What is success here? The few founders and VC get filthy rich as the larger population dumps their money into Discord stock while the users and teams with limited foresight, who’ve moved their communities to discord, suffer?

I mean yeah I guess that’s the success Cory Doctorow warns us about again and again.

But that’s not my definition of success.

For context I’ve been on the receiving end of an IPO and the founders and investors made out like bandits while a fair number of employees were stuck holding the bags thanks to lock-ins, dilution and over priced shares.

His recent interview on Pod Save America was so off putting, so filled with his own narcissism, that I simply couldn’t finish listening to the interview. There was little of substance there; just a very out of touch very rich guy loving the smell of his own shit.

It’s a fair question.

Carney is a Center-right corporate kleptocracy bureaucrat. I have no love for the gentlemen. He’s the 1%.

His primary opponent however is owned by the far right and will likely govern even more dictatorially at a time when that’s particularly dangerous. He will sell out healthcare, social safety nets, and the environment in a way that puts Harper to shame.

As I see it, the choice is picking stability, crappy as it is, or selling out the most vulnerable among us for a chance at change.

It’s not a great choice - but it’s what we have. Wishing for something else won’t make it so. The NDP won’t rise from the ashes in the next ten days.

So my vow is to swallow a bitter pill and get involved - be the change I want to see.

In the meantime I believe we need (and have) a unified front against fascism and rampant fear/hatred.

I feel very similarly.

I was incredibly put-off when they accepted to not raise the issue of electoral reform as a requirement to sign the agreement with the Liberals - who themselves ran on electoral reform (at least in part).

I’ve received a single email from the NDP this election season - announcing their new t-shirt designs.

The liberal rep - part of the crew responsible for ousting Trudeau, came to my door.

:(

That’s a really interesting PoV. I feel as if I’ve been grappling with the same quandary but landed differently.

The NDP is broken. I say this as a lifelong supporter who strongly believes their stated values and goals represent mine.

That said, the current version of the NDP is not viable or working in my opinion. Their actions do not match their words.

I’m resolved to vote Liberal (in a riding where it matters) and then immediately begin to support the federal NDP party to be ready for the next election. Time to get my hands dirty.

32kph in Canada (since the post references Toronto) for pedal-assist (level 1) e-bikes.

This makes even the limited / legal ones little fast, but not beyond what a human is capable of.

Unfortunately It’s very easy to de-limit the inexpensive ones or the DIY ones and there’s no checking. :/

Afinity Publisher is a good, affordable and a solid replacement for InDesign, at the price of MS Publisher.

We switched away from Creative Suite during one of the many “Adobe overstepping” debacles and haven’t looked back. Publisher 2 has felt like a drop in replacement for most documents/posters/newsletters/flyers etc.

I’m suggesting Afinity publisher because if you’re using ms publisher you don’t have qualms with closed source software and probably value some of the workflow niceties that come with commercially supported software.

Hoping this question is in good faith.

I think that depends on what we mean by “pay.”

My take:

If our lives are better/easier/safer/happier than the lives of those who grew out of wrongs committed by those of our own heritage / lineage, then yes, I believe we should endeavour to make their lives better.

Whether that’s financial reparations, return of property / land, sharing of resources, etc. should be up to communities to work together to decide.

Put another way, if my good fortune rests on the misfortune of others - even in the past - my personal take is that I am compelled to help where I can.

Sometimes that’s a simple as voting for the thing that benefits me less than others or me not at all because it aids those who need it most.

So yeah, we should “pay” but “pay” can mean so many things.

That’s just me.

So maybe we’re kinda staring at two sides of the same coin. Because yeah, you’re not misrepresentin my point.

But wait there’s a deeper point I’ve been trying to make.

You’re right that I am also saying it’s all bullshit - even when it’s “right”. And the fact we’d consider artificially generated, completely made up text libellous indicates to me that we (as a larger society) have failed to understand how these tools work. If anyone takes what they say to be factual they are mistaken.

If our feelings are hurt because a “make shit up machine” makes shit up… well we’re holding the phone wrong.

My point is that we’ve been led to believe they are something more concrete, more exact, more stable, much more factual than they are — and that is worth challenging and holding these companies to account for. i hope cases like these are a forcing function for that.

That’s it. Hopefully my PoV is clearer (not saying it’s right).

Ok hear me out: the output is all made up. In that context everything is acceptable as it’s just a reflection of the whole of the inputs.

Again, I think this stems from a misunderstanding of these systems. They’re not like a search engine (though, again, the companies would like you to believe that).

We can find the output offensive, off putting, gross , etc. but there is no real right and wrong with LLMs the way they are now. There is only statistical probability that a) we’ll understand the output and b) it approximates some currently held truth.

Put another way; LLMs convincingly imitate language - and therefore also convincing imitate facts. But it’s all facsimile.

Really?

I read your reply as saying the output is (can be) libellous - which it cannot be because it is not based on a dataset which resolves to anything absolute.

Maybe we’re just missing each other - struggling to parse each others’ output. ;)

Surely you jest because it’s so clearly not if you understand how LLMs work (at the core it’s a statistic model - and therefore all approximation to a varying degree).

But great can come out of this case if it gets far enough.

Imagine the ilk of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, XAI, etc. being forced to admit that an LLM can’t actually do anything but generate approximations of language. That these models (again LLMs in particular) produce approximations of language that are so good they’re often indistinguishable from the versions our brains approximate.

But at the core they cannot produce facts because the way they are made includes artificially injected randomness layered on-top of mathematically encoded values that merely get expressed as tiny pieces of language (tokens) - ones that happen to be close to each other in a massively multidimensional vector space.

TLDR - they’d be forced to admit the emperor has no clothes and that’s a win for everyone (except maybe this one guy).

Also it’s worth noting I use LLMs for work almost daily and have studied them quite a bit. I’m not a hater on the tech. Only the capitalists trying to force it down everyone’s throat in such a way that we blindly adopt it for everything.

It’s all hallucinations.

Some (many) just happen to be very close to factual.

It’s sad to see that the marketing of these tools has been so effective that few realize how they work and what they do.

Emotionally.

https://archive.ph/osq2e

Except it’s accidentally stabilizing it. Source am a progressive Canadian living in a (normally) regressive Province. Not like Alberta regressive but still surrounded by Oligarchs.

For the most part Garuda has a GUI for everything. It’s Arch on easy mode and it’s most excellent for new and seasoned users alike.

I tried it only because I wanted to give Linux gaming a try and I struggled to get any other distribution to work with my graphics card - I liked it so much I switched to it permanently for my work desktop as well.

While there are many reasons to dislike (or outright avoid) Apple - if you purchase music from them, it’s DRM-free and useable anywhere.

I believe they were one of the first official channels to do this.

Still, hadn’t heard of Quobuz and will check them out!

You’ve described Ghost. Subscriptions for content are a first class citizen.

It’s primary a writing platform with built-in monetization options and the ability to self host. We switched to it from Substack. It’s been fantastic to use and operate. Super slick.