We've launced a public discord server at https://discord.gg/lemmyworld

The reason for why we choose discord is because it was easier to moderate and manage than other options. Besides we also had a discord-bot guru by the name of Rooki who created a neat bot that allowed us to connect/verify discord users to their Lemmy World account.

So if you are a moderator and you are looking for some extra hands to moderate your community, or if you need to contact anyone from the LW team, this is the most efficient way to do it!

Come have a look!

Teddy (left), and Sampson (right)

There are a lot of reasons not to give them your money. They're assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base. That's beside the point, though, really.

It's just not a spectacular option for hosting. In order to get a Rpi competitive with even the shittiest laptop from 7 years ago, you're going to end up spending more than you would spend on a decent laptop from 7 years ago.

If it is a computer that turns on, it will likely function orders of magnitude better than an Rpi and won't bind you to ARM architecture. My entire hosting setup was pulled out of a recycling pile for free. Install ubuntu/ubuntu server and enjoy yourself.

If you intend on spending any amount of money on this hobby, I cannot express enough how much I recommend against any of that money going toward a Raspberry Pi.

EDIT: A lot of you seem to be reading this as "Raspberry Pis are all nonfunctional" and getting mad about it. Don't do that.

Edit 2: Good to see that all the stupid parts of reddit made it here

Actually, really liked the Apple Intelligence announcement. It must be a very exciting time at Apple as they layer AI on top of the entire OS. A few of the major themes.

Step 1 Multimodal I/O. Enable text/audio/image/video capability, both read and write. These are the native human APIs, so to speak.

Step 2 Agentic. Allow all parts of the OS and apps to inter-operate via "function calling"; kernel process LLM that can schedule and coordinate work across them given user queries.

Step 3 Frictionless. Fully integrate these features in a highly frictionless, fast, "always on", and contextual way. No going around copy pasting information, prompt engineering, or etc. Adapt the UI accordingly.

Step 4 Initiative. Don't perform a task given a prompt, anticipate the prompt, suggest, initiate.

Step 5 Delegation hierarchy. Move as much intelligence as you can on device (Apple Silicon very helpful and well-suited), but allow optional dispatch of work to cloud.

Step 6 Modularity. Allow the OS to access and support an entire and growing ecosystem of LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT announcement).

Step 7 Privacy. <3

We're quickly heading into a world where you can open up your phone and just say stuff. It talks back and it knows you. And it just works. Super exciting and as a user, quite looking forward to it.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1800242310116262150?s=46

The ultimate weapon of mass distraction

I'm a conservative. I don't mind the liberal stuff here. It's good to learn the other side, but I don't want a liberal echo chamber. I'd like to be more politically balanced in the fediverse. Is there any way I can do that?

Reading too much into the language seems, at this point, to be less of a danger than reading too little into it.

This week, Israel released an appalling video featuring five female Israeli soldiers taken captive at Nahal Oz military base on October 7. Fearful and bloody, the women beg for their lives while Hamas fighters mill around and alternately threaten to kill them and compliment their appearance. The captors call the women “sabaya,” which Israel translated as “women who can get pregnant.” Almost immediately, others disputed the translation and said sabaya referred merely to “female captives” and included no reference to their fertility. “The Arabic word sabaya doesn’t have sexual connotations,” the Al Jazeera journalist Laila Al-Arian wrote in a post on X, taking exception to a Washington Post article that said that it did. She said the Israeli translation was “playing on racist and orientalist tropes about Arabs and Muslims.”

These are real women and victims of ongoing war crimes, so it does seem excessively lurid to suggest, without direct evidence, that they have been raped in captivity for the past several months. (“Eight months,” the Israelis noted, allowing readers to do the gestational math. “Think of what that means for these young women.”) But to assert that sabaya is devoid of sexual connotation reflects ignorance, at best. The word is well attested in classical sources and refers to female captives; the choice of a classical term over a modern one implies a fondness for classical modes of war, which codified sexual violence at scale. Just as concubine and comfort woman carry the befoulments of their historic use, sabaya is straightforwardly associated with what we moderns call rape. Anyone who uses sabaya in modern Gaza or Raqqah can be assumed to have specific and disgusting reasons to want to revive it.

Archive Link

Mod Note: I'm bending the "no politics' rule to highlight a disgusting trend I've been seeing on Lemmy lately. Due to the sheer volume of comments fitting that trend and the huge number downvotes given to anyone who speaks out against it, I'm convinced this opinion is truly unpopular in the Lemmy-verse. This is also topical and important enough to merit discussion or at least to provide a point of reflection. So while it touches on politics, that's merely the framing device of current events being used to highlight a larger problem.

As you're inevitably downvoting this, at least take a good, long look in the mirror while you do so.

The sheer number of people here praising the shooter, advocating for, glorifying, or just flat out calling for violence has been a real eye opener and litmus test for the kind of people I've surrounded myself with on this platform. Suffice it to say, a lot of you have failed that test spectacularly.

A rational, independent thinker should be able to condemn this kind of violence even when it's targeted towards their "enemies." Political violence has absolutely NO PLACE in a healthy society, and no one should be praising or advocating for it. No one. Ever. This is one thing that, regardless of the paradox of tolerance, should be universally condemned.

There are, apparently, a ton of extremists here that don't see themselves as such because they believe their extremism is justified and that they're on the right side of history. Ironically, which is what all extremists think.

This goes back further than just yesterdays's events. For example, it's been a common refrain since the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision that, paraphrased, "The current non-dictator president should do dictator things to stop the other dictator". Which is just another flavor of "Extremism is bad except when it's my flavor of extremism".

Don't give me that "it's just gallows humor", "I'm oppressed, and he deserved it", "if you had a time machine, wouldn't you go back to 1934...", "we haven't been a healthy society for X years...", or other excuses. This is a BFD with major implications and ramifications, and y'all Lemmings are treating like we just missed the exit ramp to Utopia and are trying to find a wide spot to make a U-turn.

It's certainly fine to have no sympathy for the guy (I sure as hell don't), but it's another thing entirely to be cheering on, promoting, and/or advocating for extremist stances like those being thrown out lately.

You say you want a better society? Then act like it!

Moments like this are the true test of one's character and intellectual honesty, and I'm beyond disappointed in so many of you.