First I would bang on a neighbor's door and pay them to follow me with a camera then run into the fairly nearby motorbike shop and yell 'quick I'm doing a Mr Beast challenge I need to spend a million dollars in the next half hour!' all four guys working would jump at it especially if I said 'give yourself 10% commission on each one'

The only other shop near that isn't just groceries is a wedding dress shop so I guess while they're getting the paperwork ready I'd run in and buy their most expensive white gowns so that we could ride in style - though the train might get caught in the chain...

Oh and I'd run into the pub and tell them to ring up as much as possible before the time runs out so we can all go there after to relax.

This isn't a corporation advertising to get your business it's a collective movement of people working to create a better internet, I totally understand you not liking politics but the reality of this world is that politics is important - the people runnning instances are generally doing it with their own time and money simply because they believe in the importance of the project, of course these are going to be people with strong principles.

Personally I think having a complex ecosystem is going to be a great thing when it's had time to emerge and settle but yeah for now it's all a bit new and up in the air but that's part of the fun

I'm sure it's not lack of technical skill it's a mental block, I've helped so many people set up software that is literally clicking ok a dozen times then they're like 'oh let me print this, hang on I need to compile a firmware update and flash it using a telegraph key...' big brands have the shittiest software, but people feel they should be able to understand because it's professional but something like an open source federated social network is nerd stuff so they feel the the shouldn't be able to.

Case in point, I installed MPV on a friends laptop because VLC wouldn't play the file without crashing, the install process is super simple but they have green on black hacker terminal output instead of a process bar and you type Y when prompted instead of clicking yes -- it gave her anxiety just watching me do it, said maybe we should try uninstalling VLC and reinstalling instead... Of course mpv played the video flawlessly and used less CPU and ram doing so which warmed her to it. There's no way she couldn't have understood everything and done it herself but the fact it's not as corporate as VLC would have written it off (and wow that's a crazy thing to say, I love that there's so much great open source software that VLC is middle of the road)

Did you see the story about classified info regularly being sent to random people in Mali because they send it to .ml instead of .mil by mistake?

But yeah honestly I doubt it matters what he knows, having him parade Infront of people saying how awfull the west is would play well to the home crowd, they can pretend to have gotten great secrets from him and he'll be given all the luxuries North Korea can spare... A small concrete room and almost enough food to live!

We might have to ban it too if Canada is going to charge the instance owners for every Canadian news story posted

Bit crypto does that by publicly recording all transactions on the Blockchain, this is kinda the same thing in that it'll not just about being told 'in total sixteen people agree' and having to belive spez that he hasn't just invented the number, it's seeing who voted and how.

You can of course have more than one account and keep your identity private similar to crypto where your transactions are public but the owner of the walker can be private

Yeah this information has always been available up spez and co

There's a lot of fake SD cards on the market, worth checking it before putting anything important on it. I find that if you can put more than eight gig of data on it without it getting corrupted then it's probably real

That's how a lot of open source works tbh, often devs have jobs to make money and work on their project in free time then if the project gains traction they start making enough off donations or whatever to drop their other work.

I think it'll take time but as things settle a bit I wouldn't be shocked to see a lot of uses spring up that draw in users without them really being aware they're even using the fediverse.

For example one of the main draws to Reddit was always the tech knowledge of the users but us nerds are all here now so it's only a matter of time before Twitter and Facebook have screenshots of Lemmy posts rather than Reddit posts, all the rabbit holes that used to lead to Reddit will start pointing here.

There are already interesting bots being written for communities here, I saw a chat GPT one and no doubt anyone making a fun toy is far more likely to design it to work here where it's not going to have API access destroyed and everything is more flexible - I know that next bot I write will be for lemmy rather then Reddit which I'd normally use. I might even get round to writing the community RPG game that was going to work on its own subreddit, I could have it as a custom instance instead and allow members of federated communities to play.

There's so many more possibilities and as they evolve they'll slowly draw people over and when they have their toe in I suspect meny will stay. I've got a hundred ideas for things to make and with ai coding helping I'll probably actually get round to finishing a dozen of them before the end of the year - I went to try new ways of visualising discussions, of working together and against each other to reach a common goal, I want to make games and mobile apps that work with communities in interesting ways and this is the perfect platform to do it on so I know I don't be the only one

That's true, only Canadian instances would have to block Canadian news sites

Yeah but that will change over time, I think we've got the potential to make much better tech communities than Reddit had especially as this increasingly becomes the defacto nerd hangout

My controversial opinion is that candy crush is actually brilliant, yeah they want you to buy gold but it's more fun not to. The same goes for a lot of advert funded / in app purchase games - they're fantastic mobile games if you ignore the money option.

Morrowind ports and similar aren't great mobile games, they're great games but candy crush I can pull out my pocket when I'm waiting for a bus and get totally drawn into a few rounds. Airport control is another example, draw lines to direct landing planes and avoid a crash - super simple and repetitive but its complexity grows, cut the rope likewise is a true game in my definition because you learn skills and develop your personal ability beyond just learning game mechanics. They're engaging and enjoyable with a complexity ramp and nice easy to understand ui and graphics - they're everything a mobile game should be.

There are some great horror and story games too, especially the Indy ones

Yeah it annoys me so many people don't seem to realise AI and automation is pretty much our only real hope of fixing our climate issues. automated construction will allow more efficient buildings which when designed using AI tools can easily incorporate all the newest and best design methods, AI tools likewise will help scientists and engineers design and run experiments which are totally out of the scope of current practice.

They're getting so good at understanding what I want, there are times I've spent hours googling obscure search terms trying to work out the library I need but a brief description of what I need into one of the LLMs and it'll just tell me

Yeah, I think the big thing here isn't really users it's creators - I've tried various interesting things on Reddit, created some tools and bots because it used to be a great platform for that but going forward there's no way I'll waste time making them there when I could make them here.

A lot of the most interesting new things will get made here, especially with how flexible it is for people customizing their own instance to create totally new experiences. Over time there will be increasing more reasons to have a Lemmy account which will result in more people casually participating and shifting over this way.

i know you've only got 12000 chr but i would love to see this able to read the comments in a thread and categorise them something like '60% of comments are about the erroneous grammar in line 12, 35% are personal anecdotes about the subject, in the remaining 5% the following salient points are raised...'

i'm sure it wouldn't be very accurate a first but everything is a journey and it would be a lot of fun

I'm fairly addicted to librivox, they've got all the classics and so many fascinating oddities. it can be hit and miss with the readers but also there are some brilliant ones.

We absolutely need more trams but this image is slightly misleading as it assumes all the cars are going to the same place as the tram - integrated transport networks are really complex and I worry that if we try to gloss over those complexities it'll make it harder to convince people to take it seriously

i really like the idea of having one active post from the AI at the top which gets replaced regularly, it could have the AI summarise active threads saying things like 'users seem to like the idea of AI Curated posts but some have reservations about it as they fear it'll get spammy' maybe even it'll be able to gather some statistics '70% of replies were favourable to AI Curation however slightly over half of those in favour suggest it should happen in a limited capacity..' that could be really interesting.

it could also do a round-up of related sites and news outlets in a section where it says things like 'this story has been written about widely in the media, these articles express a generally favourable approach while these draw a counter opinion. These articles are of note or contain extra details; wired.com 'Should the singularity community on fmhy adopt AI Curation?' contains a detailed discussion with @webghost0101 who proposed the idea, yahoo finance 'singularity community to adopt AI Curation?' raises an interesting point not made elsewhere [quote from article].

it might even help shame us users into being better community members 'today there are 47 meme posts about the exact same topic. all of them are reposts and as of the last scan 0 people have said anything new or original.'