Damn, I didn't figure out you're supposed to click on the releases. Thank you.

Since I'm not a programmer - how do I get it running?

Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?

Maybe I didn't have my crystal ball nearby when I was creating my Lemmy account.

Maybe many users will have an account on the largest server, because by definition it's the largest server, with the most users. 🙄

I live in a country with a relatively similar political climate as Poland (highly religious, post-communist, wannabe central Europe). And I used to use the same argument when I was surrounded by more conservative people. The argument is IMO frequently invoked not by people who are truly worried about children (which I'll write about below), but by conservatives who need a civilised, "agnostic" argument for their homophobic stances. But ofc it's better to assume good intentions, at least if you don't know anything about the person using the argument (as e.g. here).

The biggest problem with the argument is that it's purely reactive and, under the hood, disingenuous. Children bully each other horribly already for a million stupid reasons - their shoe brand, their phone brand, their behaviour, etc. or just so, for no detectable reason at all. They also bully their teachers and professors. What is done against all this? Absolutely nothing, as far as I see (and I've seen and heard plenty while I was growing up). It is never brought up as a problem in public discourse, nobody seems to care too much. Bullying somehow becomes a big problem and relevant for the lawmaking only when gay parents are a possibility.

In general, from what I've seen, bullies will find just about any reason to target a kid. Adding one more to the roster seems borderline trivial. E.g. a lot of existing bullying is class-based - my younger sister was mildly ostracised in the primary school for a while because she wore the clothes my mother sewed for her, without a brand or anything, suggesting we don't have the money to buy "proper" clothes. Should we, then, try to separate poor kids from the rich kids, so the poor don't get bullied? Or just forbid poor kids from going to school?

Thus, instead of doing anything against the actual problem – that is, bullying as such – the laws of the state, the fundamental right of a child to a family, etc. should all buckle down before some child bullying? A child should be denied growing up with a potentially good and loving family with LGBT parents, and instead be adopted by a potentially inferior heterosexual family (assuming the adoption centres have some sort of system to judge the adopters in advance), or stay without a family at all indefinitely, because someone could/will bully them based on their most intimate and safe space, that is their family? Just as it would be monstrous to forbid poor kids from going to school to "protect" them from bullying, it is monstrous to propose "to protect some kids from bullying, we'll deny them from having a family". The whole argument is actually (or should be) an argument for aggressively rethinking and reworking your educational system , parenting and culture in general.

because why should these children be victims of war that is not even theirs to fight

Under the current system they're also victims and involved in this same war - a part of their potential adopters is denied by default, and they stay without a family for longer. Are they not victims here? (Not to get into the issue of measuring potential benefits of having a family against the potential negatives of bullying, it's purely arbitrary and depends on the given culture too.)

On the other hand, I do think the whole discussion has been derailed by overly focusing on this as an LGBT issue rather than an issue of children without families. So there's some merit at least in the general approach of the argument you present (the children are those whose well-being is most important here), but it leads to the wrong conclusion, usually because it's invoked by people who really just want to get to that conclusion one way or another, rather than helping the kids.

The process is not over yet. IA has been ruled against, but they announced they would appeal. Though I haven't been following the case in the recent months, and according to the WP article the situation is unclear right now, the parties seem to be negotiating...

Either way, the outcome will definitely affect IA as a whole, and not selectively with regards to the user's location. If the digitally lended books were distributed illegally in the USA, and IA is located in USA, they have to cease the illegal distribution in general. (It would be absurd if the plaintiffs would have to reassert their case in every country with internet access.)

If the outcome is negative for IA and the court fully accepts Hachette et al's demands, IA will both have to recuperate the publishers' supposed losses and legal expenses, and "destroy" all "unlawful copies" of the books under the publishers' copyright. I paraphrase from the initial complaint by Hachette et al. (see here, first document, from 1st June 2020). This would mean that the books under copyright by publishers other than the four included in the process would not be directly affected. But the ruling may set a precedent, so other publishers might follow suit and demand the same - compensation, and removal of their books from the database.

I am not a legal expert, and not a native English speaker so I don't know the terminology too well, I just followed the case for a while and this is what I've concluded.

Personally, I think IA was horribly stupid to play with fire with the "emergency library", their legality was in a grey area even before that... And I don't remember anyone asking for such a measure. But, as far as I've seen, the scans themselves will survive even if IA goes down.

Edit: I just saw https://lemmy.world/post/3077301, Jesus Christ...

it would reject invalid answers

Not quite. When I used to care and kind of tried to distort the training data, I would always select one additional picture that did not contain the desired object, and my answer would usually be accepted. I.e. they were aware that the images weren't 100% lined up with the labels in their database, so they'd give some leeway to the users, letting them correct those potential mistakes and smooth out the data.

it won’t let me get past without clicking on the van

That's your assumption. Had you not clicked on the van, maybe it would've let you through anyway, it's not necessarily that strict. Or it would just give you a new captcha to solve. Either way, if your answer did not line up with what the system expected (your assumption being that they had already classified it as a bus) it would call attention to the image. So, they might send it over to a real human to check what it really is, or put it into some different combination with other vehicles to filter it out and reclassify.

This is the first time in my life I've seen dislike of the userbase of an another site called 'xenophobia'.

Especially weird since 90% of Lemmy is fresh off reddit themselves.

Personally I just don't want the shitty aspects of the reddit community seeping over here. It's a fact that reddit userbase has been facebookised, to the degree where I frequently see people who are outright stupid (repeatedly posting threads to wrong subreddits, ignoring mod messages, unable to comprehend basic English... stuff that I'd expect to see on Facebook and not reddit), or focused on memes and quips to the point where any discussion is flooded with such moronic content. There's still (at least) tens of thousands of people on reddit who I'm sure would be great contributors on Lemmy too if they decide to switch, and I hope they will. But I don't want all of reddit here. Is that really so bad, to not want to look at unfiltered normie crap? Reddit was good (if it ever was good) precisely because it was a bit elitist in its design and its culture.

We can’t argue about federation on the net, avoiding corporate control, or whatever while sticking our hand out and stopping people from joining.

Maybe people can join somewhere else too? Make a Fediverse equivalent of Facebook/Instagram or something. Lemmy is not all of Fediverse and doesn't have to be for everyone.

Like half of your complaints are literally good things. Yes, people want to be heard and not practically hidden from 90% if they don't get enough upvotes on their post/comment during the crucial early time frame, as on bigger reddit subs. Lemmy is not a social media platform anyway, its goal is not to facilitate socialisation among the users and it doesn't need many millions of users to work well.

That's two twitter clones from two tech billionaires in just six months. Capitalism truly breeds innovation.

What's the other Twitter clone (other than Threads)?

Bookwyrm is open-source, works similarly to Lemmy (i.e. is a federated platform). Storygraph and LibraryThing are also popular alternatives, but IIRC they're both closed source.

Personally I think just creating a spreadsheet file with your reading data is better. (In LibreOffice, of course.)

over the past 2-3 years Amazon has slashed its budget

The site is now run by a skeleton crew

TBH it felt that way ever since I registered there, much more than 2-3 years ago. It's been largely stagnating for over a decade with regards to design and functionality. It's impressive if they somehow managed to reduce their budget even more and employ even fewer people. Which makes the recent half-baked redesign and similar interventions even weirder, they clearly don't have the capabilities to do them properly...

Goodreads never made money

Was it meant to, though? I assume Amazon planned it to work (dunno if it really did) as a platform to advertise the books sold on Amazon.

It would be useful to list and analyse those few cases where writing was invented, i.e. were there any particular circumstances that were especially conductive to creating a writing system that weren't present elsewhere.

My guess would be that trade and territorial spread of the given state are very useful for inventing it, since it's needed to calculate and store data, to communicate across greater distances (sending messages to other towns that you trade or have some relationships with - not necessary in tightly-knit tribal communities)...

And once someone invents writing, which is a pretty difficult thing to do (especially to teach it to others and make it actually durable), it's obviously much easier for anyone who comes into contact with that culture (which is likely to happen if the culture trades a lot or covers a large territory) to just imitate and adapt their writing system rather than invent everything from the ground up.

This is ofc just my theory based on what I know about the Near East (e.g. Phoenician alphabet > Greek > Latin & Cyrillic).

Human language change happens first of all because the reality that the language is meant to represent changes. I.e. you create a new thing, you create a new name for it too.

ChatGPT does not intend to represent a reality when it uses a language. It does not even know of a reality outside of its language.

Human language also changes due to various rather vague "economic" reasons, e.g. simplified pronunciation, merging sounds, developing some new habits in grammar that spread within one community but do not spread elsewhere... For example, we have extremely obvious proof that Latin developed into Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc., so language change clearly isn't some magical process. On the other hand, if you fed a ton of ancient Latin into ChatGPT, it wouldn't even develop the pronunciation of medieval Latin used by priests, much less the totally different descendant languages that developed at the time.

I have a nasty tootache right now, so... seeing this thread and your post feels like some ironic joke that the universe arranged for me :D

(Thankfully paracetamol is helping, but most likely they will have to pull it out.)

they are often expensive and not everyone can afford those

the average costumer and mobile data plans which are **mostly certainly inevitably caped **

I'm sure you know a lot about the pricing and internet caps across the entire world. 🙄

How do you plan to train the AI to recognise CP?

You can relativise things all you want, it's a fact that online insanity does leak back into the reality. For example see Qanon, or Brenton Tarrant, who used to frequent 4chan and 8chan. Not to mention the more trivial things such as people openly agreeing with Andrew Tate, or becoming fans and voters of Donald Trump due to his online presence, etc.

If you know people IRL that believe lgbt people shouldn’t exist, I guess I feel bad for you and who you associate with.

Did you just spin this into a covert ad hominem? Nice job, but I don't "associate" with every person whose views I hear espoused IRL.

I don’t know anyone at all like that, not even close to that.

Ok? But why assume that every community and society is exactly like yours? From your other comments I notice you're from Canada, I hope you're aware your political culture isn't typical for the rest of the world, not even for the entire "west".

I don’t feel the need to defend the most extreme examples of dumb things you’ve read online that someone else posted.

Right, so you didn't have to claim such people and such extreme positions literally don't exist - with caps lock, no less. I probably wouldn't think of replying to you if you didn't formulate it so categorically.

No one. NO ONE, think LGBT people shouldn’t be allowed to exist.

What I've heard IRL and what I've read online in less moderated spaces speaks to the contrary.

You can block NSFW content in your settings.

Ridiculous. I love it.

They're already acting. The guillotine is now erased.

They're not touching the "fuck spez" signs, true. Still, remember that in the last edition there was a massive amogus cock extending across half the canvas throughout most of the event and it was eradicated by the end as well. So based on that I wouldn't bet the "fuck spez"-s will survive either. (Not that their survival would mean anything...)