I like to ask a variety of questions, sometimes silly, serious, and/or strange. Never asking in an attempt to pester or “just asking questions” stuff.

I’m generally curious and/or trying to get a sense of people’s views.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider.

    By this do you mean official forums? If so I think this is kind of missing some of the independent forums for software (whether games or media players or the like) or other media, which some sorta-everyday people set up in the past. Many have migrated to Discord not only because it’s easy but, I think, because it’s simply more cost-effective.

    Forums don’t seem to be cheap. Discourse’s own managed hosting goes for $50 a month, from one of their partners it’s $20, and looks like somewhere in-between if you try to spin it up yourself (e.g. Digital Ocean droplet runs $4 a month, then add in domain, and mail-provider (~$20-35)). Looking at that, it’s little wonder so many either opt for official forums, unofficial subreddits, Lemmy/Kbin communities, or Discord servers instead now.

    Maybe if I dug around some more I could find some options for managed hosting (which makes more sense for regular people, I think, to deal with technical maintenance) for Discourse or the like that are cheaper, but I can’t imagine one may find much that beats free. Unless there is something, unfortunately I guess we’re kind of stuck with the situation as-is barring some pleasant exceptions.



  • While I agree, what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

    I’m pretty sure those that may have even been considering forums went to Discord because the only other options were more involved in terms of set up/maintenance and cost, the latter to get something without ads.



  • All that aside, the point is that people talking about how it’s not “real AI” often come across as people who don’t know what they’re talking about, which was the point of the image.

    The funny part is, as I mention in my comment, isn’t that how both parties to these conversations feel? The problem is they’re talking past each other, but the worst part is, arguably the more educated participant should be more apt to recognize this and clarify or better yet, ask for clarification so they can see where the disconnect is emerging to improve communication.

    Also, let’s remember that it’s not the laypeople describing the technology in general personified terms like “learning” or “hallucinating”, which furthers some of the grumbling.


  • Which is a fair point, because AI has never meant “general AI”, it’s an umbrella term for a wide variety of intelligence like tasks as performed by computers.

    Do you mean in the everyday sense or the academic sense? I think this is why there’s such grumbling around the topic. Academically speaking that may be correct, but I think for the general public, AI has been more muddled and presented in a much more robust, general AI way, especially in fiction. Look at any number of scifi movies featuring forms of AI, whether it’s the movie literally named AI or Terminator or Blade Runner or more recently Ex Machina.

    Each of these technically may be presenting general AI, but for the public, it’s just AI. In a weird way, this discussion is sort of an inversion of what one usually sees between academics and the public. Generally academics are trying to get the public not to use technical terms loosely, yet here some of the public is trying to get some of the tech/academic sphere to not, at least as they think, use technical terms loosely.

    Arguably it’s from a misunderstanding, but if anyone should understand the dynamics of language, you’d hope it would be those trying to calibrate machines to process language.



  • Would you happen to mean readers with filtering tools? If so I’m interested as well.

    I know Thunderbird technically has them, but I’ve had trouble making them work as effectively as I’d like. RSSOwl had some that were easier to work with, but stopped being updated. There’s now a fork of it called RSSOwlnix, but I haven’t taken the time to see whether it still works as well or not. May be worth looking into though…