He/Him. Marxist-Leninist, Butcher, DnD 3.5e enthusiast and member of UCFW local 880. I administrate a DnD 3.5e West Marches server for Socialists called the Axe and Sickle. https://discord.gg/R5dPsZU

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • I’m part of a coalition trying to prevent a private equity firm from buying out a local nonprofit hospital and using AI to “Improve efficiency” is one of their plans that we’ve had to study (done by people much more competent than I).

    The main thing they plan to use AI for is filling out paperwork - nurses will record their introductory interviews with patients and the AI (basically, speech recognition + knowing what fields to fill out for certain information) will automatically fill out that patient’s chart.

    I’m sure they’re planning on using AI for other purposes as well, but this is the most prevalent use - speech recognition and filling out charts automatically.





  • They’re allowed to complain, but that doesn’t make them correct. I don’t believe it to be wrong, because to a large extent people have a right to know public figures - they lack a right to privacy and must fight for every bit they want.

    If I, say, found a coworker’s cringy Reddit account and shared it with other coworkers in a mean-spirited way, that would be rude and a transgression of privacy. If I found out that my state Senator, or my favorite YouTuber, had a private Reddit account and shared it, that would be okay (or even good, an act of transparency).

    And there are of course levels to everything. Take the YouTuber example. We would obviously consider it more appropriate to share if the Reddit account showed they were bigoted or fraudulent somehow; or if it was boring and not notable. Less so if it contained highly vulnerable, personal stories, or (and pardon me if this is a bush you were beating around in your post) nude photos or videos.








  • The channel Technology Connections had a great video on dishwashers. It depends on how you run your washer. Powder detergent in both the pre-wash and main wash compartments is the recommended option. If you skip the pre-wash (such as by using an “Eco” or Energy/Water-saving setting), then it makes no difference between putting the detergent in the compartments vs. the bottom of the dishwasher as long as your compartment is working correctly. If it isn’t, then indeed putting it on the bottom of the dishwasher is better.


  • One additional suggestion I might make is to allow you to report the post to your own instance admins but not the host admins. This would be useful for when you want a post to be hidden or an instance defederated and you don’t want to also send your identity to the instance you’re reporting.

    This might be used for:

    Reporting spam coming from an instance that is unlikely to delete it.

    Reporting CSAM on an instance that supports it.

    Reporting hate speech on instances that believe hate speech is covered by free speech.

    Etc.



  • I think it’s just a growing pain of the contradictions of Federation resolving themselves, mostly in the political sphere.

    You have left-wing instances (lemmygrad.ml), center-right instances (lemmy.world), and right-wing instances (sh.itjust.works). Even if different instances defederate with each other, there will always be overlap instances (lemmy.ml being the biggest, but also lemm.ee, startrek.website, mander.xyz, programming.dev, etc.). And while individual users can block specific instances, this doesn’t prevent them from seeing and responding to their posts. Communists and Liberals and Libertarians, who each believe the others are literally as bad as the Nazis (and I’m not making a value judgement here - maybe some of them are right), are forced to interact with each other on occasionally political topics.

    The hard right, unlike in Reddit, isn’t really a figure here - and moderators on Lemmy don’t know how to handle political disagreements where both sides are within the sphere of acceptable discourse.




  • The other comments here do not mention the most important part: the fiscal recession cycles caused by publicly traded, unregulated markets. In other words, the predictable 8-year pattern of booms and busts - the creation of a speculative bubble of growth followed by that bubble popping - that defines modern Capitalist economies.

    No recession or depression in recent memory has truly been caused by a mismatch of supply and demand. Instead, they are caused by our complex financial investment apparatus; they have nothing to do with the “producing and buying things” side of Capitalism and everything to do with the “Moving money around” side of it. A thing - real estate, tech startups, comic books, whatever - begins to grow in value not because it is actually worth more but because people are speculating on its future value.

    This is why Uber keeps growing in valuation despite never making a profit: the people buying Uber stock are not betting on Uber making a profit, but that other people will buy Uber stock in the future, further increasing the price of the shares. This is a bubble that will eventually burst, when they run out of potential investors to keep propping up the share price - but you maximize return on investment if you jump ship at the very last moment.

    The '08 housing crisis is a great example. It followed an almost identical speculative bubble, except with mortgage-backed securities.

    While these things will happen to some extent in Socialist countries with market economies, there are two reasons why they hit Capitalist countries extremely hard.

    The first is that modern Capitalism has made every person into their own little Capitalist. Retirement funds are tied to the stock market, rent and housing prices aren’t fixed. Ephemeral financial-sector bullshit affects ordinary people when it has no reason to.

    The second is that strong regulation can prevent the worst effects on ordinary people. Socialist governments can fix prices and forgive debts in order to minimize the effects of a fiscal downturn.