's no nuance here. He interfered with workers' rights to strike and to negotiate, favouring business over workers.

Kichae ,

It's not sealioning when you say something incomprehensible and someone else asks you WTF you tried to say

Kichae ,

Jerry O’Connell looks like he desperately wants to be anywhere else

He's worried that people will discover his secret identity, and distracted by trying to find his way home to his native universe.

The Fox GOP debate melted down when the word “climate” was mentioned ( www.motherjones.com )

After the network showed a clip of a young conservative activist saying that climate change was the number one issue for young voters, Fox News moderator Martha MacCallum asked for a show of hands in response to her question, “Do you believe human behavior is causing climate change?”...

Kichae ,

Just waiting for the 2nd amigo to show up so you guys can commence with the Mexican-Spider-Man-point-off.

Kichae ,

From what I've seen, every push to have everyone return to the office has either been that they just want control over employees or they want butts in seats because the seats aren't free.

Yes, exactly.

Everyone keeps pointing to the real estate issue, but the simple fact of the matter is that most office-based employers don't own any commercial real estate. It's a great theory as to why the media has been promoting back-to-office stories, but it doesn't explain why employers are actually doing it.

Raw, unmitigated distrust of and disrespect for employees, though...

Kichae , (edited )

Most of them are not. The reality is, workers in the US are more or less equally split between big businesses and small-to-medium businesses, and outside of the States it skews much more toward small-to-medium. These are companies that often have less than amicable relationships with their landlords, because landlords have this nasty tendency of acting like landlords.

On top of that, much commercial real estate is owned by REITs, which are managed from the biggest cities, and aren't really entities small and medium businesses get to have real relationships with, any more than an apartment renter gets to have a relationship with their residential REIT.

They're not buddies. They don't even have a direct line of contact.

Kichae ,

They probably won't like the communists here, either.

Kichae , (edited )

I'm sure that's part of it, but most office-based companies do not own commercial real estate. They're renters of it. Having workers return to the office does nothing for the value of their property, as they don't own any.

While it does give management a sense that they're paying rent on those long-term commercial leases for a reason, it's pretty clear that the real value for them is in being able to directly see employees when they're not in-camera. Managers and ownership have demonstrated that they do not trust their employees, and pulling them back into the office is much more about feeling like they can control their lessers than it is about anything else.

Kichae ,

Preaching to the choir. I left my last job because they mandated return to office so that I could work remotely with teams in Montreal and Paris.

The only difference between doing that in my home office and doing it from their office was they could watch over my shoulder from there.

It's not about managing remote teams. It's about controlling workers, and those are very different things. These people are worried that you might be getting your laundry done between work tasks, or that you're actually working 5 jobs, or other ridiculous bullshit, not about whether you're achieving your assigned tasks.

Remote work is cheaper, more efficient, and leads to happier workers, and they'd rather wreck the first two to ensure the don't have the third.

Kichae ,

I can’t fathom why a civilized country

Making some bold assumptions there, I think.

Kichae ,

Burnham is raised by Vulcans which is used when it suits the plot (then she’s extremely analytical and objective) but then suddenly turns into an emotional mess when they want to portray drama. That just feels … off

No, that part feels very, very on to me. Burnham was a human girl who was witness to family being brutally slaughtered (as far as she knew/could tell) who was then placed in the care of a Vulcan man who liked living as a sociology experiment. This is a person who is traumatized from a relatively young age, and who has no idea how to cope with her feelings. She's never received therapy, only more psychological abuse.

The issue I ended up having with the show is that the show itself never addresses this. It's actually pretty clearly the setup for the entire series, but no one ever acknowledges that Michael needs help, no one ever tries to get her any, and, in the end, she never gets the help she needs. They took what could and should have been a character arc about healing from abuse and just turned it into "SMG's pretty good at crying".

Once it became clear that the show had zero interest in examining its inciting premise, I lost all patience with it.

Kichae ,

I feel it hid to much information just to be able to give a twist in the end

I don't think it was much of a twist. Between the doctor's actions in The Broken Circle (using the protocol 12 combat enhancer to fight his way through a ship of Klingons with Nurse Chapel, as recapped at the start of the show), the Special Ops Andorian trying to recruit him to the mission (and the doctor declaring that his days of doing such things were behind him), the re-introduction of the P12 green vial, and the repeated aggressive physical contact between M'Benga and Dah'Ruk, it was pretty well spelled out for us before the end of the episode.

“We’ve Changed the Game”: Teamsters Win Historic UPS Contract ( teamster.org )

Today, the Teamsters reached the most historic tentative agreement for workers in the history of UPS, protecting and rewarding more than 340,000 UPS Teamsters nationwide. The overwhelmingly lucrative contract raises wages for all workers, creates more full-time jobs, and includes dozens of workplace protections and improvements....

Kichae ,

This will be a huge selling point for the Teamsters of they're serious about trying to unionize Amazon.

Kichae ,

Yeah, I'm not sure who's going out buying a new TV every couple of years.

Kichae ,

Hey, if the guys breaking in were paid for their efforts, that's work, right?

Right?

Kichae ,

Cool. Cool, cool, cool.

Just gonna go ahead and block you now.

Defederation, Threads and You ( kbin.social )

A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....

Kichae , (edited )

I keep seeing people say that defederating from a server means your site will still send content to that server, but I don't actually see that happening in practice.

It also doesn't really make sense from a systems point of view.

If I have a server block list, that list is really only acting locally. Any site I put on that list doesn't know its been blackballed. Instead, I just refuse to accept content from it. Importantly, this is a refusal of delivery, not a stop request. When receiving content from remote sites, your site isn't actively making update requests. You basically just add yourself to a mailing list, and you and your instance get sent anything that you've signed up for. So, stuff keeps getting sent even even after your instance has defederated, it's just being filtered out before it reaches you.

But if I've blocked communications with another website, I've blocked communications with them. That should mean incoming and outgoing. If this isn't how Lemmy treats their block lists, that's kind of bizarre.

It's also not how I've seen things pan out in practice. Communities hosted on beehaw, for instance, are totally out of sync with the mirrors hosted on sites they've defederated from. Those sites do not appear to be getting updates from beehaw. There are a few breakthrough posts here and there, but from what I've seen they're few and far between, and it's possible they're arriving via third party.

I don't think the potluck analogy is a great one here, unfortunately. In the potluck, as described, all of the food gets placed in a central location, and people from all over can come and pick what they want from the table.

But there is no table here. There's no central location where instances go to pull content in from. Everything is passing back and forth from each other.

Instead, at this potluck, you carry your beans around with you all night, and sometimes people let you know that they'd like some beans. Thr fondu guy is also lugging his pot around, and sharing with people who ask.

But if you're not on speaking terms with the fondu guy, if he asks you for some beans, you're just going to say "no".

He can still get beans, though. And this is where I think things get hazy and difficult to interpret based on observed communities. Because if Iask you for some beans, and you give them to me, I can see that fondu guy doesn't have any, and I can share some of them with him.

He doesn't need to talk to you to get your beans. That doesn't mean you're actively handing them out to him, though. And he's at the mercy of other people who may be willing to share those beans.

And if everyone at the party decides they don't want to share with him?

Well, then he goes beanless, no matter how open he is to receiving beans.

Kichae ,

If they all want to pile into exploding-heads, it would at least make them easy to contain.

I wonder if there could be a way to effectively shadow-ban entire instances.

Kichae ,

No, defederation isn't shadowed. If an instance defederates from you, you stop receiving content from them, and it's pretty obvious to anyone paying attention that you've been defederated.

Plus, on Lemmy at least, block lists are publicly viewable.

Kichae ,

If an instance defederates from you, that instance stops seeing stuff from your instance. But not necessarily the other way around, as defederation is a one-way action.

I invite you to check out, say, [email protected] from lemmy.world, and from beehaw.org directly. You'll notice that .world isn't receiving updates from beehaw. A couple of posts seem to have filtered through somehow, but there are almost no posts or comments coming from beehaw.

The group is completely out of sync with its origin. And it's not because .world has blocked beehaw. Beehaw very much still appears under .world's list of linked websites.

Blocked instances are blocked, and when you block communication between sites, that's usually a two-way street.

Kichae ,

This episode seems like it's going to be light-hearted. Faces was, uh... not.

It is not Lemmy or kbin, it is the fediverse. ( kbin.social )

I don't think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on "Lemmy" or "kbin" is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer....

Kichae ,

I'm not convinced that something good will emerge.

Keep in mind we still use "internet".

Kichae ,

No, you're posting on kbin.social. You're never ever doing anything directly on a remote site. You view on k-so, you vote on k-so, you post on k-soc, and you comment on k-soc. Your actions are then, at some later point (which may be microseconds, or it may be hours, depending on traffic levels on both k-soc and the remote website), relayed to the remote website so the two copies of the community can be synchronised.

Kichae ,

I'm not going to watch the video, because everything about this gives off bad-faith manosphere "owning the libs" vibes, and ain't nobody got time for that, but is the TL;DR here that they're comparing elective bottom surgery to the eugenicist practice of performing unconsented and often uninformed sterilization of indigenous people and people with intellectual disabilities?

Because if so, wow.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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    Kichae ,

    The social environment, most likely.

    If you're at a carnival barker convention, you're going to need to shout your voice hoarse just to seem like you even belong, let alone stand out.

    Kichae ,

    Since Threads isn't federating yet, there's no particular rush to announce a stance. Especially while the developer is still playing catch up following the user growth.

    Kichae ,

    This.

    The nature of the Fediverse is that if you don't agree with your admin's running of things, you can pick a new admin. Or become one yourself.

    The admin has every right to decide what their website interacts with.

    Kichae ,

    Smaller communities may mean fewer posts, but once a community hits a critical limit, it's still more posts than most people will read in a day.

    This is only really an issue for really niche communities that haven't migrated here yet, and if all they find here when they come to explore is the exact same posts as on Reddit, but with no comments, then what's even the point of moving?

    If they didn't come out of the principle of what Reddit is doing, then it will be the content that ultimately makes them move. And that content needs to be different, and better, than what they can get on Reddit. Not the same, but with zero comments.

    Kichae ,

    The API will come. It's still very early days for the kbin project. It's, uh, kind of alpha software.

    Kichae ,

    They're not wrong. There's a few hundred thousand active users here. There are 10s of millions on Reddit.

    Most Reddit users straight up do not care about the API, or 3rd party apps, or the shitty management of the site. They want their memes, and their niche communities, and their quirky Reddit shit posting, and all of that is still right there.

    Users will leave gradually as the ads get more intrusive, and as development moves towards more psychologically manipulative features, and as Reddit cuts costs.

    Kichae ,

    They're not redundant functions. They're... Mixed up on kbin right now, because things were originally built with the up button boosting content, but that's incongruent with how Lemmy does it, so it was changed.

    But boosting isn't really about sorting at all. It's about republishing content, so that it can be sent out to instances that have started following a group after the content was originally posted.

    Kichae ,

    Boosting is super important in all contexts in the Fediverse.

    When am instance subscribes to a content source - be that a user actor or a group actor - on behalf of a user, it only requests future content. Back catalogues are not fetched by default. Boosting re-publishes the content, so that it is received by new followers.

    With a group actor, the boost triggers the actor to reboot the content itself, sending it out to new subscribers to the group, and filling in that back catalogue.

    Kichae ,

    Perhaps more importantly why would one retweet a comment? Rather than a post?

    The way content propagation works here is that someone using Website A follows a remote content source (either a user, or a group -- aka a "community" or a "magazine"), and the remote hosting website (let's call it Website B) sends all subsequent content from that source to Website A, where the requesting user can then view it. If someone from Website A was already following that content source, then they get to see all of the content that Website A had already received, and benefit from earlier users efforts. But if that person was the first from Website A to subscribe to that content source, then they only get future content.

    It's very similar to a, well, a magazine subscription in that way. NatGeo isn't sending you their 150 years worth of back catalogue when you subscribe in 2023 (not that you should bother subscribing to NatGeo in 2023).

    The 'boost' button republishes content, though. Posts, comments, whatever. Hitting 'boost' on a comment republishes it, and once republished the group actor (the little bot-like construct that functionally is the group) sees it as new content, and pushes it out to everyone following it. This means it will reach websites that started subscribing to the group after the comment was originally posted.

    Boosting is how older content (where older basically means "from anytime before literally right now") spreads through the fediverse.

    Kichae ,

    Users who can see the content need to boost it?

    Users who use the website that the community is hosted on have access to the full library of it. They need to boost stuff. And people who subscribe from remote sites need to boost older content that they've seen.

    Kichae ,

    Someone just needs to follow. The community owner either needs to seed the community to big instances using accounts on them, or people who find the community via other instances need to subscribe and know that fresh content will come. Then they can boost older content from the hosting site.

    Things take some conscious effort here. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

    Kichae ,

    If my instance follows a community at time t = T, and your instance starts following it at time t = T+10, I can boost content posted between T and T+9 so that you can see it.

    Meanwhile, if people on the hosting instance boost things posted from times earlier than T, we both get to see them. Then, once they're visible to us, we can continue to boost them for new instances to see.

    Kichae ,

    then it'd only show up the user page of the guy who went to all of that effort?

    Where are you getting that impression from?

    Kichae ,

    The Fediverse is just the world wide social web. It lacks cohesion just the same way that the regular web does.

    That's going to limit its appeal for the people who see the internet as 3 cellphone apps. But that's also ok. It doesn't need to be for them.

    Kichae ,

    "If" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, to be honest.

    The average internet user has been ok with everything collapsing into a monolithic search engine and 4 giant social websites owned by 3 guys.

    Maybe we accept complexity and expect a little more out of the people who end up here. People whole like what things have become can stay where they are.

    Kichae ,

    The k-soc terms of service state:

    Harassment, hate speech, or any other form of harmful behavior will not be tolerated.

    Now, I can't read ernest's mind to determine what he meant by this line exactly, but this kind of mean spirited, bad-faith jab falls under "harmful behaviour" in my book.

    Kichae ,

    Don't platform fascists. Don't play apologetics for platforming fascists. Don't tolerate people who platform fascists.

    Stop treating fascism as a mere difference of opinion.

    Kichae ,

    No, it's good for getting rid of antisocial shit heads who feel like they're entitled to an audience for their toxic or abusive ideas and beliefs.

    Because that's exactly what it speaks to.

    Now, if you want to argue with Karl, might I recommend getting a PhD in philosophy and starting from there, rather than whining on the internet?

    Kichae ,

    Argue all you want. But if you're going to argue that the line between what is acceptable and what isn't is what is legal, first off, uh, no (fascist rhetoric is legal in most places), and second, whose laws do you want to apply?

    Kichae ,

    People love to blame the victim for defending themselves over the problematic person who is abusing them, because if they acknowledge that someone is being abusive that kind of morally obligates them to step in.

    And they very much don't want to do that.

    And obviously the exploitation of users for their knowledge and content so that the owners of Reddit Inc. can gain wealth for sitting on their thumbs is different from the kind of abuse one's mind might go to when the word is raised, but it's the same dynamic.

    Someone is claiming mistreatment, those around them are annoyed by the claims, not by the mistreatment, because the person standing up for themselves is putting onlookers in the dangerous position of examining their relationship to that mistreatment.

    And they don't wanna.

    I feel like less of a man because of how emotionally sensitive I am.

    I don’t know how else to describe it, but all my male friends and family are very unemotional. Not in the sense that they don’t feel anything, but that they are a lot better at handling them and I feel like I’m not. I’ve tried meditation, therapy, healthy eating and a better sleep schedule but nothing works. I still...

    Kichae ,

    I think this is an important distinction. You don't want to become unfeeling, but you do want to become more in control of your feelings.

    Ehhhhhhhhh.... You want to be in control of your actions. Trying to control your feelings just tends to lead to thinks like repression.

    Kichae ,

    True, and fair. A big part of regulation, though, is actually feeling and acknowledging those emotions, and giving them permission and space to exist.

    Observation vs containment.

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