I’ll admit I don’t spend enough time on here to have a well-formed opinion, but aside from the occasional obvious spam post, I don’t see a lot of obvious bot activity… Depending on the instance/community, you’re going to get a lot of very strong and, uh… controversial opinions.

Keep in mind that the (still relatively) niche nature of Lemmy/Piefed (and the fediverse writ large) means that a higher proportion of people around here are going to be far from the center of the political gradient… and the western world is very much experiencing a cultural/political paradigm shift which is driving people to the fringes.

I also think that a lot more people are using the platform than a year or two ago and that has knock-on effects on moderation that we still need to figure out how to deal with.

I’d like to see similar testing done comparing models where the “misaligned” data is present during training, as opposed to fine-tuning. That would be a much harder thing to pull off, though.

i prefer to do mine in the czech republic, personally

Laziness doesn’t exist. Everyone has their own struggles and it’s pretty fucked up to judge someone because they don’t choose to put their limited energy toward overcoming the obstacles that you take you’ve taken for granted having the ability to overcome. We should be encouraging curiosity and exploration, not demonizing people who got left behind and are too scared to try new things.

Being able to upload to Google Play Music was such a great feature. Honestly though, maybe it’s best that they killed it when they did. That way it can live on in memory as the example of what a music streaming service should be like… instead of becoming an enshittified zombie like spotify is today.

Hertz is the worst rental company I’ve had to deal with. Enterprise is the only one I’ll use if I have a choice.

Human posting of AI-generated content is definitely a problem; but ultimately that’s a moderation problem that can be solved, which is quite different from AI-generated content being put forward by the platform itself. There wasn’t necessarily anything stopping people from doing the same thing pre-GPT, it’s just easier and more prevalent now.

I’ve always hated that. I feel like I’m seeing it less and less on newer vehicles, though, so maybe manufacturers are also realizing that it’s stupid as hell.

Or maybe it’s just not worth the cost to have two different but mostly identical versions of a very expensive and highly integrated modern taillight housing for different markets.

It wasn’t just the norm for websites, it was the norm for every single kind of established platform that offered “free” content; see TV, radio, and even our goddamn public roadways.

Apple did not create an ad platform for the iPhone when it was introduced. The iAd platform was introduced in 2010 with the iPhone 4 as “mobile ads done right” (well after Google’s acquisition of AdMob in 2009, and certainly after the iPhone launch in 2007). It was subsequently shut down in 2016.

Developers never needed to “hack” ways to put ads in mobile apps. Mobile ad platforms already existed at the time, and developers were happy to use them extensively once they realized that smartphones were becoming a truly mass-market product (just like TV advertising, imagine that).

“I blame RCA for television ads. If they hadn’t made the first mass-market television set, we wouldn’t have TV ads interrupting my morning cartoons!”

that’s how you sound rn

Well, it was the norm for websites, why would anyone expect it to not transfer over to every other conceivable platform like it has today? The fact that Apple made the first device that allowed people to put adware on a device in your pocket is pure happenstance, and I’m not even sure how true that is given the existence of Blackberry and early Windows Mobile devices.

That said, have you ever heard of WildTangent? Because they’ve been around for a loooong time, and were really attractive to poor and stupid kids like me that really started using the internet circa 2005 and wanted to play computer games.

Again, what are you basing that on? Many websites, games, etc. that had traditionally only been accessible on a desktop/laptop were already primarily using ads for monetization at that point (I should know, I was using a lot of them). Blaming Apple for simply making the first handheld devices capable of running similar software makes absolutely zero sense.

How so? I went from Android to iPhone and one of the biggest reasons I kept it was the lack of consumer-hostile intrusive bullshit that seems to be everywhere on Google and Samsung products.