DefederateLemmyMl

I mean, they’re not entirely wrong … but that also highlights the limitations of LLM based AI, and why it’s probably a technological dead end that will not lead to general purpose AI. It will just become another tool that has its uses if you know how to handle it properly.

Or ctrl+w to close the fucking site and never come back.

There are basically four positions you can take about this:

1. Jesus existed and was crucified
2. We can’t know, because there is no conclusive evidence, but I think (1) is more likely
3. We can’t know, because there is no conclusive evidence, but I think (4) is more likely
4. Jesus is a myth

I am on (2), as are most historians, and you put yourself on (1).

if it’s good enough for the majority of historians

It isn’t. Historians would love to have independent evidence of the existence and crucifixion of Jesus, but there isn’t… so most historians refrain from taking a position one way or the other. The ones that do have to make do with what little objective information they have, and the best they can come up with is: well because of this embarassing thing, it’s more likely that he did exist and was crucified than that he didn’t, because why would they make that up?

That’s rather weak evidence, and far from “proof”.

Not sure why you’d need more

Well for one because the more prominent people who have studied this have a vested interest in wanting it to be true. For example, John P. Meier, who posited this criterion of embarassment that I outlined in my previous comment, isn’t really a historian but a catholic priest, professor of theology (not history) and a writer of books on the subject.

There was a guy named Jesus that was crucified by the romans and all that. There is proof of that

There isn’t actually. The proof is basically: it’s embarassing that their cult leader got painfully crucified, so the early Christians and writers of the new testament wouldn’t have made that shit up.

Personally I find it rather unconvincing.

white-adjacent

You keep using that word as if it will somehow transform the color yellow into white and make your argument for you. It won’t happen. It’s yellow, and not just pale yellow but an extremely saturated and bright version of yellow. It is clearly not a natural skin tone of any race unless that person is very ill.

If you look at a white person’s skin tone, it’s not a saturated color and the hue is certainly not yellow. If anything, it’s pink. How you can arrive at “yellow = white-adjacent” just boggles my mind. There are literally billions of people on this planet who are not white and whose skin tone is closer to the yellow of a smiley face. You can call any color with sufficient luminosity white adjacent then. Bright blue: white-adjacent. Bright red: white-adjacent. Bright green: white-adjacent. Wee look at all those white-adjacent colors:

Anyway, I’m done with this discussion because I find you truly insufferable and I no longer want to spend my energy on it. If I can give you one piece of life advice: go find something worthwhile to get up in arms about.

yellow skin tone is clearly adjacent to whiteness and this was well established before aughts.

Not it was not and it still isn’t. The reason we think of the Simpsons as white is because the context makes it crystal clear that they’re a typical white suburban family, not because of their color. If Matt Groening had made Simpsons green, purple or blue we’d still think of them as white, and at the same time smileys and later emojis would still be yellow. At best there is some parallel evolution here in the sense that both Matt Groening and Harvey Ball both chose yellow for the same reason: because it is perceived as a bright happy color.

If you then associate yellowness exclusively with whiteness that’s purely a you thing, and honestly I find it pretty fucked up to see racial connotations like this in the most innocent things. Stop projecting your own prejudices.

emojis caught widespread support in the mid/late aughts

My argument is that bright yellow smileys have their own cultural lineage dating back to 1963, and it has nothing to do with skin color or race. Using these yellow smileys to express emotion in computer programs has been a thing since at least the mid nineties, not the mid/late aughts as you claim. The reason that it only appeared in the mid nineties and not earlier is technological and cultural. It has to do with the developing graphical and networking capabilities of computers around that time, and because smileys were popular in other aspects of culture around the same time. It has nothing to do with The Simpsons or other supposedly white cartoon characters.

The Simpsons came out in 88. You are saying most of the world got the Simpsons about half a decade later. I would say this proves the exact opposite of your point and that it is a huge world cultural phenomena. I’m shocked that I’m having the defend the Simpsons as one of the most important and impactful TV shows of all time.

My point is, I didn’t even hear about the Simpsons until I was in Uni, which puts it around 1995-ish, but I sure knew what a yellow smiley was.

Emoticon != emoji. Characters don’t have skin tone colors. The first emojis didn’t come out until 1999

I meant smileys really, because that’s what they were initially called. Emojis is a more recent retroactive rebranding/appropriation of smileys by Apple when they launched the iphone.

Anyway ICQ had yellow smiley faces 1996-ish. AIM had them 1997-ish. Yahoo!Pager, later Yahoo!Messenger, had yellow smileys in 1998. And MSN definitely had them in 1999.

And then there’s friggin minesweeper that had a yellow smiley face all the way back in 1992:

I guess they all watched too much Simpsons?

My point is that everyone, who is being honest at least, interprets the Simpsons as being white. Do you think they’re white?

Yes, from the context it’s crystal clear that they’re white, they could be purple or green and they’d still be “white”, but I think it’s not relevant in a discussion about emojis.

As I said, it’s no surprise the default emoji is closest to white skin. Even if that association comes from the Simpsons, emojis didn’t come out until decades after the Simpsons became a cultural mainstay.

My point is that yellow smiley faces have been a cultural mainstay independent of the Simpsons, and that you grossly overestimate the worldwide cultural impact of the Simpsons. Most of the non-US world didn’t even get the Simpsons on TV until the mid 1990s, while smiley face t-shirts and pins were all the rage in the late 1980s and 1990s. Source: I wore them myself when I was a kid, and from your comment I’m guessing you weren’t born yet.

And decades? The Simpsons started in 1989, while the first instant messengers already had smiley face emoticons in the mid 90s.

But emoji’s are not derived from the Simpsons. They’re derived from the yellow smiley face ideogram that originated in the 1960s, it was designed by the artist Harvey Ball.

It’s yellow, not because it’s supposed to represent whiteness, but because the company colors of the State Mutual Life Assurance Company it was designed for were yellow and black, and because it feels sunny, bright and positive. It’s an anthropomorphized representation of the Sun, and does not represent a human with a specific skin color.

Wait until you hear about Sesame street!

Hmm, on one of the KDE plasma updates, my wallpaper did change to their infamous teletubby wallpaper. Mind you, I was still using the default wallpaper at that time, and this was their new default wallpaper, so that’s probably why.

We should still try to have instances get along and try to find some common ground

Common ground can only be had with reasonable people you actually have common ground with. Personally I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to talk sense into the lemmy.ml admins.

The only solution I see is to salvage what we can from the bona fide communities that still reside on lemmy.ml and then put a big fence around it, so can have their toxic waste dump of an instance all to themselves.

It’s still annoying to migrate

I’ve switched instances three or four times when I was still getting my bearings on lemmy. I didn’t really find it annoying. The only tedious part is resubscribing to the communities you were in, but there are tools for that.

It’s basically the underpants gnomes meme

1. Dictatorship
2. ???
3. Utopia!

I’m perfectly fine with just avoiding interactions with lemmy.ml communities

I would be fine with that too. If the instance was just tankie people talking tankie bullshit, like lemmygrad or hexbear, it would be easy to ignore. Unfortunately it’s not that simple.

The problem is that lemmy.ml has a more privileged status in the fediverse: being the first Lemmy instance in existence it still holds quite a number of popular communities that are still frequented by people from the whole fediverse, and the tankies wield their power there as well. Like literally: make a disliked comment on /c/memes and you get banned from /c/Technology, /c/linux, /c/Progammer Humor, /c/Mechanical Keyboards,… and all your other favorite communities on lemmy.ml as well. This actually happened to me.

A second issue is that the mods make efforts to hide the censorship that they are doing, because they know it’s not a good look. If you examine the modlog over there you’ll see that the first half of the page is like a day’s worth of moderation activities, and the second half covers 4 years. So where’s the rest? The many controversial comment removals and bans that happened a few days ago on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, and who knows what else, have all been disappeared.

So yes, I think it is very important that people are being made aware of this and I also think a concerted effort should be made to move bona fide communities away from an instance ruled by bad faith actors.

It’s easy enough to switch instances, but which instance you joined is actually far less important than which communities you engage in. Rule of thumb: avoid any ...@lemmy.ml communities. Not because the communities are bad per se, but because the tankies have power there and they don’t shy away from banning you from unrelated communities if you say something they don’t like.

Ideally nobody who’s not a tankie should create or join communities hosted on lemmy.ml anymore.

in the office … you can still hear what’s going on whilst listening

That sounds like an anti-feature. In the office I use my headphones because I don’t want to hear the noise around me.

Third person in the present time is ALWAYS conjugated as stem+t for regular verbs

It gets more complicated in the second person though, with the inversion exception.

That would be illegal in the EU country where I live (Belgium). Here the rule is that the advertised price must always include any mandatory charges, like VAT and service charges, so that advertised price = price the consumer would have to pay.

Source: https://economie.fgov.be/nl/themas/verkoop/prijsbeleid/prijsaanduiding

Translation:

Price indication

Companies offering goods or services must indicate the price in writing in a legible, visible and unambiguous manner.

The price is the total price to be paid by the consumer, including VAT and all other taxes or services that the consumer is obliged to pay extra. These prices are stated at least in euros.