Only if it contains no complex entries.

I put the Jerboa app icon where Baconreader had been on my phone. I kept opening it by reflex. This seems to be working.

Perhaps it was a hypnopompic hallucination? I ask because I have many experiences waking up from nightmares and hearing bizarre sounds or seeing bizarre things. Like ice cream truck sounds outside at 3am. Or seeing the face of an "alien" standing next to my bed.

Hopefully your experience was just a trick of the mind!

To be fair, I've written plenty of useful code as a hobbyist with the help of Chat GPT. Not good for writing anything factual or creative, but it's a decent assistant at my level.

There are nowhere near enough demotivational posters being dug up from back in the day.

I think you are making the right call. I frankly hadn't even thought of all of the potential legal difficulties that small instances might get dragged into, but you make a good point. I simply don't trust Meta not to trample thoughtlessly over everyone else in the fediverse.

Thanks once again for explaining your reasoning and keeping the discussion open.

https://yourmist.streamlit.app/

This is the direct link to the MIST itself, if you want to take it without going through the article/account process.

I feel that. It's hard to get over the lurk moar mentality. But here I am trying as well. Glad to be here!

I would really appreciate a broader STEM theme. While I enjoy the natural sciences, I probably don't have quite as much that I could directly contribute to those topics. My hobbies tend to fall more in the math/AI/programming/art sphere, so I have been wondering how broad the "science" umbrella was intended to be.

However, I am probably not going to start any communities of my own (at least not at this time), so I would also be content to contain those sorts of topics to relevant communities outside of our instance, if that's what everyone prefers.

Still much easier to use than the garbage official Reddit app.

That's encouraging. Hopefully they'll give it up. It's ridiculous that anyone pursued this in the first place.

I did find that the fake article titles were often too "on the nose" to be believable, so I guess that's one level of filtering. But you are right, if you can't explore the article and its sources, you are just guessing whether it is true based on whether it sounds or feels true.

I have another issue with the fact that a headline can be a "real" news headline, from a source that may have a veneer of reputability, but could still very much be full of bias. Is it "fake news" if the article exists and technically contains some verifiable facts, but is otherwise full of propaganda? It gets blurry.

I've seen hairspray used on a clear filter to create a similar bloom effect!

I have a lot of dream related phenomena that I experience regularly (sleep paralysis, out of body experiences, etc.) but I generally chalk that up to the fact that I probably have some kind of sleep disorder.

But there was one dream I had that I cannot easily dismiss. A few years ago, my grandfather was living alone and declining in health. He and I were extremely close when I was growing up. We (my mom particularly) would go check up on him during the week, and he had home health aids that checked in as well.

One night, I had an unusually vivid dream where I saw him - in blue robes, in a heaven-like setting, happy and healthy and strong. When I woke up, I made sure to journal the dream, as I keep track of significant dreams. Just a few minutes after I finished writing, my mom calls me and tells me that my grandfather's health aid had showed up and found him lying on the floor; they had thought he had a fall during the night. They sent him to the hospital, but he wasn't really coherent and was pretty obviously reaching the end.

I visited him as soon as I could and said my goodbyes, and he died the next day. I felt like the dream gave me some sort of closure, like his spirit reached out to me and let me know that he was ready to move on?

I actually had a few dreams after that where he visited me, but we both knew he had died and couldn't stay. I at least got to share the news with him that I was expecting a child (I found out I was pregnant about 4 months after he died). I have not seen him in a dream since.

This is really well said. I know you're in a difficult position here, but I do want to say that I really respect the approach you are taking.

Thanks! I'll check it out. Still figuring everything out. I'm not sure I know how to cross post here yet - unless it's literally just posting the same image again?

I am glad I am not in the dating game at this point in my life. I know I very easily could have been an anxious wreck of a hermit if I was completely on my own. Hopefully not a conspiracy theorist, but I can't honestly say I don't have tendencies that could put me there.

The poor relationship between the sexes is something I have morbidly kept my eyes on for a long time. I married pretty young, but I have a good handful of inexplicably single friends, both male and female. None of whom seem to be compatible with each other, or frankly even living in the same perceptual universe. They are all good people, fairly successful, and not being unreasonable in their standards as far as I can tell. But there is just some complete lack of trust or faith in the opposite sex on both ends. It hurts to watch.

I think best case scenario is that matchmaking services and "arranged marriages" (by this I mean voluntary setups through families and social networks, nothing coercive) begin to catch on. There has got to be a way to pair up people who are at least somewhat vetted for trustworthiness and seriousness in seeking companionship, outside of the confusing and alienating social landscape we have developed, or the meat market of online dating. But maybe I am naïve to think that would work.

keep on keving on 😎

Both are fascinating to me. I have also met a lot of people who are interested in both. I don't think it's a coincidence. There's something really interesting about the way we can use symbols and signifiers to encode and transmit and preserve information. Any kind of information.

Coding requires you to say precisely what you mean. Give clear instructions. Define exactly the pieces you are working with. There is really no room for ambiguity, and there's something really satisfying to the logical side of my brain about that kind of rigidity.

But that's exactly why linguistics is interesting to the other side of my brain. Human language is full of fuzzy categories, changing definitions, unwritten rules, unspoken connotations, creative repurposing, borrowing, taboos... You can add dimensions of meaning with text, your voice, your eyes, the movement of your body. You can pack so much nuance into a single word or phrase; a subtle hint can mean so much more than what you are literally saying. You can intentionally encode a message so that it is NOT understood. There is infinite malleability in human language.

This is why it's so exciting to see such progress in natural language processing. Large language models kind of blur the lines and begin to "understand" and respond to the ambiguities of the way we use language (at least in a kind of probabilistic sense). But they are also learning our programming languages. Right now, we can converse with AI models that can write (basic) code for us and with us, and make changes based on our conversational language. Imagine one day programming in plain language without that intermediary step!

I had a roommate once who kept walking in and contributing to conversations with no idea what was happening, so "You're out of your element!" became a staple.