TheMuffinMan

Serious question: can anyone vouch for a search engine today that prioritises… searching? and does it well?

I used DuckDuckGo for a couple of years, but I’d found the result set frequently lacking compared to Google. I’m currently on Brave search (+ Brave Browser), and it’s good for text, but it does shove an LLM response at the top and is pretty bad for image results.

I don’t know why you were downvoted; you’re not wrong.

In a similar vein to those who tackle cyber crime, and (to take a specific example, the mass generation of CSAM), there quite literally aren’t enough people to take action at the volumes the stuff is being generated.

Here on Lemmy/PieFed, an instance could get flooded with slop that the admins can’t deal with. Yeah, the instance might get defederated, but 1) sucks for you if you were on it, and 2) nothing prevents this from happening on the other instances that defederated.

Unfortunately I do think the only ‘solution’ is to fight fire with fire (i.e. build automated moderation systems), but this will inevitably lead to the development of slop generators that circumvent those measures.

Seems to me like it will be an endless battle. Anything but straightforward to deal with.

I get where you’re coming from, but I also think some general traits that people can have are more common in people with autism.

Not everything is either definitively autistic or definitively just a trait.

I frequently find myself evaluating what parts of myself I can ascribe to autism versus just a facet of my personality. On the off chance that you have a manual that helps with this delineation, please send it my way!

Nice work on the truncation.

I agree, although this particular bit

Have everyone pander to you and stop posting?

works both ways - so much so that I initially misinterpreted your comment when I quickly scanned it before properly re-reading

Opinions (even negative ones) are a form of discussion.

I get the sense that you are speaking out about circumstances relating to this specific artist (maybe they’ve been excessively hounded by a brigade of haters), but your original comment, esp. the last line was quite general, and is largely what I was responding to.

I don’t have any stance on this comic or this artist (never seen them before), but comment sections are kind of exactly for opinions to be shared.

Ah, that is indeed what they wrote but that interpretation didn’t even cross my mind! That is hilariously bad lmao. Thanks

Assuming they were in brackets after people’s names, why is that silly? It’s just so you know how to address them.

Behind every decision to replace staff with yet another LLM is endless frustration for customers and clients.

I had an urgent leak to deal with earlier this week, and when I called my rental agency they told me they couldn’t do anything until I’d logged it in their online system. I logged it in detail with photos, then it took me to an LLM. When I told the LLM I wasn’t interested in further chatter and just needed a plumber sent over ASAP, I got a text saying my request wouldn’t be dealt with because I “did not complete the conversation with [their] agent.” All the while my light bulbs were dripping… I felt like I was taking crazy pills.

I haven’t been able to post to reddit in years now, because I refuse to browse it without a VPN, and while it still lets me in, any account that I make immediately gets shadowbanned as soon as I make a post or a comment.

I can’t tell if it’s because their bot filter is just terribly implemented, or because they don’t want me on their platform if I don’t surrender my public IP address.

I’m pretty sure they just use a “how many different accounts under the same public IP” type of logic, because even if I create an account on a 4G network (no VPN) and post, this happens. Cellular networks often use double NAT (unique internal/carrier IP, shared public IP) to avoid allocating a public IP to each mobile device.

I’ve given up a long time ago. My only exposure to reddit now is when a search results page links me to a post. The most helpful stuff is usually from a decade ago or earlier.

Am Brit, have 3 credit cards, am I missing something?

I only know one adult who doesn’t have any.

Edit: I think you might be confusing us with France, where the vast majority pay with debit cards.

TBH, this makes very little sense to me, because that stereotype hasn’t been true for decades. I was once a braces kid (in a country where that was very normal) and have been living in the UK for 10 years. No significant differences in the state of people’s teeth.

Either the people you were watching are very old (born pre WW2) or an especially unlucky bunch. 😆

Trans man here, IMHO being nonbinary can be paired with being trans, but not necessarily, i.e. they are not inherently the same thing.

If they have dysphoria and want to transition to alleviate it (irrespective of whether they can), then yes, they are trans.

If the extent of a nonbinary person’s journey is to go by they/them, or they/them + the pronouns associated with their AGAB, then I would not categorise them as trans. To be clear, I am not saying that this is not a valid stance - just that the experience is not the same as being trans, though there may be some overlap.

Obviously you cannot work this out without intimately knowing the person, and it isn’t really anyone else’s business anyway, but to answer the question explicitly, I would refer to them as a nonbinary person (in the absence of further information, and where the ‘nonbinary’ descriptor is relevant otherwise I would just say ‘person’), not a trans person.

Happy to help 😅

FWIW, I’m bi and find other bald(ing) men who embrace it attractive :)

I just wish other people were less demeaning about it; rude comments about bald men (mostly from women unfortunately) were the biggest barrier to acceptance for me.

Just putting it out there, because I have been silenced every time I have tried to talk about my negative experiences with minoxidil:

I was on a 10% topical formulation (so 2x the strength of regular Regaine/Rogaine) and the stuff destroyed my skin on a permanent basis. About a month or 2 in I started noticing lines and wrinkles where I previously had none, my eyes were really puffy, and I started to look like the ‘after’ photo in those PSAs about doing drugs. I had to come off the stuff and take collagen supplements daily to even slightly reverse that. I’m not back to baseline and likely never will be; that shit aged me by about 8 years in the span of 6 months. It was honestly much worse than hair loss itself.

Before I came off it, when I told the ““clinic”” that prescribed me what I was experiencing, they said it was placebo. Meanwhile, other hair loss sufferers online told me that I was making it up because I was jealous of other men’s gains (???)

I am by no means saying this will necessarily happen if you take minox, but it wasn’t even a reported side effect on the leaflet (where it lists common/uncommon/rare/very rare side effects), and I was genuinely trying to get it on there so people could be aware that this is a risk.

I would be super cautious of oral administration. When I was on the topical, it was only in contact with my scalp and any part of my body that would touch my pillow while sleeping I guess. Can’t imagine what it would have done going through the digestive system instead.

Sincerely, fuck the hair restoration industry and the way it preys on desperate people.

Sorry that this isn’t necessarily super on-topic (or uplifting), but seeing/hearing about minoxidil brings up a really bad experience.