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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: April 22nd, 2025

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  • Americans are brainwashed to believe that there’s only one particular and specific way to protest, and beyond that all you can do is kill people.

    They haven’t yet realized that there is a huge swathe of options in between, and it requires no organization or depending on others, and no violence against anyone. You can just quietly do stuff. Probably less risky than doing anything publicly in a country with ubiquitous surveillance and the law no longer matters. Protests are great for showing the level of public support for a movement, but if the government doesn’t represent the people their effect will be minimal for producing real change.

    There currently is no cost for ventures into fascism. Make it so expensive they’ll think twice next time (if there is a next time.)




  • Trying to be a Reddit clone.

    Reddit was shit to begin with. It was a dumbed down forum site for people who found sites like Plastic or Kuro5hin too intimidating or complicated(!).

    Slashdot-style upvoting would instantly solve a lot of “Reddit”-type problems, because instead of just good/bad, or like/dislike, the reason for the vote is noted, such as “insightful”, “funny”, etc., and you can then filter and sort comments much easier. Just filtering out “funny” comments saved soooooooo much time.

    Another thing: Why don’t creators of threads have the option to admin their own threads? It’s their thread! It wouldn’t be appropriate for discussion threads (for obvious reasons), but for interpersonal posts and questions, it makes perfect sense for the creator to be able to have control over what appears in the thread to keep it on topic and the trolls at bay. It’s pretty rare to see a post where someone asks a question that doesn’t quickly devolve into an offtopic mess, and the creator is usually attacked for trying to bring it back on topic. This has made Reddit useless for question-answering (and besides, the most upvoted answer is almost always wrong.)

    Is the purpose of these forums to enable authentic conversation, or just to farm content regardless of quality (to be sold to AI companies, presumably)?





  • Stack Overflow hasn’t been useful for at least 10 years, if not longer.

    The flagged “correct” answer is almost always wrong due to idiotic power-users and the vast horde of idiots who upvote obviously wrong answers because they’re bootlickers. The real answer is usually buried in between the posts by gatekeepers, pedants, idiots with something to prove, wannabe admins, egotistical idiots, the highly opinionated technologically insecure, etc ad nauseam. Reddit is just as bad for tech questions, if not worse.

    Since I started using LLMs (running on my own inference server) I haven’t used anything else for tech questions that wasn’t opinion-based. Much, much more useful, and it requires you to think seriously about the problem to come up with a good prompt – which often gives you the answer before you even finish the prompt.