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Joined vor 2 Jahren
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Cake day: 22. November 2023

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  • When I was in highschool, I came up with an expression: “Scratch an artist and you’ll find a student of many subjects underneath.” To some extent I agree with you, but I think it’s more that kids aren’t really introduced to a variety of subjects in an interesting way. Art causes you to learn at least a surface level understanding of the science behind color theory and lighting, anatomy, engineering, and a host of other things just by the nature of needing it to get better at creating what you see in your head. Our understanding of anatomy today is founded upon the studies Da Vinci and his apprentices did of bodies that they stole from graveyards and performed autopsies on in secret.

    Kids are naturally curious. They know nothing of the world around them and that curiosity and desire to learn is how we get stereotypes like the kid who never stops asking questions.

    It’s just that the way subjects are often taught is not conducive to engaging with that curiosity (ignoring when that curiosity is stifled by other influences like parental beliefs). Plenty of schools played with Kerbal Space Program, which has a simplified but still fairly realistic depiction of orbital mechanics in it, and that abstracted system taught many kids the basics of orbital mechanics and the science behind building rockets. Minecraft has taught many kids the basics of circuitry, as redstone is literally just basic circuit wiring - to the point where somebody created a full computer running DOS in Minecraft with a working keyboard and screen and everything.

    I think it’s an issue of approachability vs one of outright not caring. Tomes about the math behind nuclear physics has nothing on telling a kid that today you’ll be telling them about the Demon Core or how basically all forms of generating power boil down to new and exciting ways to boil water. When you include the particle physics involved, they’ll be much more interested in how that relates to why one guy in the room died while everybody else was perfectly okay than just an abstract on the deflection of radiation by atoms.




  • I agree, in general I believe that any system is vulnerable to the human element and not some kind of horseshoe theory. But in this case I am specifically using ML to refer to users of lemmy.ml and how they’re not as extreme as Hexbear users, a number of whom basically could have turned into MAGA followers if they hadn’t gotten into socialism first. Very similar behavior and rhetoric from some of the users on that instance. Socialists can be just as pro-authoritarian as fascists can, and just because they’re racist against Western Europeans instead of Asians doesn’t mean that they aren’t racist.




  • You can still find the posts on the whole saga on Blahaj somewhere, but my recollection is that Blahaj users got harassed, Ada said something to the admins on Hexbear to try to resolve the issue, they either refused to do anything or went full no contact, and then when Blahaj voted to defederate, they defederated first before Blahaj could and then claimed that Blahaj users were transphobic towards their users and that Ada or any of the other admins never contacted them, etc.

    Basically went “You can’t block me if I block you first!” and then played the victim/transphobia card…against the instance largely created for trans people, by trans people.



  • If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say they see it as being no different than pirating any other kind of media from multi billion dollar corporations, which completely ignores the fact that those hurt the most by genAI models are the small artists who lose out both on both having their labor stolen and losing potential future customers.

    Either that, or they have the same mentality as middle managers and upper management in that they don’t value the labor required to produce art but desire the end result, and work backwards from there to justify it.


  • Yeah, though I wouldn’t say that ML falls into this category generally. It’s more specifically about the farther extreme end that is usually relegated to Hexbear and beyond that start to fall into the “so left they practically loop back to the other end of the spectrum” group. There are those amongst that group that have no problems with harassment or transphobia or anything else so long as they deem the target as having failed their purity test and therefore being nothing but capitalist scum who deserve everything they get.






  • Short answer? It’s normally used against conservatives, but cliques and purity politics (both literal politics and not) do come into play on occasion.

    Longer answer: Lemmy was originally founded by a bunch of Marxist-Leninists and socialists of similar stripes (that’s what the .ml stands for), and early adopters often made up some form of minority group/outcast - LGBTQ and the like. This has led to a very zero tolerance policy towards conservative “talking points” and the usual bag of tricks that they employ when attempting to colonize an area/group. Especially as Reddit has further enshitified, but even before then Redditors were generally thought of more in terms of r/the_Donald subscribers rather than as disparate groups from across the political spectrum.

    There are of course the “joined Lemmy before it was cool” groups who resent the growing popularity of the platform - especially after the Reddit API exodus that brought you and me here - but I think they’re largely relegated to the parts of Lemmy that most of the instances defederated from. Some of those places are basically the leftist equivalent of 4chan, and would absolutely use it as an insult if you failed their political belief purity tests.

    In short, basically everybody would use it for a Trumper, but a small few might use it on me if I were to say something like that I think that dbzer0’s support of genAI inherently makes the instance pro-corporatism so long as they’re the ones benefitting from stealing labor from workers, and an even smaller few would probably use it simply because I started using Lemmy during the Reddit API fiasco.