The difference is that Uber’s model of using an app to show you the route, give driver feedback, be able to report problems and monitor and track the driver, etc. is actually a huge improvement to both rider safety and experience compared to calling a cab company and then waiting who knows how long for someone to show up and hopefully bring you where you want to go.

Not saying that their model of gig workers, or dodging up front training is good, but they legitimately offered up a fundamentally better taxi experience than anything that came before, which I think encouraged regulators to really drag their feet on looking into them.

“This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se”

“This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget”

If you finish those sentences, it becomes clear why per se is used:

“This isn’t a meeting about the budget per se, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

“This isn’t exactly a meeting about the budget, it’s a meeting about how much of the budget is spent on bits of string”

In this situation, using per se provides a more natural sentence flow because it links the first part of the sentence with the second. It’s also shorter and fewer syllables.

“Steve’s quite erudite.”

“Steve’s quite intellectual.”

I think intellectual might be a closer synonym, but intellectual often has more know-it-all connotations than erudite which seems to often refer to a more pure and cerebral quality.

“Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the juxtaposition of the relationship between cat and mouse.”

“Tom and Jerry is a fun cartoon because of the side by side oppositeness of the relationship between cat and mouse that is displayed”

For those to say precisely the same thing it would have to be more like the above which doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

“I don’t understand, can you elucidate that?”

“I don’t understand, can you explain?”

Elucidate just means to make something clear in general, explaining something usually inherently implies a linguistic, verbal, explanation, unless otherwise stated.

Honestly, these all seem like very reasonable words to me for the most part. I can understand not using them in some contexts, but for the most part, words exist for a reason, to describe something slightly differently, and it takes forever to talk and communicate if we only limit ourselves to the most basic unnuanced terms.

When people use industry specific jargon and acronyms with someone not in their industry.

It is a very simple rule of writing and communication. You never just use an acronym out of nowhere, you write it out in full the first time and explain the acronym, and then after that you can use it.

Artificial diamonds can be made with a High Temperature, High Pressure (HTHP) process, or a …

Doctors, military folk, lawyers, and technical people of all variety are often awful at just throwing out an acronym or technical term that you literally have no way of knowing.

Usually though, I don’t think it’s a conscious effort to sound smart. Sometimes, it’s just people who are used to talking only with their coworkers / inner circle and just aren’t thinking about the fact that you don’t have the same context, sometimes it’s people who are feeling nervous / insecure and are subconsciously using fancy terms to sound like they fit in, and sometimes it’s people using specific terminology to hide the fact that they don’t actually understand the concepts well enough to break them down further.

For each of these, what would you use instead?

The stated reason being political disagreement.

That was your stated reason, not theirs. Please try and keep track of your own statements at least.

Were those on Lemmy.ca, or Hexbear? If Hexbear users want to call out Canada for being a right-wing country on Hexbear, many of whom are Canadian themselves, why does that mean it would spread to Lemmy.ca?

It’s literally the stated reason they defederated. If you disagree it’s up to you prove otherwise.

Communists have and continue to do so, Capitalists continue to produce a system that ruthlessly exploits workers for Capitalist riches.

Name the country. Vietnam known for its working conditions and lack of exploitation? How are those Chinese Uighurs doing?

That doesn’t bear out when compared to Hexbear’s thread, which was more level headed on average. The issue is in political disagreement, which Hexbear was willing to open, while Lemmy.ca was not.

You seem insistent on it being politically motivated, yet that thread had far more vitrial that would have required mod cleanup than a typical lemmy.ca thread.

Just go through and count the usage of kkkanadians.

I restate, again, Capitalists making use of FOSS tools does not mean it is Capitalist, or compatible ideologically. Capitalists will use what’s available, users will use what works and aligns ideologically.

Then FOSS isn’t inherently ideologically anything.

Capitalism does not function even in theory for Material Goods. If it functions in theory but not in practice then the theory is wrong. That’s why Communists put a large emphasis on actually touching grass and developing theory through practice.

Lol neither system has ever produced a practical , implemented system that is good for the average worker.

So you say, yet you’re admitting that the most fringe of Hexbear is the issue in your opinion, not the entire instance, so then why defederate? Why not federate and block bad-faith users? Because Lemmy.ca itself is anticommunist and anti-anarchist, as I said.

The argument being that Hexbear has a larger than average number of shit posters, meaning that the benefit gained from seeing their communities is not offset by the increased cost to all the lemmy.ca moderators who have to clean up after those users.

The fact that Capitalism exists and makes use of readily available tools does not mean actively choosing to support and develop FOSS

But they do. Most successful FOSS projects are actively supported by capitalist companies, from Linux, to git, to web standards, etc.

Capitalism is an awful choice of resource distribution in general, not just information.

It is fundamentally ill suited to information in a way that it is not with material goods though. With material goods, it can function in theory, though always tends towards corruption and fucking the poor and working class in practice. With information, it is simply a cruel system design from a theoretical basis that imposes scarcity where there is no need for it.

deleted by creator

Hexbear wasn’t defederated from for its too comments. It was defederated from for its bottom ones, in which people repeatedly call people Nazis and the KKK.

I restate, Lemmy is built on Communist principles. FOSS is anticapitalist in nature, hardcore libertarians prefer Reddit. Anarchists are also Leftists.

Given that the largest and most successful open source projects are all openly supported by capitalist companies, that is evidently not true. There is nothing inherently anti-capitalist about FOSS. Capitalism is a poor choice of resource distribution system for information because unlike material things, information can be copied and replicated freely, so there is no need for scarcity. FOSS exposes that,l flaw with capitalism but it is no inherently communist.

I read their comment too, no need to worry. Anticommunist instances like Lemmy.world and, relevantly Lemmy.ca, still can’t get rid of Communists even by defederating from Communist instances.

Assuming that whole instances are anti-anything is a great way to judge a whole swath of people quickly and look childish, it’s less useful to do anything else.

My point is more that Lemmy itself is structured along Communist principles, while Reddit remains the right-wing Lemmy. Choosing Lemmy over Reddit is ideological in nature, which means there is going to be a steady influx of Communists and other Leftists, less so Liberals.

No, Lemmy is just decentralized in nature, while that’s attractive to fringe left groups like hardcore communists, it’s also attractive to anarchists and fringe right groups like hardcore libertarians.

They never said anything about getting rid of communists, they said it’s no longer a communist echo chamber.

S Tier:

• Milwaukee
• Bosch
• Makita

A Tier:

• DeWalt
• Porter Cable

B Tier:

• Ryobi
• Rigid

C Tier:

• Black & Decker
• Craftsman
• Master craft
• Skil
• Other store brands

All of them will get you a passing grade, C Tier feels a little flimsy like it might let you down, B Tier works perfectly fine and feels normal, A Tier feels like it could take one extra hard drop, and S Tier is noticeably rock solid and nice in every way.

Atleast, this is ballpark what I remember from when I was contracting…

Training and running them consumes enormous amounts of energy,

Right now, using GPUs and unoptimized chips. Running and building other services like Google Search and YouTube also took enormous amounts of power and still does, though it’s vastly more efficient these days.

all the IP is within some gigantic monopolistic corporations,

This feels like a pretty knee jerk point instead of a well thought out one.

A) the biggest AI players are startups like ChatGPT and Anthropic which have gotten a lot of funding and attention but are neither giant nor monopolistic.

B) of the biggest monopolist companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta), only Google and Apple are keeping their research closed, with both Microsoft and Meta publishing their models openly.

these corporations in turn push huge amounts of money into products that are not only bad, but dangerous (MS Recall or X’s porn generator AI),

Literally the vast majority of software developers already use copilot or a similar AI assistant. Bing search is genuinely useful for synthesizing answers and asking plain language questions with sourced answers. People are finding ChatGPT useful or they wouldnt be paying for it. DeepMind has literally discovered novel protein structures that we never knew existed before. And VFX artists like Corridor Crew are using it to make wild videos way faster than they ever were able to before. This feels like youre just cherry picking poor uses.

other corporations use AI as excuses to fire thousands of people and letting their core products rot away.

Capitalism does that with all forms of automation, whether it’s AI based, or just normal, run of the mill, software / machines. It’s how you end up producing the same products with less effort and manual labour. If you want to go back to hand milling flour you’re more than welcome to, otherwise automation is going to continue. The answer to automation lies in the government and social safety nets, not blocking automation technology.

We already have a way for society to decide what is and isn’t worth spending power and effort on and it’s called money.

Increase carbon taxes to incentivize clean fuel sources and ban predatory advertising and data tracking behaviour because it’s problematic.

We do not need to setup a separate shadow economy to gatekeep what is and isn’t worth spending eoectricity on.

AI search is legitimately useful.

For something like Salesforce development, you’ve got the answer spread across their old framework docs, their new framework docs, their config settings reference page, and a couple stack overflow questions.

Copilot / Bing search has legitimately been incredibly helpful at synthesizing answers from those and providing sources so that I can verify, do more research, and ask follow up questions.

Both use machine learning algorithms that are modelled off the behaviour of neurons.

They are still different algorithms but they’re not that wildly different in the grand scale of the field of machine learning.

Like I get what you’re saying but this is also hysterical to the point that people are going to ignore you.

Don’t use AI ever if there are consequences? Like I can’t use an AI image search to get rough ideas of what the plant might be as a jumping off point into more thorough research? Don’t rely solely on AI, sure, but it can be part of the process.

Cleaning is a non issue, some dirt accumulates beneath them but you never notice until you lift them up again.

Maintenance wise they do fade in the sun, but it only takes like a couple hours to apply a couple of coats of new stain to a whole deck (like maybe once every two or three years depending on your tolerance for fading). Otherwise they’ve held up great for ~4 years of constant, year long exposure.

Those Ikea snap together decking tiles. We rent but have a tiny all-concrete backyard, and for like $250, we transformed it into a remarkably pleasant deck between those tiles for the ground and planters for the perimeter.

The Govee Dreamview TV lights and Philips Hue lights are also pretty high up there.

3D printer is now, but it took it several years of occasional use and occasional CAD upskilling before it got really useful.

Automatic cat feeder for dry food. It’s so nice to reduce cat feeding to just the wet food, and it makes it way easier to put them on a diet.

Dyson handheld vacuum, but only because I got it refurbished and on sale for substantially less than half the original price.

Edit: oh and the biggest one by far is my Onewheel. I hate the company and will never buy anything from them again (will be making an open sourced VESC board or buying a Floatwheel instead), but I bought the board at the start of the pandemic to have something to do during lockdown and I now have ~7000km on it. It’s way more fun and practical then I was expecting. Even compared to like an e-scooter, a Onewheel still give you both hands free and is small enough to fit on the bottom of the grocery cart, making it surprisingly more practical for hauling stuff.