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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • (It has been funny watching some of my coworkers learn a new coding technique and finding it to be so cool that they apply it everywhere regardless of whether it fits or not while I think to myself, “Ah, I remember when I went through that phase as a teenager!”)

    I’m not a programmer (although suggestions on a language to start learning with - with no project in mind - would be welcome!), but I’ve found similar things with my old musical projects. I look back some old project files and see that I used various techniques all the time that I don’t necessarily use nowadays. Sometimes, I think I probably should use them more than I do now, but I definitely overused them back then when I first discovered them.

    I guess it’s just exciting when you learn something and it opens up a bunch of possibilities for you!




  • Well I’m just glad Harry Mack managed to release his 100th episode of “Omegle Bars” this week. He decided to take a break from doing Omegle-based content at the right time, it seems.

    For anyone who doesn’t know, Harry Mack’s a freestyle rapper. He has (had) a series where he’d ask strangers on Omegle to give him a handful of words and then create a full song out of them on the fly. And not just saying those words then immediately moving on like most freestyle rappers do; he actually creates entire verses on the topics he’s given and really raps around them. Plus he’d be calling out things the people were doing as they react to him, responding to things they say, mentioning things he can see in the room, etc, as he raps.

    Here’s one of his freestyles that’s really stuck with me ever since I first saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehcA4zCeaPI

    He takes what are some fairly negative, “cry for help” words from the girls and turns them into a really beautiful, positive rap overall. He’s a very positive guy in general, and I’ve watched him consistently since I discovered him. Binging his videos got me through a breakup, in fact.


    My own experiences with Omegle have either been penises or just bland, and it’s not something I’ve used for many years as a result. But videos like Harry Mack’s show what wonderful things could come from it and I do think it’s a huge shame it’s gone. It feels like another part of the old internet’s gone, and that we’re moving even closer to the sanitised, heavily-monetised internet run by megacorporations. I hate that.




  • All they do is hallucinate

    I read an article a couple of months ago about AI usage in geolocation (link because it’s interesting, even though it’s not necessarily relevant). In it, they brought up a quote from a computer scientist / AI specialist who said he preferred the word “confabulate” to describe what happens with AI, rather than “hallucinate”

    Confabulation: a type of memory error in which gaps in a person’s memory are unconsciously filled with fabricated, misinterpreted, or distorted information.

    I agree with the guy that it’s a slightly better term for it, but I also just think it’s such a fun word that it’s too good not to share!


  • So a few things:

    • sorry that’s been happening to you, it must suck
    • the Reddit admin’s response doesn’t seem great
    • this isn’t a relevant place to be posting this
    • your tone in the DMs with the admin and in the comments comes off as overly panicked and alarmist. It’s going to be hard to win anyone over like that. Take some time, write it up with a more calm and informative tone, add proper context, etc.
    • you’re not going to get your story out there by spamming it in random, inappropriate fediverse communities. If you’ve got solid evidence, email a journalist at a place like The Verge or Ars Technica about it. Just don’t expect them to care if you don’t have evidence - right now, it just mostly reads as “user upset that Reddit admin didn’t ban other user”. Yes, it sucks, but it largely just reads as a social media drama piece at the moment, and not anything with any real substance to it.
    • or just report it directly to law enforcement


  • Communism does work on a communal level - it’s no coincidence they’re rooted in the same word - but it absolutely needs a level of accountability at the top that can only come from actually knowing the people they’re responsible for. Once you get beyond a couple of hundred people in a community at most, and it stops being an “everyone knows everyone” kind of thing, communism is just far too susceptible to corruption.

    My gaming group takes a somewhat communist approach to starting out in survival games - Minecraft, ARK, etc - and it works well. No-one’s going to destroy any friendships over half a stack of stone and two bits of cooked food so corruption isn’t an issue. Plus it’s more efficient for us to work together at that point rather than all try to individually collect everything we need. Sure, it’s just video games, but it shows the system can work and have benefits. It just doesn’t scale up at all.