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Cake day: November 25th, 2024

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  • I want to add my tuppence worth as well. Even if one day we have a justice system that can be 100.000% certain of guilt AND 100% certain that there is no chance of rehabilitation, I think we should still not have the death penalty, because I don’t think spending the energy and time killing individuals in cold blood is a healthy way for a society to behave. This Rudakubana guy may be some kind of monster, but that doesn’t mean that acting monstrously towards him is somehow acceptable.




  • MouldyCattomemes@lemmy.worldI hate whoever that was
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    21 days ago

    My impression from when I’ve encountered this is that it is an attempt to repel bots.

    hmm bots don’t use keyboard or mouse copy & paste so I don’t see how that makes sense?

    my impression is this is just stupid product managers who don’t understand why it’s a bad idea to force all your users to manually type out their passwords or email addresses just because of the 0.1% of people who would copy and paste one with an error in.


  • Yes you’re right, sorry I went off on a tangent about the reasons for the intense negativity in the Lemmyverse about LLMs. I’ve been using lemmy for four years, and definitely don’t think there has ever been any positive feelings towards LLMs here, especially as ChatGPT’s arrival predates the first surge of users on Lemmy (and the subsequent appearance of all the instances we see today). On reddit, yes, and there are still many people there who still think OpenAI is great.


  • I think it’s another example of “internet bubbles” - people with similar views tend to congregate together and this is particularly true on the internet, when going elsewhere is always just a mouse-click away.

    When ChatGPT first launched, Lemmy was still pretty much a ghost town, and it did cause a lot of optimistic excitement e.g. on reddit. Lemmy got a big surge in numbers when reddit did its infamous API changes - enshittification driven by spez’s and other reddit executives’ insatiable lust to exploit the site for more and more money.

    Perhaps for this reason, people on Lemmy are more averse to the enshittification trend and generally exploitive nature of large tech companies. I think this is what people on Lemmy object to - tech companies’ concentration of power and profits by ripping off the general public - not so much the concept of LLMs themselves, but the fact they could easily be used to further inequality in society.





  • I’d say these books are important for anyone studying American literature - and probably essential for anyone studying American literature of the 20th Century.

    They’re not so important for Welsh pupils and don’t need to be included in a general English literature syllabus for 15-year-olds in the UK. The reasoning outlined in the article for choosing not to include these sorts of works in the list of required and optional texts for this specific qualification is pretty convincing IMO and I completely support it.

    No books are being banned from schools or anything like that. The article headline is I suspect just trying to get clicks from the anti-woke crowd.


  • The book hasn’t been banned, it’s just not been selected as a required or optional text in a new English qualification for Welsh schools. Steinbeck is a wonderful author and story-teller, and his stories provide a useful insight into America’s difficult recent past in regards to racial segregation (as well as other issues such as oppression of the poor). America is an important country, and it’s useful to understand why it remains such a damaged society with deep racial divides even today, but it’s not Wales is it.