• 11 Posts
  • 160 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • I use Github for 4 reasons:

    • Everybody else is on Github. Github is to repo hosting what Youtube is to video hosting. It’s sad but that’s how it is in this world of unchecked, extreme big tech monopolization. So I put my stuff up there because it’s just simpler to be found.
    • I use Github as a dumb git repo. I don’t use any of the extra social media garbage Microsoft tacked onto it. So I get free hosting and Microsoft pretty much gets no data on me - i.e. I’m a net loss to them.
    • You can use dumb repos as PPA and RPM sources, if you need to distribute Debian or Redhat packages. Microsoft never intented for repos to be used this way, but if I can abuse Microsoft services, I will six ways to Sunday.
    • Github lets you drop videos in your README.md. But here’s a trick: you can use the links to the video files anywhere. In other words, you can use Github to host videos that you can post on other forums - including here on Lemmy, or on Reddit if you’re still patronizing that cesspit for some reason. I find this a nice way to abuse Microsoft’s resources also, and I’m all for abusing Microsoft’s resources.

    TL;DR: I use Github not only because it’s the most prevalent git hosting service out there, but because I can abuse it and make Microsoft pay for the abuse without getting anything of value from me in return.


  • Do you choose your friends and the folks you hang out with? Of course you do. Why should it be any different in the communities you patronize?

    I came here because I was tired of suffering the morons on traditional social media platforms. The Fediverse is not perfect - nothing ever is - and it has its fair share of undesirables too, but it’s much better, and I’m not looking forward to the morons following me here and making things worse. They belong to Facebook and the likes, and they should stay there.


  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.orgtoFediverse@lemmy.worldFediverse enshittification
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    28 days ago

    It won’t enshittify in the strict Doctorow sense. But it will become shittier as more people who are currently plaguing Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and making those platforms terrible discover the Fediverse and come splatter their cowpats here. That’s almost inevitable: it’s happened to just about anything that ever became popular.

    Incidentally, that’s also a big part of the reason why it’s supremely important to boycott Threads and not let it federate: the Fediverse needs to grow, but it doesn’t need to grow with an influx of low-quality Facebook users.




  • I would take what ChatGPT tells you with a gigantic salt crystal.

    Case in point: I made a fairly important purchase in a foreign country recently. The seller’s countract was in the local language, which I speak for ordinary matters but not well enough to understand legalese.

    The seller couldn’t find how a crucial piece of the contract was translated into English, so she typed “Say this in English: the buyer has no right to pull out of the deal even in case of force majeure” in her language. ChatGPT translated it as “The buyer has the right to pull out of the deal in case of force majeure” in English. The exact opposite of what was written!

    Luckily for me, while I didn’t know the legal terms in the local language, I could see it was a negative sentence. So I managed to catch it and understand that the clause was in fact working against me-the-buyer, not in my favor.

    I know why ChatGPT translated it that way: the force majeure clause in most contracts usually states that the deal is off in case of force majeure (force majeure usually being a euphemism for death). But in this instance, the seller turned the clause 180 degrees around, leaving my children on the hook if I snuffed it early and didn’t complete the payment. ChatGPT, being nothing more than a mechanical parrot, simply repeated the most common form of force majeure clause it had been trained on.

    The main takeway from this story is: you should never trust what ChatGPT says, and the more important what you ask it to tell you is to you, the more consequences you will suffer for its mistakes.