Tiota Sram

@piefedadmin issues I haven't seen other comments here address yet:

1. The AI will sometimes hallucinate the post contents in the "summary" it shows. Without clicking through all those links (thus mostly defeating any time savings involved) you'll never know.
2. The AI will be biased in its analysis, even moreso than a human would. Lots of irrelevant details in the comment history will influence the result way more than they should. That's just how LLMs work.
3. The prompt used in this example leads heavily towards false positive results. Designing an actually neutral prompt for an LLM for this purpose is nearly impossible anyways, but this prompt definitely biases heavily towards finding a "pattern" even where there really is none (or when the target user's behavior is no more polarized than the average user).

This moderation practice indicates a significant disregard for good moderation standards. It also does so in a way that relies on a tool that's positively bristling with negative externalities. Instances that work like this should quickly find themselves defederated into their own little bubble, similar to hateful/oppressive instances. This behavior shuls absolutely not be normalized or downplayed.

To address the "poor moderators need to rely on such tools because they're overworked" trope: yes, moderators are often overworked. No, that doesn't make this okay. Perhaps consider limiting the size of your server to whatever size you can comfortably moderate, and letting other volunteers running other servers pick up the slack. That's how the fediverse is supposed to work.

@matildalove@wetdry.world

wheat and air

wheat

Plants create the starches and sugars that make up their bodies and seeds via photosynthesis, a chemical reaction in which CO2 from the air is combined with H2O pulled up from roots (but which originally fell as rain after condensing from clouds, i.e., wet air). Sunlight is used to power the reaction that fuses carbons and hydrogens together into a carbon chain with hydrogen trim, letting excess O2 leave as waste.

So bread is really just all air if you think about it: solidified air plus still-gaseous air.

;P

@Star12Mt first, some things sci-fi or adjacent:

• A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga by Hayao Miyazaki (goes way beyond the animated film and has Miyazaki's usual vivid humanism woven through it)
• Sanity and Tallulah by Molly Brooks (graphic novel series)
• Across a Field of Starlight by Blue Delliquanti (graphic novel)
• Mushishi by Yuki Urushibara (manga, not so much hopeful as meditative and calm; this is fantasy instead of science fiction)

Second, as a teen reader of lots of SFF who as an adult has expanded my horizons, might be consider trying a more classically lighthearted genre?

Hani & Ishu's Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar is an excellent example of a simple, lighthearted, and fun romance that I really enjoyed. Other recs along these lines would be Loveless by Alice Oseman. If he likes dark humor, Just Do This One Thing For Me by Lauren Zimmerman is hilarious.

Finally, it's absolutely not lighter or hopeful, but if a change of pace and expansion of horizons is enough, BLAME by Tsutomu Nihei (manga) is both well outside the western trends but also has a huge legacy so you can see its influences in a lot of modern stuff. More than being dark I think of it as pushing the limits of imagination in interesting ways. The plot is honestly only mediocre IMO but the concepts (and the art) are so good they more than make up for that.

Definitely a star sentence of my current Wikipedia dive:

"Like other rootless land plants of the Silurian and early Devonian Aglaophyton may have relied on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi for acquisition of water and nutrients from the soil."

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_plants

Writing a song that includes verses on plant evolution turns out to be a lot of fun.

@johnbrowntypeface@spore.social @inthehands@hachyderm.io @mhoye@cosocial.ca @robin@social.riley.pub

Perhaps there are reasons that hidden harms will undermine these benefits, but I see shame as successful in several ways right now:

1. People on the fence about LLMs who have some respect for me and other shamers and who aren't the direct targets of our criticism feel more reluctant to use LLMs (also reluctant to admit it if they do, which could be a hidden cost).
2. Those criticized leave or just don't enter communities where they get shamed for using LLMs or know they would be. Everyone else in those communities is better off for this, even though it creates exactly the kind of fragmentation you describe.

Given the amount of communication bandwidth backing the pro-LLM side of things, I'm not sure that staying in community with them and trying to change the entire broader culture is a better move. At least, I don't view the existence of some spaces fragmented along this divide as a bad thing, even if not all spaces should be.

Again I think it's important to keep critique anchored in real harms, but I think shame is ultimately the mechanism by which a lot of these effects play out, even if one tries very hard to stay away from explicit shaming language.

Absolutely for sure the exact same shaming mechanisms when deployed against, for example, queer people in small conservative towns, are horrific and harmful. Maybe this is good enough reason to abandon them as a tool entirely and and community that tries to use them for good is destined to devolve into something grim...

On the topic of conservatives: they absolutely use shame heavily within their ranks, but also deploy shamelessness as a signifier of status, since leaders being infallible/above the law is a celebrated tenant of fascism. This contradiction does cause some internal friction as non-fascist conservatives (yes such a thing exists) object to the shamelessness, but this right now just helps the power structure identify and discard them, plus it molds people who aren't thinking things through towards fascist participation and away from actual principles. Since in most circumstances most people will take the easiest cognitive path away from cognitive dissonance, the dissonance between intense shaming of the rank-and-file for the exact same things leaders shamelessly do brings to a head the "am I loyal or an I principled" where the "loyal" branch is both incentivized with threats and cognitively easier than the "principled" branch, leading people to abandon proto-principles in favor of loyalty.