At this point I doubt tankies should be much of a concern. What are they, 1-2% of the potential Dem voter base? I’d sooner worry about the indecisive ones who have seen the performances in the debate.

I don’t think this is the exact cause for the situation, but having more book related forks would probably just do harm by splitting up the audience. The book reading trackers are absolutely dominated by Goodreads, and any alternative desperately needs as much user concentration as possible.

BookWyrm was my first dip into the Fediverse, back when I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads.

Tbh if there’s a musician that deserves this sort of comments, Eno is definitely one of the best candidates.

This has to have some weird ass allegorical meaning.

EDIT: So apparently this is a picture from a “Stammbuch” (“friendship book”) by some Ludwig Hetzer, from 1620. The scan of the book can be found here: http://digital.wlb-stuttgart.de/purl/bsz475519329 (at 12 recto; has lots of other fascinatingly weird drawings and miniature paintings).

The lower part of the page seems to be a dedication from a friend in Latin (seems to be referring to a birthday?), and above might be the text (probably a proverb) that explans the image but it’s in Greek and I can barely decipher cursive Greek, much less figure out the meaning. The first word seems to be θεος (god), the last might be διχαζει (divide?).

Tbh just going off my intuition and the themes in other pictures in the book… the woman is poking the man with a stick with a heart-shaped ending, which could symbolise love/sexuality/marriage. So it could be like a caricature/“warning” showing a wife controlling her husband, literally pushing him around through emotional influence.

This reminds me of the anti-wind-energy arguments about the turbines killing many birds…

Something of the sort has already been claimed for language/linguistics, i.e. that LLMs can be used to understand human language production. One linguist wrote a pretty good reply to such claims, which can be summed up as “this is like inventing an airplane and using it to figure out how birds fly”. I mean, who knows, maybe that even could work, but it should be admitted that the approach appears extremely roundabout and very well might be utterly fruitless.

Platypuses are mammals, but they’re weird enough

We probably wouldn’t consider them nearly as weird if they were more numerous than any other mammal species and lived all over the world. So their comparison to catholicism is weird.

and then it will turn out the monster was inside me all along

there’s only seven stories in the world

There isn’t. That’s a completely nonsensical statement, no serious scholar of litearture/film/etc. would claim something of the sort. While there have been attempts to analyse the “basic” stories and narrative structures (Propp’s model of fairy tales, Greimas’ actantial model, Campbell’s well-known hero’s journey), they’re all far from universally applicable or satisfying.

Yeah, I’ll shill for dbzer0 as the place to host the community.

At least we won’t have any dang countries forcing time zones there to be in odd shapes.

In Croatia, we call(ed) it ‘snow’ (snijeg).

Ehhhh, if you have expertise in ANY field outside of like programming, you can easily test various models and see that they produce a lot of crap. That doesn’t require you to understand how LLMs work exactly.

I’m in exactly this situation right now and I’m becoming more than desperate. I probably have several emails asking me to respond and let people know what’s going on. I don’t even dare to open my inbox.

Clearly you can see it’s an old picture, from the ages when people actually drew/photoshopped new things, before memes were 100% made up of Drake and Wojak variations.

/boomerposting

It can vary from place to place…

The point isn’t so much to actually block all the garbage, that’s impossible, but to suggest to the Facebook algo to show you less such stuff.

I’ve also seen people getting semi-pornographic adverts on Youtube, so your experience sounds entirely expected. Putting everything else aside, it’s “funny” how any other smaller independent website or a user on these major websites can and will be sanctioned (the user getting banned, the small website gaining a negative reputation) for hosting/posting pornography, but when a major website shoves pornography right into your face (and probably minors’ too, which is unambiguously illegal) nothing can be done, there is never any sort of uproar or criticism, I doubt you could even report it to some authority…

This. It’s horrible and outright unusable. I used to block each and every “recommended” post/page, after a few weeks they stopped appearing so frequently.

This. In the west among the younger generations, sure, Facebook is outdated/dead. Among other generations, and across much of the world, it is still almost as essential as email.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero

A criticism also stated that Facebook is practicing digital colonialism because it is not introducing open internet but building a "little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content”.

An article by Christopher Mims in Quartz in September 2012 stated that Facebook Zero played a very important role in Facebook’s expansion in Africa over the 18 months following the release of Facebook Zero, noting that data charges could be a significant component of mobile usage cost and the waiving of these charges reduced a significant disincentive for people in Africa to use Facebook.

To me as a kid with a rudimentary phone and little pocket money, this was also how I got onto and used to access Facebook.