They do those things to some degree, but those things remain banned for under 18s, which I suppose reduces harm, even if it doesn’t fully eliminate harm.

By that logic we shouldn’t ban anything for teenagers. But we do: smoking, gambling, alcohol, etc.

That would be great. “Get tae fuck ya wee bawbag” (I think that’s the kind of thing Scots say)

Unfortunately I think they’ll stick with the USA

Maybe Lemmy is a 2020s version of phpBB (the forum software, which is open source like Lemmy is). Lemmy and phpBB can both be hosted by anyone, but of course the interesting thing about Lemmy is that Lemmy servers can share their content with each other.

I wonder if there’s some validity to what OpenAI is saying though (but I certainly don’t completely agree with them).

If the US makes it too costly to train AI models, then maybe China will relax any copyright laws so that Chinese AI models can be trained quickly and cheaply. This might result in China developing better AI models than the US.

Maybe the US should require AI companies to pay a large chunk of their profits to copyright holders. So copyright holders would be compensated, but an AI company would only have to pay if they generate profits.

Maybe someone more knowledgeable in this field will tell me I’m totally wrong.

I listened to more of their stuff on YouTube, it’s pretty cool, I can respect the guy’s anger and pissed off attitude.

Interesting idea. I suppose you could start a Lemmy community for meet ups for people in your country. I don’t know how easy it would be to find willing people who are relatively local to you though.

Yeah there’s some truth to that. Working at home can be lonely in my experience. But on the other hand you save all the hassle with commuting.

True. On Lemmy I can still be bombarded by stuff about the two billionaires running the USA, if I look at the active threads on all instances. But I can avoid that by just looking at threads from the instance I’m on, or by visiting particular communities individually.

I’ve been thinking how socialising on the internet with strangers is so hugely different to socialising with people in real life.

In real life you can see someone face to face, you can get a sense of their personality, and you learn to trust them. Those things are harder on the internet. You can’t see a person’s face, or hear their accent. Someone on the internet could be lying when they tell you about themselves, and it’s harder to tell if they’re lying.

Also of course on the internet people are much more willing to be rude and offensive because there are few penalties. If you meet someone in a pub, they probably won’t be rude to you, most of the time. If you disagree about something, you might say “okay, agree to disagree” and move onto another topic. But on the internet people will just be disrespectful cunts because they can get away with it, without negative social consequences for themselves.

In conclusion, internet socialising should be better than it is.

I guess it’s not the kind of thing I normally listen to, but I came across Jobseeker on YouTube and thought it was good. That feeling of authority figures being patronising and belittling and you just want them to piss off.

I wasn’t meaning to criticise any particular country, I just meant that goals aren’t inherently a good thing.

Regarding China and the US, I think both countries have a lot to offer, and there will be decent people from each country, but I don’t think I’m a fan of the current government of either country.

No I haven’t, in fact I think I only know one song by them… good song though (Jobseeker). I should probably check out more of their stuff.

I just chose this username because I was trying to think of something randomly and it popped into my head.

I don’t think goals are inherently good… Hitler had goals…

Yeah I’ve heard of that, maybe I should look at it more. Hopefully the Lemmy codebase is fine though. I’m just saying it’s possible, even if perhaps unlikely, that something could be lurking in the code which nobody has discovered yet. The XZ Utils backdoor was well-hidden and happened to be discovered, but maybe malicious code isn’t always discovered.

Even a technical lead of an instance may not have read every single line of code because codebases these days are pretty large. Typically you might look at the code you’re working on, but not necessarily the entire codebase.

Hopefully Lemmy doesn’t have anything malicious in it, but it’s possible to sneak malware into open source projects. This sort of thing happened to XZ Utils last year.

I’m not raising a conspiracy theory point, I’m raising what is surely a valid point: everybody assumes that someone else will read all of the source code and understand it all.

Codebases are large, and malicious code can be obfuscated. Hopefully Lemmy’s code is fine, but I definitely don’t know for certain that it’s completely clean. I just hope that it is.

Have you read all the code though? Everyone assumes that somebody else will read every single file of the source code, and understand it all. Malicious code can be obfuscated.

Maybe there’s something in the codebase that sends all our data to North Korea… who knows.