There isn’t one type. There are the ones like Bezos and Dell, who got rich by growing one or more businesses, and are still at it. They likely don’t work normal hours, but they likely work more than 40. Some of those, like Gates, get older and move on to other things like foundation work, but not an actual job. Hard to say what kind of hours they work. Then there are the ones like Christy Walton, who inherited their wealth and don’t really ever work.

First, sometimes the lighting is terrible if you look. Like shadows going one way for some objects, another way for others.

But generative AI is generally extrapolating from its training data. It gets lighting right (when it does) because it’s processed a giant number of images, and when you tell it you want a picture of a puppy on the beach at sunset, it’s got a million pictures of puppies, and a million pictures of things on the beach at sunset. It doesn’t know if it’s right or not, but it’s mimicking those things.

Looks like a broadheaded bug

That does look like it. Quite a variety of common names:

Fuligo septica is a species of slime mold in the class Myxomycetes. It is commonly known as scrambled egg slime or flowers of tan[2] because of its peculiar yellowish appearance. It is also known as dog vomit slime mold or Jasmine mold and is relatively common with a worldwide distribution, often being found on bark mulch in urban areas after heavy rain or excessive watering.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. It’s not 5 comments, it’s 5 posts. I’m guessing they’re trying to limit spammers and people with an agenda. As I recall, some Lemmy instances either implemented or considered limits on total posts across communities because of spamming.

I was dumbfounded that they tried to make this point with drawings. I mean, all of those people and characters are well photographed.

It’s something he’s talked about on his show? It is delightfully 90s, but I don’t know what it’s about.

I get where your coming from, but this seems like it can elevate fringe opinions too much. It’s like when news stations felt that they needed to air both sides of every issue, so even though 99% of scientists said that humans were contributing to climate change, the stations would have one of the 99% and one of the 1% who disagreed, and the public would get the impression that science was divided on the issue.

That one is good and much needed.

That one bugs me. Should require an engineering degree.

I’ve read ten of the twenty one. The fact that it was so different than these types of lists tend to be, without being a bunch of fan fiction or whatever, is why I posted it. Just seemed like an interesting list. Of the ones I’ve read, I didn’t dislike any of them, though there are some I certainly wouldn’t have put on an all-time greats list myself.

Flatland is worth reading, though admittedly it was decades ago that I read it (it may even have been high school). It’s clever; written in the late 1800s as a commentary on Victorian society and social classes. It’s from the POV of characters in a 2D universe, with forays about 1D and 3D universes. As a side note, it has a bit about a potential 4D universe, and it was written before Einstein’s relativity theory got people talking about higher dimensions. As I recall, it’s fairly short.

I haven’t yet read Parable of the Sower, but I read Never Let Me Go recently. This is what I wrote about it in my notes to myself (no spoilers - certainly less than this article):

This is an odd book. It’s very slow paced, and not much actually happens. I think it’s best to read it without knowing anything at all, so I’m going to avoid spoilers. It’s a story told first person by a woman who attended a special boarding school. For a quarter of the book, there are barely even hints that there’s anything unusual going on. We don’t get an understanding of it until halfway, and even then not fully. I feel like this might have been better as a novella. That said, it was highly regarded and even made into a movie (that I never saw). The premise is really interesting, and the story moving, but for half the book we’re just reading a woman reminiscing on her school days.

I did enjoy it, but it’s not one of those books that I’d comfortably recommend to anyone and everyone. It depends on the kinds of things you like and don’t like.

Thanks for doing that

The things is, the stakes can be really high, even for something that seems benign. The people who give you medical advice based on a text post really are being irresponsible. Doctors are trained to ask the right questions and do the right tests. Sure, we might like it if we could just crowd source our diagnosis, but it’s a really, really bad idea for most things.

When you buy a used car through a private party, you have a mechanic check it over for two reasons:

1. You want to make sure you aren’t overpaying (because repairs are needed)
2. You want to make sure it’s safe and doesn’t need immediate maintenance

It’s the same for a house. The first one is moot: you already bought it and can’t go back. But the second one still applies - it would be good to get it looked over.

Yeah, there’s for sure a lot of that

Just like with Reddit, there are a lot of people who use the downvote button if they just disagree, which isn’t really the intent. So you’re likely to get downvotes for any unpopular subjective opinion.

Yeah, for sure. And before that time I used to wonder how much truth there was in the idea of the Russian troll farms - it seemed a bit like a conspiracy theory, even though it was pretty well documented in the Mueller report. But that day was such a dramatic demonstration. The whole site suddenly shifted so much to the left, and the toxicity dropped so much lower.

I remember, after being on the internet for a while, when the www standard was being adopted and all the web pages started popping up. It was so cool to see the kinds of content people were using it for. Then we got search engines like altavista, and it honestly seemed magical. It was like this egalitarian utopia, where all this knowledge was available to everyone; it was hard not to feel like it was the start of an amazing new phase for society.

So it was just soul crushing to me when we first started seeing intentional manipulation and misinformation. Search results that were skewed by paid advertisements or google bombing, propaganda being pushed into discussion forums, and all the fake news… it all represented the end of that amazing new phase. Heartbreaking.