I think it's more complicated than free will existing or not.
If you knew every single possible value about the universe at its start and had a perfectly accurate model of physics, you could theoretically predict/simulate everything that would ever happen. For practical reasons, though, that's impossible, even ignoring weird quantum effects, for the simple reason that that is a lot of data points, more than any of us could reasonably keep track of- it's like how, in sufficiently controlled conditions, a fair dice can roll the exact same number 100% of the time, but there are enough variables that are hard enough to control for in a normal situation that it's basically random.
Similarly, if you knew everything about every human on Earth, you could theoretically predict exactly what any of them would do at any given moment. Of course, that's just not practical- the body and brain are a machine that is constantly taking in input and adapting to it, so in order to perfectly predict someone's thoughts and actions, you'd need to know every single detail of every single thing that has ever happened to them, no matter how small. Then, you'd need to account for the fact that they're interacting with hundreds of other people, who are also constantly changing and adapting. It's just not possible to predict or control a person for any reasonable length of time like that, because one tiny interaction could throw off the entire model.
Just look at current work with AI- our modern machine learning algorithms are much more well-understood and are trained in much more contained environments than any human mind, and yet we still need to manually reign them in and sift through the data to prevent them from going off the rails.
So, technically, I suppose free will doesn't exist. For practical purposes, though, what we have is indistinguishable from free will, so there's not much point getting riled up about it.
I think the point of these bots is that they try to make themselves appear not like bots in order to steer the direction of discussions. That and upvoting the agendas they want to push and downvoting perspectives they disagree with.
Good: I got support from people when things in my DnD group got weird.
Bad: Once, I asked a technical question that I had asked people irl and researched a lot and not found what I was looking for. On reddit, I had people making assumptions and nitpicking the terminology while avoiding the actual question completely. It was a good example of the CS/math departments friction (which makes a whole lot more sense to me now). I did get a better answer on another site by just posting the equation and using zero jargon but I ended up abandoning that topic bc it was impractical.
Recovery involves failure. It is natural to fall back into old ways, what is important is what you do after. You can either live in the failure, the negativity, and say you are incapable or you can accept that a habit is a habit and try again, find the positivity in continuing to try. Nothing in life is perfect, and recovery involves relapse even if it's been years, it's okay just pick up and keep trying.
By now, we've all been around the internet long enough to know that good things never last. That's really life: Everything's impermanent. Lemmy will probably suck someday, as will much of the fediverse. But I'm grateful it's good right now and for the foreseeable future.
It could suck someday, but it doesn't suffer from the same things that made myspace -> facebook -> reddit suck. No money hungry executives profiting off underpaying employees to implement features no one asked for and selling astroturfing as a service. At least it doesn't seem that there's astroturfing as a service here yet.
Before it opened up to the general public, we used it to organize parties, share photos without concern, and keep in touch with friends that went to other colleges. There wasn't anything else like it.
I have hope that as the big corporations enter the Fediverse and start enshittifying it, some of us can sneak off to new instances that just don’t federate with them. Then the masses can enjoy their Meta-branded Fediverse, and the tech bros can make their money from it, while the rest of us carry on quietly in a parallel one.
We're not all trapped in the same building anymore. You can just move to a different instance and still have the same software experience but with the community you prefer.
I have to take care of a 3 year old with pink eye giving her antibiotic eye drops 4 times a day for a week. It's like wrangling a greased screaming pig. She doesn't sleep though the night from the coughing, so i dont sleep through the night. I'm all alone while my spouse is on a work trip for 2 weeks, so he gets to miss out on all of this start to finish! No daycare or taekwondo so I can get a break! No family or support! All me all alone with a shit eyed toddler and no sleep for 2 weeks straight. That's on top of all the other agonizing responsibilities haunting me every day. I'm so tired, 10 days left......
Teach him early and remind him often about how to vet his sources. Things like making sure you know who's funding what you're reading, what the political reputation of the sites you're reading on are, and so forth.
Honestly, this is probably the single most important internet skill that exists, second only to (maybe) information security / data privacy, and I didn't get my first serious classroom lesson on this until I was in my Master's degree program. This is a skill people need from goddamn grade school these days.
Yes, it can be tedious, yes it can be exhausting, but if you want to understand who is, or could be, pulling your strings, you have to understand how to vet your sources. Never learning to do this is the path to Fox News viewership.
Hot and active are currently broken and will show stale content. It's a Lemmy thing not a Jerboa thing. I'm hoping they fix this in the upcoming version that's in testing right now.
Other people have made good points, but one I've noticed is that there's no advertising or profit motive (so far) and there's also no leadership that encourages dark patterns like increasing negative engagement through encouraging stuff like doomscrolling or starting or continuing arguments.
I'm on Kbin, and I like how by default all the notifications are turned off. So people aren't automatically told to respond to every little thing they participate in. If they really care, they have to manually go back on check on things they wrote about or were engaged in. Makes it less likely that people will argue endlessly, lowering the quality of posts and replies, and derailing them with long subthreads of off topic discussions or arguments.
There aren't any bots here promoting a narrative, or auto-downvoting people. From around 2015 until its final days, Reddit was manipulated by business and political entities to steer groupthink. Turning off reddit unplugs you from the Matrix, so to speak.
On Lemmy specifically: its a higher barrier to entry, there's less karma chasing here. Especially if you aren't on one of the larger Lemmy instances. It feels like a community and not like karma-whoring. In my preferences, I turned off viewing the number of votes a comment has, which is nice.
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