All these “why are people using Bluesky and not Mastodon” topics are starting to give me a headache. You’ve been told and on some level, I have to assume you understand the reasons, but are simply unwilling to address them. When people say, “it’s difficult to use” instead of understanding why they think that way, you just dismissively wave your hands and say, “no it’s not”.

If you want people to use Mastodon, you need to SHOW people the power of federation while HIDING all the rough bits. People want to go to where the friends, writers, artists, scientists, etc. they want to follow are and sign up for an account there. Simple as. In this way, they very much want at least the appearance of centralization. I don’t want to have to get balls deep in an instance’s politics to understand their moderation, who they’re federated with, if they have the funds to operate into the foreseeable future, and how to migrate my data if any of those things goes sideways.

I was thinking about this the other day, one of my favorite analogies is seconds.

A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is … 31,688 years.

The analogy already breaks down, because while most people could understand 12 days and a lot of adults can understand 31 years for having lived it (some even twice or more!), 31,688 years is completely incomprehensible again. How many human generations is that? All of recorded human history is only like 5,000 years. It’s utterly, mind-numbingly insane. No trillionaires, ever! No billionaires!!!

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/17/business/elon-musk-richest-person-trillionaire/index.html

This was published on September 17th of this year, after most of the nonsense of Twitter and utter things. He’s still on track, by 2027 no less. There’s no telling how directly and flagrantly he’ll benefit from a Trump win, either.

It’s been used many times before, but I like the analogy of ordering food. If I go to a restaurant and order risotto, I haven’t made the dish, I’ve only consumed it. I want you to focus on that word “consume”, it’s important here.

Another idea I’ve seen recently that I like was a summed post something like this:

• People use AI to write a 4,000 word article from a 15 word idea (introduction of noise)
• Others then use AI to summarize the 4,000 word article into a 15 word blurb (introduction of more noise)

I know I’m using a lot of analogies here; from food to writing and now the visual medium - but stick with me. Completely sidestepping any lofty notions of soul or humanity, let’s look strictly at what’s being communicated in a visual piece of art generated by AI. It’s an idea, one containing neither your specific style (the creative process) or vision (the final product), though you may feel you get a close approximation after several iterations and a detailed/complex enough prompt. If you wanted to convey the idea of “eagle perched in a tree”, you’ve already done so with that phrase (or prompt in this respect). By providing an AI-generated image, you’ve narrowed my own ability to interpret down into the AI-generated noise now taking up space between us.

The reason you’d use AI-generated art is because you need to fill space, like the thumbnail to go with an article. An empty space to dump things into. While I can’t ever claim enough authority to define what exactly art is and is not (nobody can), I can say with absolute certainty that no matter how far the tech evolves, to me PERSONALLY, AI will only ever generate content, not art. There is already more art in the world than I could possibly consume in a hundred lifetimes, I neither want nor need this garbage.

We could explain it to you, but you’re not interested in understanding.

Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.

Even if that’s not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it’ll work for your similar purposes as well.

… I thought that … nevermind, this is why I’m here.

The Elgato has a USB coming out of it and I thought that passing everything through it would allow the USB to feed/write the video stream without any other processing, I guess what I’ve really been after this whole time is more OBS tweaking.

The only thing you might want to do is go into the video settings and set it to use NVENC (I think you can do that on Linux) to offload the encoding to your GPU (which has dedicated encoding hardware) instead of your CPU.

I think this was a big missing piece for me.

For all my years in IT, I’ve never been an A/V nerd.>

Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

WTF, no, this is worse in every way. So instead of being involved with the people and topics I choose, it’s instead left up to an algorithm? Somehow even more opaque than usual because of AI involvement.

This isn’t solving any problem, this is yet another mask to push content in front of people.

The rollout already hit me and passed. I use Chrome at work with uBlock mostly because it’s mandated and I burnt through all the warnings and videos were starting to not play. I thought that was that, I was too lazy to fix it on my work PC but a day later uBlock updated and it hasn’t been an issue since.

Procrastinating wins again, I never took direct action. I don’t want to get too hopeful, but I think even Google is going to have more trouble with this than they anticipate

In response to a perfectly valid question about dumbass plan I just came up with:

“we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”

I wouldn’t say “no reason”.

I’m not gonna do a whole Vaush teardown here, but it’s amazing how he always seems to align himself against a lot of the other leftist YouTubers I have watched and respected for years.

His obsessive need to tout his “rightness” on all matters is extremely abrasive and off-putting. He likes to cite diversity of tactics as a reason for engaging in debate the way he does, but then also doesn’t respect anyone that can’t debate their position. I’ve read a lot of philosophy and political commentary over the years, I know what I believe, but if you put me up against him I’d crumble on the spot. I couldn’t debate to save my life, it’s a particular skill. Watching him angrily yell at other leftists is not furthering the points he thinks it is.

Being able to win a debate doesn’t make you right, and losing one doesn’t make you wrong. He’s just another pig in the mud.

I’m right there with you.

Microsoft (and honestly a lot of mainstream software) has been slowly evolving over the years from providing robust, full-featured products that allow you build your own workflows to shipping things with an inherent “paradigm” or “ideology” on how they should be used. Mostly (unsurprisingly) to the ends of data collection, ad serving, and profit driving. Gross, gross, gross.

God, but that just seems like the worst. The fun of karma was that it was worthless but hey, a lot of us liked seeing big number go up and that was fulfilling in itself. Now people are going to be incentived to post for the sake of posting to try to earn something. Low effort, contentious, engagement driving spam.

One of my favorite examples of this was playing The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure on the Gamecube back in they day. Me and a friend were really into it, but had trouble rounding up extra players. We got his little sister and an unwilling third friend to join. After about 30 minutes the unwilling friend, Marcus, gets bored with the game and starts sabotaging the rest of us. He’d run around smacking us with his sword making us drop rupees or refuse to stand where we needed him. That’s honestly when it became fun for all of us, though.

The other three of us would plan out the room and then we’d figure out how to wrangle Marcus back into place. Someone would hold him so he couldn’t go rogue and hit us while the others got in place to pull some levers before the wrangler would toss Marcus onto a pressure plate or something. He got to continue being a little bastard while we (slowly) made progress through the game. He eventually came around and helped us when it was absolutely necessary, but it was always clear it was just so he could keep being a bastard again. I really enjoy that asymmetrical style of gameplay and wish more things capitalized on it.

Also on the Gamecube of notable mention was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Always fun when someone would get the personal mission of “take the most damage” and become a suicidal maniac in every encounter, much to everyone else’s detriment. Ah the good old days.

But if I give them one of my nickels, what will I rub the other one against?

Thank you, that’s good clarification on what the actual motivations are here. Was having trouble following all the threads and sussing it out myself. Appreciate it.

Am I missing something obvious here? What is motivating such stringent measures to be put in place when things have been sufficient without them thus far? Who is asking for this?

I live in my own little online echo chambers, but even I can’t believe there’s enough ground swell for the government to step in on … What? Violence? Addiction? This is very confusing.

The original post was at least half joking in tone, but in seriousness, I think there’s an argument to be made that “posts” applies to topical threads. Threads that originate with a piece of content like a link or self post and that all following discussion is at least tangentially related. I’d call them posts here on Lemmy for that.

Tweets, however, often originate out of thin air, be it someone’s head or ass. When someone says, “Kanye West ‘tweeted’ <INSERT OPINION HERE>” you’ve already determined about how seriously you’re going to take it.

Not gonna lie, that still felt a little dirty. But I already posted it to the internet and there’s no going backsies.

Everything is tweets now, on all platforms; hear me out.

It might sound lazy, and I certainly have no loyalty to the Twitter brand, but if Musk isn’t going to defend it we have the opportunity to dilute and generalize the term (like zipper or band-aid). We can kill it dead AND reclaim it.

It’s a good word! Short, sweet, has familiarity, and is honestly pretty descriptive for the simple bird-like chatter of the discourse. Everything else proposed sounds dumb as hell, not to mention you’re doing the marketing for them. Don’t sell their brands - suffocate them!

It’s the one-two punch of “why wasn’t it already in place” and “very bad, slow communication” wrapped up in “a team that really should’ve known better already”. If any one of those had been different maybe the reaction wouldn’t’ve been so strong. This just isn’t what you want to see from a new service that’s hoping to take on the entrenched Twitter (no matter how rapidly it may be declining, holdouts will be strong) and the evil Threads (which jumped itself so far ahead in userbase through … shady tactics).

At the end of the day, this is a product. We have a right to demand better service if they want us using it (how they make a profit isn’t our concern). This is the best time to strike too, and lay down the groundwork for what kind of community that we want to foster there. Sending a strong message that we want Twitter but without the bad stuff that made us leave is very important. Did some people take it even way too far? Probably maybe, but you should know by now being online that you can’t let the worst of everyone represent you.