Congratulations and well done dude!!! I’ve found Hybrid Calisthenics (the app and the YouTube channel) to be a friendly, easy way to build routine and understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it when you’re exercising. The app can be a little glitchy on my phone but it’s just visual glitches.

Ahhh I assumed it was that one, lol

Making art can be lonely when you come up for air and feel like nobody cares or would enjoy what you’re creating, but I’m sure plenty of people would love to read what you’re writing! It’s impressive that you’re even attempting to write a book!

What film are you referencing?

Nice, thank you! 👍

The head of my agency is a gullible rube who is terrified of being “left behind”, and the head of my department is a grown-up with a family and a career who spends his days off sending AI videos and memes into the work chat.

I’ve been called into meetings and told I have to be positive about AI. I’ve been told to stop coding and generate (very important) things with AI.

It’s disheartening. My career is over, because I have no interest in generating mountains of no-intention code rather than putting in the effort to build reliable, good, useful things for our clients. AI dorks can’t fathom human effort and hard work being important.

I’m working to pay off my debts, and then I’m done. I strongly want to get a job that allows me to be offline.

Asking you as it seems like you’re somebody working in the AI field: how can I avoid whatever you and others in your field are doing? Do I just have to go offline?

I’m not against that idea, but unfortunately I do have debts to pay off at least for the next 45 months or so and my career requires me to use the internet (I’m a web developer). Once the debt is paid, I’m free.

Sure, it’s an arbitrary distinction to you. To me, not so much. Different feelings, I guess. 🤷‍♂️ Have a good one! ✌️

I hear you. It’s hard to trust that art you see is genuine art by people anymore, and it’s only going to get more difficult as these AIs swallow and plagiarise more and more of the human effort that they can.

I can’t give you easy advice on this. Find an artist you trust. Follow them. Learn to appreciate older artists who are dead. Learn to love fewer artists.

What I can tell you is this: take time away from the internet. This whole Generative AI boom has shown me that a disconcerting number of people, probably even the majority, honestly and seriously do not give a shit about authentic human effort and creativity. Being real, being authentic, being creative, any of the things you or I might view as essential to the human experience don’t matter to them. They want content to consume, and that’s that. Don’t give a shit where it comes from. Don’t give a shit what it means. Just stick it in front of their eyes for a few seconds before they move onto the next thing. It’s really fucked up.

So, go outside. Reconnect with your real friends, in contexts where these marketing machines can’t lie to you. Talk with human beings. I’ve started going to galleries in my area. I’m sober at the moment so I’m spending a lot of time working out at home or running. I went out to a film night screening Palestinian films made about the genocide. Met a lot of people there.

Get away from the internet when you can. It’s not a healthy place, and it can make people a little bit sick, I think. Make art for yourself.

Oh do stop it, you know what the OP means.

Interesting, you might be right. If that’s the case, though - and I don’t have any sort of formal education in fingering so this is a layman’s perspective - it looks like the starfish is misplacing his fingers.

Surely the starfish would find it more effective to use the more nimble and dexterous tips of its fingers to touch those sensitive nerves around the rim, rather than the middle of its digits which are much harder to apply small, directed pressure with?

I hate to ask… But would that even feel good for the sponge? Would that even feel like anything? From what we can see, there’s nothing in there. The starfish’s fingers aren’t stimulating anything; they’re just waggling in the air inside the sponge.

Beyond simply the stretching of the hole, I can’t see the sponge really getting anything out of this act. And the most I can see it doing for the starfish is providing a convenient carry handle for his friend.

Damn, none of your posts are funny

Y’all 🤠🤠🤠🤠🤠

But also Cloudflare confirmed an issue:

Hahaha uh oh!

Oh no but I was just about to join

That feels a bit dangerous to me, sincerely. Like, what if the government mod of a country decides LGBTQ stuff is blacklisted? How do users protest the legislative blacklist? I guess just switch instance?

No idea honestly mate, but what I meant when I brought up the illegality was really that it’s usually very disturbing content, which mods catch and remove before loads of people have to see it.

If it’s a new account posting that stuff, I don’t know how the system we’re discussing would prevent loads of users having to see it - altho I guess if those blacklists of users were collaborative and the person or team whose list you’ve “subscribed” to catch it, maybe that solves the issue?

Ah yeah I hadn’t thought about legal authorities. I guess that would entail local police forces monitoring Lemmy and blacklisting and subsequently investigating specific users or bots once they post something illegal, which seems not so feasible sadly. But, definitely up for a more democratised system of modding generally!

Oh, that’s an interesting idea. It’s more nuanced than just relying on upvotes, and sort of democratises the role of moderator! I was thinking maybe reporting would come into it somewhere but I see that the idea you’re describing has more depth than I was picturing. I’d be up for using a system like that, I think!

Re this, though:

It could also be dictated to you, in the case of legally forbidden stuff.

Is that just admins? Does that decision sort of shift mod responsibility upwards, leaving a good majority of decisions in the hands of the public but ultimately leaving a few powerful people with more global “modding” capability still? Not trying to nitpick or be antagonistic, this sounds like a cool system to use, I’m just trying to understand

Voting could replace mods in some ways, but in others it would be less effective (I know, not all mods are effective).

For instance, combatting spam; more users would have to see the spam and downvote it to have it removed (presumably in this system, a post could be removed when it reaches a certain downvote threshold? Not sure how else it would replace mods).

Additionally, content moderators and admins do actually do at least one other good thing; they look at and remove illegal or seriously upsetting material. Unfortunately, Lemmy has had several issues with csam being posted by presumably bots – good, active content moderators remove this as quickly as possible, protecting more of the users on their instances than a downvote threshold.

Outside of having some sort of threshold, I’m not sure I have a good picture of how downvotes could replace mods? Human oversight is really key to a lot of accurate and effective decision making; I’m sure we’ve all dealt with fully automated systems and know the pain of that.