Just seems like everything is “this company did this to their employees” and less about “this novel messaging protocol offers these measured pros and cons.” Or similar

And yes, I could post things, but I’m referring to what hits the top, 12h.

Can anyone rec communities with less of a biz and politics and wfh vs in-office vibe?

  • @[email protected]
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    282 years ago

    HackerNews(ycomb) is a veritable gold mine but I find the community to be a bit caustic at times.

    There is a HackerNews mirror on Lemmy here that I like but not too many people comment. If I saw more activity I’d probably comment more.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      Repost it here if you find something interesting. I read a little ycomb but it’s a firehose and discussion is typically bad as you said.

      Lemmy needs more reposting from other blogs. Filtering content is useful. Not everything needs to be original.

    • @[email protected]
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      62 years ago

      but I find the community to be a bit caustic at times

      I find the same can be true around here too, though.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      Wayyyyy too many libertarians on hacker news who have experienced a lot of personal success in their life and have transformed that success into an utter lack of intellectual maturity or ability to empathize with others less fortunate than them.

      Good info, but wow I have read enough hacker news that I have almost zero interest in talking to tech people in real life at this point, they can be so aggressively naive and are always focused on incredibly narrow visions of the future that as a rule don’t center humans as the most valuable part of society/economy. If aliens came to earth and offered them a new algorithm in exchange for enslaving all of the planet, they would shrug their shoulders and say “We can’t stand in the way of progress, I might as well do it, somebody else will if I don’t!”. It makes me thankful a physicist developed the nuclear bomb not a tech person or I am sure we would all be dead right now.

      Good info though and fun to troll libertarians if you are into that kink.

    • @[email protected]
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      142 years ago

      I don’t think people should have to put extra filters to get what they signed up for when they subscribed to “technology”

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        On Android I can use Boost. I didn’t realize Lemmy didn’t have this as native functionality, as it’s something that’s actually built into Mastodon by default.

        Voyager is an alternative web app that works on all web browsers, by the way

  • @[email protected]
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    362 years ago

    There is a “Business” community, ideally the mods should remove any links that are “company a lays off workers” or “Elon Musk is stupid again” and re-direct them to Business, where the business decisions belong.

  • kpw
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    32 years ago

    Talking about protocols seems pretty technical to me…

  • livus
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    42 years ago

    @GBU_28 I see what you mean!

    The smaller tech communities seem to have a better signal to noise ratio, I was in [email protected] the other day and it’s mostly posts about actual tech.

  • @[email protected]
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    72 years ago

    Hey, if you don’t like it you can get the hell out of r/Elon, we don’t want you here!

    oh…wait

    • @[email protected]
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      122 years ago

      I like hacker news but have had trouble figuring out how to actually like…follow it. There is a shitty Android app. They don’t have an RSS feed best I can tell. How does one actually consume it?

      • @[email protected]
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        152 years ago

        Hacker News has an RSS feed at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. They have a tag in the main page to point to it but browsers don’t really surface that anymore I guess?

        They also have like different filtered feeds for things with like a certain number of votes or something, which I have seen people using.

        • @[email protected]
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          42 years ago

          Maybe that’s what it is then. I don’t see it on the main page and their FAQ didn’t list it either.

          Regardless, thanks for the link! I’ll drop that into my RSS reader.

        • Perhyte
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          22 years ago

          They have a tag in the main page to point to it but browsers don’t really surface that anymore I guess?

          There’s a Firefox addon to fix that. It’s called RSSPreview, but besides providing previews it also adds a little button to the address bar on sites that have tags like that so you can find the feeds in the first place.

      • @[email protected]
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        32 years ago

        You could just use [email protected]

        I know it’s a bot driven community but somehow they actually pulled it off. Lemmy users are actually leaving comments and voting over there.

        There’s also [email protected] but it seems like a less active version of the same thing

    • @[email protected]
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      262 years ago

      Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve been there, but my impression was the polar opposite. That it’s filled with business folks and tech bros. That their unbalanced voting system unearths controversial takes rather than informative comments. Every now and then, you’ll genuinely see a comment from someone with expertise, but that was not worth sacrificing my mental health for.

      • @[email protected]
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        52 years ago

        One of my hats os interviewing senior engineers, one of my warm up questions is to ask where they get their news and stay current.

        Hacker news is a very, very, common response.

        In fact I don’t have a better news source to offer you.

        I worry about dismissing the discussion as tech bro and businessy… As real engineers use the site, I also worry about dismissing people as tech bros, it’s not a great term, and I think unfairly applied to engineers because they are often not neural typical.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          In fact I don’t have a better news source to offer you

          Have you taken a look at lobste.rs? Not saying it’s better, but there are alternatives.

        • @[email protected]
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          62 years ago

          one of my warm up questions is to ask where they get their news and stay current.

          How important is this to you? If they say they don’t make an effort to keep up with tech news, is that a red flag? Is your company/product really so much on the cutting edge that you need the team to be keeping up with the latest tech news.

          Doesn’t seem very important to me, but it’s one of the first questions you ask.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            its a warm up question, its not a requirement, getting to know you.

            But, someone in industry who doesn’t make an effort to stay up to date in the industry, somehow, would raise an eyebrow… FWIW nobody has ever not had a answer to that question.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          I certainly don’t want to dismiss any individuals as tech bros. Tech broism is more like a natural phenomenon, which occurs when you lock exclusively privileged people into a room for long enough and then let them discuss user needs.
          At some point, they’ll ask themselves questions like “Why do we need privacy?” and everyone else in the room will agree that they’ve never needed it either and then they’ll found Google.

          I am very much at risk of this, too. I have to constantly go out of my way to try to re-adjust my perspective, so that I don’t completely miss the ball on what users actually need.

          And places like Hacker News naturally form, because of course, we all do want to only talk about topics that we consider relevant. And folks whose needs are not generally considered relevant by the Hacker News community will look for different places, too.

          I guess, a question you can ask yourself:
          If you’ve ever interviewed a senior engineer who was for example black, gay, trans and/or a woman, did they frequent Hacker News?

  • @[email protected]
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    102 years ago

    That’s just what’s happening in the tech industry right now. Loads of firings and other issues. That’s the human factor of tech.

    • @[email protected]
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      92 years ago

      That’s all well and good but I want discussions about tech itself. Tell me about your latest achievement while building your robot.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      102 years ago

      I’m aware I’m off the wavelength here, but I wish those concepts were in a “human factor tech” channel

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        Maybe. Maybe not. Humans do make up a disproportionate amount of factors involved in most human activity. So their concerns do bubble to the top when all is not well.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          82 years ago

          I don’t care what is well or not (in a technology channel). I care about tech.

          In other channels, such as perhaps a workers rights channel, I care about such topics.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    But if this community community isn’t flooded with tech business articles, where are people going to post insightful comments like “fuck Google” and “switch to Firefox”?

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      My bugbear is all the Linux circle-jerking. I get that the fediverse has a high nerd-count (I’m one of them), but the “switch to Linux” sentiment is so tedious. Yes, Linux is great for those that have the time or inclination to learn swathes of new terminologies and procedures just to achieve the same level of productivity that the equivalent commercial data-harvesters offer in a more readily-accessible UX, but the vast majority of users simply don’t care.

      This old meme couldn’t be less appropriate on Lemmy.

      Operating systems

      Edit: Not wanting to poke the bear, but the accusatory phrasing in a couple of the responses below (“you obviously haven’t used Linux in 10 years” and “you don’t really understand the motivation behind FOSS”) go some way towards emphasising the point of this comment.

      • @[email protected]
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        82 years ago

        IMO it’s not the “switch to Linux” sentiment itself that’s so tedious, it’s that it’s just so damn oversaturated. It’s like that guy who posted “if buying isn’t ownership then piracy isn’t stealing” like 20 times in one thread the other day. I 100% agree but OMG we get it, kindly stop saying the same damn thing over and over. It’s just annoying that every post even mentioning Microsoft or Google devolves into a sea of privacy complaints and FOSS evangelizing to the point it’s difficult to have any real conversations.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 years ago

          Completely agree, hence the reply to lolcatnip’s comment originally. It’s to be expected I guess, given where we are (as deweydecibel said earlier), but that doesn’t make it less annoying.

      • deweydecibel
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        2 years ago

        Since when do people need to take into account if anyone else cares when posting to social media? They’re not content creators serving an audience.

        I get it’s obnoxious sometimes but people are going to sound off about the things they care about on social media. That’s the whole point.

        i get that the fediverse has a high nerd-count (I’m one of them), but the “switch to Linux” sentiment is so tedious

        I genuinely don’t understand why people think this is odd. Think for a second about what the fediverse is and what it represents.

        Why are we here? Why are we on the fediverse and not reddit or twitter? They both have more content, more intuitive systems, and more mature (if terrible) UXs. So why are we here?

        The fediverse represents the same basic thing as a Linux OS for the average consumer: an escape from corporate controlled, locked down, and increasingly bastardized ecosystems. An open source alternative that, while taking a little more effort, rewards the user with relief from the bullshit they want to escape.

        Of course it’s popular here. How could it not be?

        You’ll also find early adopters tend to be more willing to put in the effort to learn new systems, and we’re barely out of the early adopter stage for the fediverse.

        • @[email protected]
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          92 years ago

          Since when do people need to take into account if anyone else cares when posting to social media? They’re not content creators serving an audience.

          I mean, this whole post is about what content is preferable in this specific community.

      • @[email protected]
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        152 years ago

        Linux is great for those that have the time or inclination to learn swathes of new terminologies and procedures just to achieve the same level of productivity

        You obviously haven’t tried Linux for at least ten years. It’s really not like that.

        • Corgana
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          72 years ago

          I am not a programmer or anything and I’ve been using Zorin full time for a while now after trying it as an experiment. I would go so far as to say it’s on par with Windows or Mac in many (not quite all) respects. Assuming you’re not dependent on some proprietary software the only switching cost these days is… learning to navigate a new system.

          Just as an aside, I find it interesting that people using LEMMY of all things for social media would perceive FOSS systems as inferior. I guess that’s a testament to how far along ActivityPub development has come.

          • @[email protected]
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            102 years ago

            I wouldn’t disagree, and I’m not saying FOSS is inferior, I’m just whinging about the Linux evangelising.

            There is no perfect OS that can have universal approval. However if I’d I said “Windows is a data-harvesting nightmare” or “Being locked in to Apple ecosystems is constricting and expensive” then I’m sure I’d see the upvote button hammered on Lemmy. But to seemingly question the validity of Linux as a silver bullet for the vast majority of desktop users is borderline heresy.

            • Corgana
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              2 years ago

              I won’t dispute that fanboyism is thing, but also I don’t think many evangelists as it were view Linux as a “silver bullet”, just as the most ethical option given the alternatives. And they feel very strong feelings about this, that come across as Weird and Scary to people not used to seeing software treated with the same enthusiasm as politics.

              Also, I should add that many view open source software as having the potential to one day be the “silver bullet” in a way commercial software can never be due to it’s structure.

              • @[email protected]
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                52 years ago

                I’ve been reading about its potential for a long time. Maybe next year will be the year of Linux ;)

                • Corgana
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                  62 years ago

                  If your barometer for “potential” relies on market share, then you don’t really understand what motivates a person to contribute effort to a FOSS project in the first place.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          You obviously haven’t tried Linux for at least ten years. It’s really not like that.

          This is the standard response I’ve heard from Linux advocates for the last 20 years.

          I know it’s easy to assume off the back of my initial comment that I might not have, but I assure you, my frustrations with Linux are not borne out of inexperience.

      • @[email protected]
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        42 years ago

        I mean you are trying to poke the bear. And you’re pretending that people don’t constantly make recommendations all the fucking time. They do. Everywhere about everything. That’s how marketing and grass roots campaigning works. What I think is more interesting is why you’re doing these two things - is your shame of being nerdy so deep that you prefer to try and shame others for not being ashamed?

        • @[email protected]
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          82 years ago

          is your shame of being nerdy so deep that you prefer to try and shame others for not being ashamed?

          This response couldn’t be a more perfect example of what I’m saying. Thank you.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            It really isn’t. I’m not supporting or promoting Linux, I’m not discussing the subject matter at all and I have no skin in the game. What occurred to me is why you needed to identify as a nerd and then drop trow and proceed to shit on nerds.

            • @[email protected]
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              82 years ago

              Your response is precisely the reaction I referenced by the edit. Why is it personal? “You don’t understand FOSS” “You clearly don’t use Linux” and now, beautifully, “You’re ashamed of being a nerd”.

              • @[email protected]
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                12 years ago

                I called out the behaviour you’re exhibiting. That’s not personal, it’s observation. Please clarify why you are allowed to make observations about people but they can’t make observations about you. Calling something “personal” is meaningless.

                • @[email protected]
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                  62 years ago

                  Nah mate, you can have this one. This is where I drop off. Jumping into a topic with “you must be ashamed of being a nerd“ is never going to provoke a worthwhile discussion.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          Which is it? Are you seeing this complaint constantly, or is it a spicy individual opinion?

          I’d probably say my preference to have fewer default knee-jerk recommendations for Linux within various tech posts about other systems isn’t particularly unpopular, if only going by the up/downvote count. Even if it was the other way around, I’d stand by it, however antagonistic you might find my “bravery”.

  • @[email protected]
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    202 years ago

    You are not going to get that at any of the larger communities. We’ll need to grow the niche communities instead, more specific to your interests.

    Could you please take a look at https://fediverser.network to see if gives you anything interesting?

    • @[email protected]
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      242 years ago

      It can definitely happen. This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.

      It degrades to the lowest common denominator. This was seen across reddit, constantly.

      It happened on lemmy in record time due to a lack of default outlets for the low quality content.

      • @[email protected]
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        92 years ago

        This is just the result of a lack of quality or subject control.

        This is just another way of saying “having mods enforcing super strict rules”, which then leads to an ossified culture and a bunch of mods high on their power trip. This was also seen on Reddit and StackOverflow.

        Unfortunately, the way to avoid “lowest common denominator” issues that you mention is by going to the places where the denominator is relatively small, but big enough to have network effects in its favor. My experience was that all subreddits between 25k to 500k subscribers worked really well without excessive policing. Between 500k and 1M it could still go by, depending on the moderators. After crossing that mark, things started to deteriorate fast.

        If we were to scale that to Lemmy, it means that all communities with a subscriber count >= 1% of the total network will fall into “deteriorate fast” territory.

          • @[email protected]
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            22 years ago
            • Editing post titles does not count as quality control, in the same ways that some of reddits have such strict rules to the point that mods delete anything that is not exactly within the lines.

            • HN mods (dang, especifically) don’t care about power trips, because they have actual power

            • HN is not a single-topic community, like a Lemmy group. If you create a /c/technology and say it is a place to post “Anything that good hackers would find interesting”, it would quickly derail into a constant meta-discussion.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 years ago

              Editing post titles does not count as quality control, in the same ways that some of reddits have such strict rules to the point that mods delete anything that is not exactly within the lines.

              …huh? It leaves discussion threads intact while fixing titles to be more reflective of the source material or more reflective of updates to an event. How is this not quality control (and, in turn, moderation)?

              HN mods (dang, especifically) don’t care about power trips, because they have actual power

              Please take a moment to read the comment you’re replying to. See the last statement where I call out “You can have strong moderation that works out if mods enforce the rules for the sake of quality content, not for the sake of being an internet hall monitor.”

              HN is not a single-topic community, like a Lemmy group. If you create a /c/technology and say it is a place to post “Anything that good hackers would find interesting”, it would quickly derail into a constant meta-discussion.

              The extent of how single-topic a community is depends on the community and moderators. I don’t know what you’re trying to say here.

              • @[email protected]
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                22 years ago

                The extent of how single-topic a community is depends on the community and moderators. I don’t know what you’re trying to say here.

                The discussion started because OP wants to have “more hard tech” and less “tech biz news”. How do you think you’d enforce that, and how would you avoid splitting the ones that do not agree with that direction?

                On HN, it’s easy to avoid splittering the community because there is no “sub-HN”. The ones that are not interested or oppose the guidelines have no other option but to leave.

                On Reddit or Lemmy, it’s quite easy to “fork” a community or simply creating another for the more specific niches. So you don’t end up with a single /c/technology, but instead we get a “popular” /c/technology (for the lowest denominator) and the more specific “/c/hard_tech” or “/c/true_tech”.

                • @[email protected]
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                  12 years ago

                  I agree with your assertion that above a certain size you need strong moderation but disagree that it has to be toxic.

                  There are two components to being successful at strong moderation: you need mods that are opinionated but work to the benefit of the community (I think dang does a decent job at this) and a community that trusts the moderation.

                  Comparing HN and Lemmy, HN generally trusts their mods while Lemmy does not. As a result, dang on HN can prune low-effort threads and it doesn’t cause much of an uproar, but doing this on Lemmy would probably be much more difficult.

                  As far as enforcement, I’d just remove the fluff threads that get the same, repeated 5-6 comments. We already know everyone’s opinion about Elon Musk, the potential perils of AI, and the occasional string of threads over 2-3 weeks when $bigtechnologycompany doing $unpopularthing with a new article that rehashes information for clicks. People may disagree, but that’s okay. The goal should be to try to judge content on it’s discussion merits, not the user who posted it or personal beliefs. There will be screwups, but the community will need to assume good intent and the moderator will need to own up to mistakes.

                  On HN, it’s easy to avoid splittering the community because there is no “sub-HN”. The ones that are not interested or oppose the guidelines have no other option but to leave.

                  HN doesn’t try to cater to everyone and that’s their greatest strength. If my theoretical approach causes people to leave, that’s OK.

                  A lot of communities/subreddits/forums prioritize a growing user count number instead of fostering insightful discussion. I think this is what causes the huge communities to grow bland and foster an environment for abusive mods. It’s one thing to want to claim “I moderate a forum with 500k people”, but it’s another to say “I learn something new from my community every day”.

                  I’m content with c/technology and think the mods are doing a good job. It scratches the itch I want for being a general-purpose place to chat tech-related things but I would be elated to find a community that has a much higher bar for discussion.

      • @[email protected]
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        162 years ago

        I was on reddit for a very long time. And this is why I started to bemoan when communities would celebrate that they passed some number of subscribers.

        /pardon me as I yell at the clouds. Stop now unless you want to read a completely unnecessary rant.

        Two of my favorite niche subreddits were absolutely ruined by getting big: mindfulness and foodporn. The former was primarily a discussion about practicing mindfulness, there were even a couple of buddhists who actually deeply studied the tradition that provided very good non-western insight. It was a good place to go get help, albeit occasionally got a spattering of stupid memes, but you could easily get past them. As it grew it turned more and more into just memes, and then was just over-taken by new-age nonsense and pseudointellectual quotes over pictures. Food porn (while never exactly what I wanted) went from often having well-done pictures of good food, to shitty cell-phone shots of oversized hamburgers, half eaten food, and plates of food sitting on counters with all of this shit in the background.

  • @[email protected]
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    162 years ago

    The problem is all the s*** we really want to hear about all the companies are keeping close to their breast.

    Then, when something actually novel and interesting comes out it ends up being polarizing. We can only consume so much Chat GPT Gemini Bard crap.

    We should start a tech community on the federal verse about technologies people are passionate about. Get some people to talk about cool s*** they’ve done with Wyoming, Piper and whisper. Maybe have some people talk about their local mini installs of LLMS, for how they’re getting the most out of stable diffusion. Maybe some people looking at Obsidian or Anytype, maybe some NixOS

    There’s lots of cool stuff out there to cover there’s just not a lot of news about it these days. If it’s not AI they’re afraid people’s eyes will just glaze over.

      • @[email protected]
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        142 years ago

        Voice dictation. I need the censorship on for some places, but the setting is buried enough that turning it on and off is arduous. Unfortunately that means that gracing the world with my profanity is only for a times where I can be at the keys.

  • Curious Canid
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    402 years ago

    It would be nice if there were separate Tech Industry and Technology News communities.