NONFICTION BOOK QUOTE FOLLOWS:

Often, people with NPD resort to an insidious strategy called gaslighting — a term drawn from the 1938 play about a man who persuaded his wife she was crazy by, among other means, dimming the gaslights and claiming he’d never touched them. As people with NPD become increasingly psychotic, they’re determined to convince others that they’re the “crazy” ones who can’t see reality for what it is. Gaslighting reassures pathological narcissists that their own grip on reality remains firm because they can’t bear to acknowledge their sanity is slipping away. We might ask if we’re seeing this now, as Trump and his closest advisers appear on TV claiming he didn’t make statements that journalists often simply play back — or if it’s a tweet, flash an image — to prove that he did indeed say what he said.

Lately, these incidents have become commonplace. Many in the press and public at large now refer to them as alternative facts, alluding to Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway’s now infamous “explanation” for why Sean Spicer had berated the press for misreporting Trump’s inauguration size: “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” Spicer peevishly told a stunned press corps. This turned out to be patently false, though Conway defended the statement, saying Spicer had simply been providing “alternative facts.”

Those who embrace Trump’s reality, where the mainstream media lies and remains “the enemy,” signify their support with red hats bearing the inscription MAGA (Make America Great Again). Those who believe what the news reports about Trump have donned the symbol of resistance — pink pussy hats, a reference to his now infamous hot mic comments about women, “I just grab ’em by the pussy…”

That the country is currently split — and our shared reality with it — seems without question at this point.

― Bandy X Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. October 3, 2017. Page 58.

People didn’t purge their comments to remove this information from the public, but they purged it from reddit making money off limiting the access to this information.

Reddit was always making money off their content. The tragedy is that the common knowledge is destroyed. They didn’t bother to copy it to a public place, they just nuked information and context. The loss is for newcomers on any topics. The result is the same old questions being asked over and over, which all social media sites (including Lemmy thrive on FRESH content).

I think people who single out hate and dehumanization and violence in one spot have tunnel vision. Hate and violence is all bad. Hate is incredibly popular in drawing a crowd, but overall it is better to criticize all hate like Martin Luther King Jr. did. MLKJr would emphasize not just hate from white to blacks in USA, but all hate in the human brain in general. Too many people want to use hate as an organization tool, weaponize gangs of hate over something or another, and I’m sick of all the crossfire. With social media, it’s everywhere.

people joined basically with no terms of service on a lot of Lemmy instances.

Free and open information, like Wikipedia, used to be an ideal. I have used Reddit since 2008 or earlier because it got on search engines and shared information consistently on precise topics. Twitter used to also be this way, but now mostly only puts paid subscribers on search engines.

If you are to organize information around topics, such as a Commodore 64 community, and the protocol openly allows copies to be made via federation, I encourage people to have the attitude that information be treated like Wikipedia content. It sucks now that so much information from 10 years ago has been just entirely lost now that so many deliberately purged their Reddit comments, etc. Tragedy of the commons. And it drags down the entire planet that people squirrel away discussions on topics that are generally public. It’s like now everyone wants to monetize even their discussions on Commodore 64 or automotive repair / have behind absolute control or paywalls /etc.

While I agree with what you are saying, I think audiences crave the falsehoods strongly, regardless of how the sausage is made. And I know that the technology itself may be regulated for normal consumers, while ‘professionals’ will use their wealth to get another set of technology that does it better. Much like in the USA prostitution is generally illegal, but filing sex for pornography media is legal. There really are not very many preaching to level the playing fields on media production hardware. And if you look at the energy requirements and cost of a high-end GPU just as run-time, you can start to get the sense of how a $15,000 camera is going to be able to do post-production that a consumer smartphone won’t have.

James Joyce has entered the chat

if I need a Chrome based browser

I don’t think Chromium has “gone bad”? They make a WIndows and macOS build too, not just Linux: https://chromium.woolyss.com/download/en/

Bad Dog seems to have a YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@BadDogDC but they aren’t off to a good start. All the songs they uploaded are marked as YouTube Kids which means you can’t even playlist them.

Twitter / X is the drug, tiny little bits of LSD drug. www.LazyWake.com for video by media expert Marshall McLuhan.

Rumors, happenings, and innovations in the technology sphere. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

This fits with the “Rumors” of technology company of this community.

IBM, Lions Gate, Apple, EU… https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-x-antisemitism-twitter-ads-83e68f03e9bf1d261c1a8c55066c4e59

“Je ne vois pas dans la religion le mystère de l’Incarnation mais le mystère de l’Ordre Social. La religion rattache au ciel une idée d’égalité qui empêche le riche d’être massacré par le pauvre.” (Napoléon Bonaparte / 1769-1821 / au Conseil d’Etat, le 4 mars 1806)

We are in an Information War and I don’t see enough peer to peer friendships being made between The People of China and everyday people in USA, South America, Africa, North America, Europe, Australia, etc.

I don’t see China people on GitHub and YouTube like I did 5 years ago. Maybe the real war is power over technology and all of humanity isn’t winning. Isn’t that another way to interpret Climate Change, an education mistake on a global scale? Advertising and marketing defeating science teachers? The love for the singe-passenger automobile 9 to 5 commute job - exceeding the reality of global climate physics?

Like they say in The Orville - Dolly Parton was a hero! she basically turned out to be a great teacher, like Mr. Rogers on the true problems of childhood. 9 to 5 was kind of like showing children what your divorced single mother was having to go through. Not to say that fit the relationships in the film itself, but the office environment of white collar world. The technology of the Office Workplace and the era of typewriters as business machines. EDIT: It’s a real War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Do6VWUxyg

Latest information is often of the highest quality on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qaraqosh_wedding_fire

114 deaths reported so far.

we aren’t far away from easily-made interactive images / video where people will be able to create realistic selfies / video clips of their own self - in famous situations. Like Forest Gump being inserted into meeting historic President. The appeal is too strong and it will likely create tons of highly upvoted/shared social media images distorting the original.

People tend to treat detecting photoshop images as a game of one-upmanship, not as an importance of preserving a documented concept or situation for others to learn and understand.

I think their creators have deliberately disconnected the runtime AI model from re-reading their own training material because it’s a copyright and licensing nightmare.

I think public-facing they have to be that way, otherwise they would copyright infringe on their training material. Behind the scenes, I suspect that the wealthy can gain access to AI engines where the random response isn’t set so high and they can even fact-check and cite their own training material better. It’s really hard to imagine that they can debug these things without having any idea what training material influenced which pattern of associations. I sure don’t buy that they don’t have tools to trace back to training material.

Right now consumer-facing AI wants to put in simple prompts and get back unique term papers each time you ask it the same question.

I’d say the debate about using a strongly typed relational database and ORM is probably more of an impact on end-user turn around than typed language.

We have way more complex queries

It isn’t the complexity that is the problem. It is the open-ended nature. It lacks any WHERE clause that specifies which posts to get. It just kicks off join after join without restricting what it is looking for. It relies on the “LIMIT 50” that Lemmy restricts post listings too. Which worked OK in March 2023 when Lemmy was over 4 years old and still had very tiny amounts of data in all these tables that it joins, but once even a modest amount of data got point in the open-ended nature of the WHERE clause kept making it slower and slower as more and more content.