Honestly, I think part of it is that having an entire community of people suffering depressive symptoms becomes a depressing environment.

I’m sure I heard this in a Brene Brown video, but in order to be able to help someone else, you need to be in the right place yourself. Two empty glasses can’t help fill each other. And most people can’t help an entire community of struggling people, one glass can’t help fill fifty, it’s futile and self damaging to try. It’s why we have professionals that do one on one therapy.

And, this might be unpopular, but I think historically this is why we have priests too. I’m not religious, but I think that community offers that to some people.

Sometimes people need to vent, and some people aren’t lucky enough to be in a position where they can vent to anybody, but I don’t know if diving into a community where you expose yourself to everyone else’s problems too is the solution. Things like addictions counseling are controlled, with professionals at the helm, and often in small spaces, with a prescribed meeting time and an end.

That’s odd! I had no issues with the stock Ubuntu install. Installing CUDA on a Windows machine requires WSL2 now, but I didn’t really use it for anything more than that, so I could’ve just not used it enough to find problems. As soon as I finished the semester that required proprietary software, I got rid of Windows entirely though.

IMO, as long as you get comfortable with the basics like navigating directories and moving files, installing and updating software (first through something like apt, compiling stuff manually isn’t necessary at first), and managing some basic bash settings like aliases, you’re pretty much set. At least, from a programmer’s standpoint.

I dunno how well versed OP is in computers overall is the thing. The above is a good baseline, but you need a general understanding of how operating systems work in general to be really comfortable with something like Arch. Like you gotta know what a driver is before you can troubleshoot issues with your hardware, or if you’re managing disks it’s good to have an idea of how filesystems work. But that all comes with experience.

I suggest trying Windows Subsystem for Linux. You’ll get a simpler way to get familiar with the command line, which is the important part if you’re interested in development.

That or dual boot, you don’t need to set aside a large partition for messing around.

So what’s a better solution than reusing grocery bags?

Would reusable grocery bags suddenly be ok if they were free? Because honestly I feel that would just fuel forgetful people’s bad habits.

Why can’t something be both for profit and for the environment? Because frankly, after living with a plastic bag ban for years (Canada started the process in 2020), I haven’t seen random nasty plastic bags being blown around on the street. So it’s helped my immediate environment.

I feel we gotta reduce plastic use on all fronts. Yes, individual consumers pollute less than corps, but that doesn’t mean that consumerism as a culture doesn’t produce unnecessary waste. Think about a single store and just how much packaging there is in that one place, and where all of that will ultimately end up.

So like, I’m personally for bringing reusable containers to stores to fill up on things like say, shampoo or milk. Milk delivery was a thing for a long time, so there’s nothing saying our cultural approach to these things can’t or shouldn’t change, especially if it means less waste is generated.

And if reusable containers become a thing, I promise you there will be people whinging that it’s profitable for the groceries that they’re selling bottles that you used to get for free with the soap or whatever.

Yeah, which is a generational issue at worst. One guy in my family keeps forgetting his bags and buying new ones, but he also has a mindset where he resists change. The rest of us have gotten into the habit of remembering them, leaving a few in the car, etc.

Kids growing up after the ban are just gonna see it as normal. You go buy groceries? You bring your bags, just like you need to remember to bring your wallet.

Makes me think about how the BBC started a mastodon instance. If the CBC follows their example, then federation changes the relationship with social media, as it’s sort of baked in…?

Not the poster you’re replying to, but I’m assuming you’re looking for some sort of source that neural networks generate stuff, rather than plagiarize?

Google scholar is a good place to start. You’d need a general understanding of how NNs work, but it ends up leading to papers like this one, which I picked out because it has neat pictures as examples. https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02200

What this one is doing is taking an input in the form of a face, and turning it into a cartoon. They call it an emoji, cause it’s based on that style, but it’s the same principle as how AI art is generated. Learn a style, then take a prompt (image or text) and do something with the prompt in the style.

Sorry, rereading it and I think I was unclear. I’m saying that this community moved from tumblr, to twitter, and now to mastodon. I quit this community at the twitter stage when it became too detrimental to my mental health.

But this community uses moderation as one tool to enforce cliques, rather than to actually prevent abuse. Or, you could say, this community has a history of using moderation as a form of abuse.

Alongside that, this community has a history of inciting witch hunts over the most petty things. And they will be happy about what the moderators are doing within their own clique.

I remember artist tumblr in the 00’s. Participated, then moved over to twitter in the 10’s before I got sick of it. This looks like another continuation of that same community.

They can do what they like, but this reeks of the exact same kind of drama and mobs that, for example, drives fanartists to attempting suicide because they painted a character’s skin a shade too light. (Zamii070, if you’re curious.)

These sorts of communities form an echo chamber that, frankly, can be absolutely horrible for kids. Yeah, they can do what they want in their house, but I’m staying far the fuck away.

Over the last five years, I’d click a link to Stack Overflow while googling, but I’ve never made an account because of the toxicity.

But yeah, chatGPT is definitely the nail in the coffin. Being able to give it my code and ask it to point out where the annoying bug is… is amazing.