• 1 Post
  • 19 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 14th, 2025

help-circle
rss






  • Yes this happened to me as well, I don’t remember what I was talking about but I remember I made a typo and it just ran with it as if it was a real thing. I let it keep going to see if it ever realized it was talking about something that didn’t exist but nope it kept going until I pointed it out.

    I ask for it to explain what the command did and I did manage to wrap my head around a few concepts but in the end I feel like I’m trusting it to not insert any vulnerabilities into the system, and I don’t like that. Mistrust is the whole reason I’m doing this. But yeah I’ll pay close attention and maybe even ask all the implications of he changes we make.


  • I know next to nothing about using the command line, so I’ve been relying pretty heavily on ChatGPT to set my stuff up and so far it has reliably helped me overcome every issue. The problem is, of course, that I often don’t even understand what the issue was in the first place so I don’t even know if the fix that the ai spits out is, let’s say, correct. I don’t really want to become an It expert, I just want to be able to host some services on my own to depend less on corps, is it alright if I continue to rely on the AI? Or do you guys think that I just have to learn this stuff or else I might mess up?

    I don’t have great security concerns btw, my ISP doesn’t allow port forwarding, so I access my server exclusively though Tailscale.








  • I think the point of that article is closer to my own argument than what I myself would have thought. I do still think that the problem is the design of the algorithm: a simple algorithm that just sorts content is not a problem. One that decides what to omit and what to push based on what it thinks will make me spend more time on the platform is problematic and is the kind of algorithm we should ban. So maybe the premise is, algorithms designed to make people spend more time on social media should be banned.

    Engaging with another idea in there I absolutely think that people should be able to say that Joe Biden is a lizard person and have that come up on everyone’s feed. Because ridiculous claims like that are easily shut down when everyone can see them and comment how fucking dumb it is. But when the message only makes the rounds around communities that are primed to believe that Joe Biden is a lizard person, the message gains credibility for them the more it is suppressed. We used to bring the Klu Klux Klan people on tv to embarrass themselves in front of all of America and it worked very very well, it’s a social sanity check. We no longer have this and now we have bubbles in every part of the political spectrum believing all kinds of oversimplifications, lies and propaganda.




  • But correct me if I’m wrong (I’m not a programmer), lemmy’s algorithm is basically just sorting; it doesn’t choose over two pieces of media to show me but rather how it orders them. Facebook et al will simply not show content that I will not engage with or that will make me spend less time on the platform.

    I agree that they are useful but at a certain point we as a society sometimes need to weight the usefulness of certain technologies against the potential for harm. If the potential for harm is greater than the benefit, then maybe we should somewhat curb the potential for that harm or remove it altogether.

    So maybe we could refine the argument to be we need to limit what signals algorithms can use to push content? Or maybe that all social media users should have access to an algorithm free feed and that the algorithm driven feed be hidden by default and can be customizable by users?


  • While transparency would be helpful for discussion, I don’t think it would change or help with stopping propaganda, misinformation and outright bullshit from being disseminated to the masses because people just don’t care. Even if the algorithm was transparently made to push false narratives people would just shrug and keep using it. The average person doesn’t care about the who, what or why as long as they are entertained. But yes, transparency would be a good first step.