@FaceDeer - eviltoast

Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I think there’s a significant difference between “neutral” and “diverse”.

    For example, Reddit is big enough that if you find yourself holding an unpopular opinion in some particular subreddit and you’re getting battered with downvotes, you can probably find some other similar subreddit that’s more friendly to whatever view you’ve got that’s drawing ire. People speak derisively of “bubbles” and “echo chambers”, but really, why should I stick around and try to engage with people who just don’t want you around? Communities naturally tend to segregate themselves along ideological lines like this.

    Here on the Fediverse the population’s too small to support quite so many diverse communities yet, unfortunately. So if you’ve got an unpopular minority view you can end up stuck with either routinely finding yourself serving as a punching bag or just not posting. That’s no fun.






  • A couple of weeks back there was an article making the rounds of the fediverse about how people with reasonably decent incomes were nevertheless living “paycheck to paycheck”, and a number of examples were given in the article with their individual stories of woe about how they were baffled by how burdened with debt they were. Most of those stories, when you dug in with just a slightly critical eye instead of an automatic assumption of victimhood, revealed people making foolish choices to take on debt and support the maximally lavish lifestyle that they could manage.

    The comment section was weird. It turned out that there were some people there who thought this was perfectly reasonable, giving examples of “necessary expenditures” from their own lives that were just as excessive when examined. If you think that building a deck or buying a new bed simply because it’s “time for a new one” are necessary expenditures then it’s kind of hard to be sympathetic when you complain about how you have no money for long-term savings.

    Is there just some basic personality type that finds it hard to be responsible with money, or is this a failure of education somehow? I have ideas for how to help but help will be unwelcome by people who refuse to recognize that they have a problem.





  • The article opens:

    When I first started colorizing photos back in 2015, some of the reactions I got were, well, pretty intense. I remember people sending me these long, passionate emails, accusing me of falsifying and manipulating history.

    So this is hardly an AI-specific issue. It’s always been something to be on guard for. As others in this thread have pointed out, Stalin was airbrushing out political rivals from photos back in the 30s. Heck damnatio memoriae goes back as far as history itself does. Ancient Pharoahs would have the names of their predecessors chiseled off of monuments so they could “claim” them as their own work.