At least for me at least, I personally err on the side of having more freedom to look into places even if that means dealing with a couple of assholes.

This decision was about users from other instances coming here and causing trouble, not beehaw users going elsewhere. The intent isn't to keep users siloed in here. Unfortunately, lemmy currently only supports two modes of interaction between instances: either you federate, or you don't. More technologically mature fediverse platforms like mastodon have more nuanced options, and hopefully we'll get similar options in lemmy soon that will allow, e.g., beehaw users out onto these instances without letting everyone on those instances in here.

I believe Jerboa on android has a feature to let you have multiple accounts signed in, although I haven't messed with it yet

Really interesting to hear an actual expert with experience at depth (and at this exact site) discuss this story. I'm glad the anchor didn't cut in too often and let him speak at length. Thank you for sharing!

Flash games will work again? Moving away from NFTs? Well dang, I might just make a new neopets account! Lots of nostalgia there, it'd be cool to mess around with again after all these years.

It seems like you're working under the core assumption that the trained model itself, rather than just the products thereof, cannot be infringing?

Generally if someone else wants to do something with your copyrighted work – for example your newspaper article – they need a license to do so. This isn't only the case for direct distribution, it includes things like the creation of electronic copies (which must have been made during training), adaptations, and derivative works. NYT did not grant OpenAI a license to adapt their articles into a training dataset for their models. To use a copyrighted work without a license, you need to be using it under fair use. That's why it's relevant: is it fair use to make electronic copies of a copyrighted work and adapt them into a training dataset for a LLM?

You also seem to be assuming that a generative AI model training on a dataset is legally the same as a human learning from those same works. If that's the case then the answer to my question in the last paragraph is definitely, "yes," since a human reading the newspaper and learning from it is something that, as you say, "any intelligent rational human being" would agree is fine. However, as far as I know there's not been any kind of ruling to support the idea that those things are legally equivalent at this point.

Now, if you'd like to start citing code or case law go ahead, I'm happy to be wrong. Who knows, this is the internet, maybe you're actually a lawyer specializing in copyright law and you'll point out some fundamental detail of one of these laws that makes my whole comment seem silly (and if so I'd honestly love to read it). I'm not trying to claim that NYT is definitely going to win or anything. My argument is just that this is not especially cut-and-dried, at least from the perspective of a non-expert.

Ideally there'd be options other than what's essentially a binary on/off for inter-instance relations. Something like mastodon has: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/moderation/#limit-server

There just isn't an equivalent in lemmy yet. Hopefully that will change sooner than later

why would I want to use it?

You wouldn't, but that's fine with Match Group: JP Morgan[^1] are loving this new monetization strategy. If they think they can get more money out of their users they will, the experience and usefulness of their app be damned. Very similar to aggressively monetized mobile games, but extra icky since they're monetizing human relationships.

[^1]: I'm sure other investment firms are pleased as well, but JP Morgan was the firm mentioned in the article

Exciting stuff. I've long since vowed never to pre-order anything from Bethesda ever again though, so I'll be waiting to hear what the vibe is once other folks start playing it. Right now it very much seems like it could either be great or disappointing. We'll see in a couple weeks' time I s'pose

Defederation completely cuts the ties between instances, so no connection in either direction: lemmy.world users can't see or post here (which is why this was done), and beehaw users can't see or post there. The latter is less than ideal, but it's the only lever of control lemmy has at this point for inter-instance relations. Hopefully things will change as better tooling / more granular controls are implemented.

Thanks for sharing this, its the first I'd seen of it. It feels like a kinda message-in-a-bottle sorta thing. The few messages I read were a melancholy mix of people who were clearly going through some hard times, and people trying to share some positivity. (And also some chain-email style "If you see this message pass it on," messages; very nostalgic.)

Nobody needs to write an essay; I wrote two (maybe three?) sentences in mine. You just need to actually be interested in beehaw for what makes it different from other instances and express that. My application wasn't really any longer than this paragraph

Registration happens to be behind right now, mainly for technical reasons as alyaza mentioned, but the admin team is working diligently on it (♥)

Yep, haha, it sure would be convenient if the world only ever threw challenges at us when we were well and fully prepared to deal with them! 🙃

Well I hear what you're saying, although I don't much appreciate being told what I should want the outcome to be.

My own wants notwithstanding, I know copyright law is notoriously thorny – fair use doubly so – and I'm no lawyer. I'd be a little bit surprised if NYT decides to raise this suit without consulting their own lawyers though, so it stands to reason that if they do indeed decide to sue then there are at least some copyright lawyers who think it'll have a chance. As I said, we'll see.

Exactly. Some things just can't be studied as part of a double blind RCT. For example, see: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials

The perception that parachutes are a successful intervention is based largely on anecdotal evidence. Observational data have shown that their use is associated with morbidity and mortality, due to both failure of the intervention and iatrogenic complications...

The paper is funny, but the authors are making a serious point. RCTs are great when they're possible, but just because they're not possible doesn't mean we can't gather strong evidence anyway.

I've been watching a lot of her videos lately! I found the one on Gell-Mann amnesia to be really interesting and linked it here the other day; maybe a good one for a next watch if you haven't picked yet.

Yeah, I browsed the thread about the defederation on lemmy.world, and I get the same vibe that you do from it. A couple folks who seemed to get where we're coming from commented, but pretty universally their comment responses just demonstrated a total lack of ability to imagine that anyone might want something other than the maximalist experience of the fediverse. By and large they don't seem to understand what were trying to do here, which I guess reenforces that defederation was the right move for now.

I think you've got valid concerns here, and while it doesn't completely address them I think it's worth keeping in mind that Beehaw isn't here to be the next reddit, and growth for the sake of growth isn't the goal of this instance. Having a smaller scope and a more tightly knit community here is probably actually desirable, in the long run. Also, I don't think there's too much concern about people making fake applications to get in, as that's a much higher effort (and thus lower volume) vector of attack for bad actors.

With respect to sustainability, we'll hopefully get better moderation tools in the (near) future to solve these problems in a way besides total defederation, but at the moment lemmy doesn't support that kind of granularity. As better tools become available, refederation is not off the table.

But that the lemmy.world admin (at the time of the post) had not responded

This has changed now! Everybody's talking to everybody else at this point. None of the admins are upset at any of the other admins or anything, everyone's chill except for (some of) the users

all I needed to supply to register HERE is a username/password

The application also had a required question you needed to answer about why you wanted to join this community in particular, which was then read and manually approved by a human.

if yer having issue w/ moderation, hire moderators; I bet the ‘cost’ is pretty cheap

Monetarily, it's free. We moderate as volunteers. But keep in mind that there's both an overhead to vetting new moderators, as well as the fact that it will always be faster to troll and harass than to clean up the aftermath of that trolling and harassment. That, combined with the fact that there are way more people who'd like to do a little trollin' than there are people willing to volunteer their time to keep tabs on things, and you should be able to see how poorly this solution scales. The admins have addressed this a few times in comments on this thread, which I'm sure you'll probably turn up if you do decide to read through it.

what LemmyNet community should one join if they WANT to see the entire LemmyNet

Any instance that still federates with beehaw.org, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works. There are many smaller instances, regional instances, interest-specific instances, etc that fit the bill. I'd recommend looking around and finding one that seems like a good fit for what you're personally going for.

I feel like I should clarify because the article didn't do a good job at explaining: perovskite is a kind of structure, not a particular material. They have the generic formula ABX~3~ (where A and B are different kinds of cations and X is some kind of anion), although not everything with the formula is a perovskite.

Simple perovskites include some lead-containing materials like lead titanate, but also lead-free materials like barium or strontium titanate. And in general there are a lot of different kinds of perovskites, especially because some of the structural sites can be filled by small organic molecules instead of pure elements.

Edit: I think I was misreading the journal article before my edit (it's early I'm not awake yet lol). I had said it looks like they're using a lead-based perovskite but actually I can't tell what exactly they're using with a quick skim. The article is very review-y, the formula I thought they were using is from another paper. I'll have a more thorough look later.

Edit 2: It's a review paper, and the way it was described in the linked news article is kinda misleading. Its not specifically about this company's particular composition or architecture.

I've always heard that "organic" farming is really not especially different from conventional farming, including from some folks in agriculture. Like, they still use chemical pesticides and stuff, just different ones that are less effective and so sprayed more heavily.

I don't have anything to back that up with though, so there's a reasonable chance you have better info here. I'd be interested to know more if you've got standards and such you can share?

Just so you know, if you saw a green "Report Created" toast notification, that's actually a known bug with the Lemmy web UI, not something you did! I assume a fix will come along at some point, although there's of course a lot of dev work to be done. You're free to completely ignore those notifications.

Yeah I've heard a lot of people talking about the copyright stuff with respect to image generation AIs, but as far as I can see there's no fundamental reason that text generating AIs wouldn't be subject to the same laws. We'll see how the lawsuit goes though I suppose.

I'm pretty sure there are plans to have questions related to new communities on the survey that the admin team has been working on.

Report 'em too, if you're not already! It helps the mods and the admin team find them so that site-wide bans can be issued.

It looks like you're on aussie.zone, so I'm pretty sure this shouldn't affect your ability to see posts and comments in any way

Agreed. Strong (and effectively enforced) worker protections are just as important as tech-specific safety regulations. Nobody should feel like they need to put themselves into a risky situation to make work happen faster, regardless of whether their employer explicitly asks them to take that risk or (more likely) uses other means like unrealistic quotas to pressure them indirectly.

There are certainly ways to make working around robots safer, e.g. soft robots, machine vision to avoid unexpected obstacles in the path of travel, inherently limiting the force a robot can exert, etc... And I'm all for moving in the direction of better inherent safety, but we also need to make sure that safer systems don't become an excuse for employers to expose their workers to more risky situations (i.e. the paradox of safety).

That's a real mood, yeah.

I just recently decided to stick with mine. I was having a lot of doubts: feeling like I wasn't making and progress, like I wouldn't actually be able to finish the projects I started, impostor syndrome shit, etc. I'm happy I decided to stick with it. I just cleared some big milestones and I'm in the middle of a nice long vacation now, and I'm feeling excited again about my work.

On the other side of things, I've got a friend who decided to leave his PhD program with a masters a few years ago. He's now heading up product development for a robotics startup, doing quite well for himself.

I don't think there're any wrong answers here. Do what will make you happiest. Maybe you just need a vacation, maybe you're ready to move on. And remember that education is never wasted: even if you decide not to finish out the PhD, you've still learned a lot and that's valuable with or without the piece of paper and title.

Best wishes, friend, whichever way you decide to go ♥

Probably referencing this lawsuit the the internet archive lost recently, related to the online library they launched during the pandemic.

I know there's a general issue to track shortcomings in the mod tooling: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2277

There's also an issue to allow users to block certain instances themselves, which would be helpful with this kind of thing: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397

There are a lot of open issues at the moment on lemmy's github. I'm not sure if there's something specific to this issue yet. I wasn't able to find one but I may well have just used the wrong search keywords (I don't know all the activitypub lingo yet). If not, one should definitely be opened! (And if I happen across one I'll update this comment.)

Users applying to join this instance need to answer a question about why they want to join this instance in particular. If they didn't, they didn't get in. There are several posts about the beehaw instance philosophy on the sidebar, and users are explicitly encouraged to read them before applying. We're pretty explicit about not trying to be a 1-to-1 replacement for reddit here. If a user is looking for that, they should sign up with an instance that better fits those aims.

That functionality would essentially solve the problem, yeah. Another solution would be something like mastodon's ability to limit or mute other instances without totally defederating from them. Any of that would need to be done at lemmy's end of things, though: there's nothing besides just outright defederating that the beehaw admin can do until/unless the capability is implemented in lemmy itself.

(And defederation isn't permanent or anything, so once good tools like that get implemented refederation in some capacity is certainly on the table.)

It's possible to run an instance in a whitelist mode where you only federate with approved instances, but I don't think the admin team really wants to go that route. The intent isn't to wall users in (although that's an unfortunate side effect in this case since there're no tools like the one you linked available for lemmy yet)

Caveat: I've not gotten up to speed on lemmy's full implementation of the activitypub protocol, so some of this might be wrong in some way. But, to the best of my understanding:

Those "shell" communities on L.W and S.IJ.W are, at this point, essentially unmoderated. I believe that reports will be visible to L.W / S.IJ.W admins (respectively), but this is the part I'm most uncertain about. I also don't know how much the admins on those instances would care to moderate the shell communities anyway, even if I'm right and they can see reports, and I also also don't know if L.W mutually defederating would hide the "shell" communities. Hopefully someone who understands activitypub and lemmy's implementation of it can jump in and answer some of these questions.

When we defederated, L.W and S.IJ.W kept local copies of our communities with any posts and comments that were made before defederation. Now that we're defederated with them, any further posts and comments made by L.W users will only be visible to L.W users (and the same goes for S.IJ.W). Other instances that we're still federated with will continue to get the "true" copy of the community which we host, which will not include any posts or comments made by L.W users or users from any other defederated instance. So there is unfortunately a possibility for L.W & S.IJ.W users to be deceived if they're unaware of the defederation, but users on instances we're still federated with will have the normal, moderated experience.

Ideally lemmy would do something about this: make the "shell" copy read only / archival, purge the community from the defederated instance, or at least surface the fact that the community was from a defederated instance in the UI somehow. Currently nothing like that is implemented.

I do agree that there's a potential for harm here. If you have a L.W account and feel comfortable, one thing you could do is make a post on the "shell" community letting folks on that instance know that we've defederated and their instance's copy is essentially unmoderated. It's unfortunate that we're needing to find ad hoc solutions like this, and I hope that lemmy's tooling and protocols around this kind of thing improve in the (near) future.

I think there are already a lot of good answers to your question here, but I figure I can add my own perspective. For your reference, I've lived in several pretty big cities in the eastern US:

I'm another person who almost never has cash on me. I happen to end up with some cash kicking around maybe two or three times a year. Sometimes, though, people will ask for money for something specific. When that happens, if its something I can reasonably get for them – food, socks, a bus ticket, etc – I will. I'm not in favor of making myself judge and jury over what people should be doing with their money or anything, but since I rarely have cash to give in the first place it's what I've settled on.

When I do have cash on me by chance, I'll give it (as long as it feels like a safe situation to be pulling out my wallet in). Once when I told someone I'd buy them the bus ticket they were asking for they got mad and left, so it's certainly true that sometimes what people say they need the money for isn't actually what they were going to buy. But, I mean, that's not really that big a deal imo, the same could be said about teenagers asking their parents for money! I try to not worry about what they're going to do with it. Hopefully they won't use it to do something that's going to hurt them more in the long run, but I recognize that I'm not qualified to make that call for them. Even if they do buy drugs or alcohol with the money, maybe that's what they need to do to avoid crippling or (especially in the case of alcohol) deadly withdrawals.

Finally, I'll end with a question to the other folks in this thread: what do you do when you encounter people selling, for example, flowers or bottles of water from the side of the road? I used to see this very often in one of the cities I've lived in. I've been told that a lot of these people are actually being exploited, and get to keep almost none of the money they earn through these sales. Is that true? If so, do you know a good way to help these people out without having your money go to the people exploiting them?

Sorry, I was unclear. You need an account that's on any instance that still federates with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works to view and interact with those instances. It looks like you're on waveform.social, so this change shouldn't affect you at all.

All this means is that users from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works can no longer participate here on beehaw.org (which was the purpose of us defederating with them), and users from beehaw.org can no longer participate on those instances (which sucks but is unavoidable with the options currently available in lemmy). Since you're registered on waveform.social and not any of beehaw.org, lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works, none of that applies to you.

tl;dr you're all set already and shouldn't need to do any new account creation

This is the most management-ass "feature" request

I'd sum it up as: 😴☕📝

Can't wait for my thesis overview to be in the past (hopefully I pass! 🤞)

Growth for the sake of growth isn’t always bad

I didn't say it was! It's just not the goal of beehaw in particular. Other instances have decided that they would like to be the new home for everybody who cares to apply (for example, lemmy.world). And there's nothing wrong with that at all, but ultimately it's also the reason we're not federated with them anymore.

Installed! I've been unhappy with my weather app for a little while now, looking forward to giving this one a try! The fact that they'll use an approximate location is really nice. Thank you for shouting this out!