Putting bases on the Moon means we can do more studies, experiments, etc. outside of Earth, particularly tasks that are difficult to complete by current rovers. Human physiology in low gravity situations, lunar geology, possibility of water and life outside of Earth, that sort of stuff. I’ll also echo what others have said about how the Moon could become a launching base for future explorations, given its lower gravity and lack of an atmosphere.

There isn’t a conspiracy by lizard men to set up a Death Star, this is driven by the curiosity of humanity and our desire to explore the unknown. The “race” to have the first base between Americans and Chinese is, like during the Cold War between the former and the Soviets, a push to be the first, trying to show that they are ahead in terms of technology and science. In a nutshell, it’s driven by curiosity and, at least partly, national pride.

If you didn’t know, CoMaps has a desktop Linux and macOS version! I believe GNOME Maps (also on Linux) recently got better offline maps support too

I would imagine that it’s the easiest for the model to produce. Bold colours, clear and distinct shapes, that sort.

It doesn’t help that the companies have scraped the entire internet (which is a can of worms in terms of both legality and ethics) and then some, so it will mimic the advertising strategies employed everywhere (again, bold colours, clear shapes, etc.)

More people who kiss the toes of dictators. Those who ignore the atrocities of Stalin and similarly despicable figures, “tankie” as in the tanks used to silence civilian protests

Anarchists are far left, but they would be very insulted if you called them tankies (their whole thing is anti-authoritarianism!)

People who love authoritarianism and intentionally skip over their atrocities, the term “tankie” refers to how the military (tanks) were used to crush the rebellions of many authoritarian regimes, notably, the Hungarian uprising in 1956 being crushed by the Warsaw Pact and the Tianamen square massacre in 1989 by the PRC.

It’s usually used to refer to supporters of the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, etc. who deny all the bad, inhuman things about those states.

I think it would be neat if somebody made a community-run list of stable Lemmy/Piefed communities and categorised them by their rules, where the servers are, etc.

As for now, I think it is best to recommend a few instances that you know are reliable. Push them towards more local instances. If they live in Canada, lemmy.ca, piefed.ca, lemmy.blahaj.zone, and piefed.blahaj.zone are good options, I know feddit.org (Lemmy) and feddit.online (Piefed) are both hosted in Germany. sopuli.xyz is hosted in Finland, piefed.nz in Kiwi land, etc.

Or perhaps instances that relate to their interests, like programming.dev or retrofed.com (both are pretty self-explanatory)

If you define a stupid question as one where discussion is difficult or even impossible, then no, this is not a stupid question. Questions are meant to provoke debate and communication of differing ideas, and this is exactly what is happening now.

A true stupid question would be like asking if guns can kill people. Of course guns kill people, there is no discussion about this. A better question could be how we should regulate guns and ways to avoid placing them in the wrong hands.

I feel like we should better differentiate between LLMs (the ones that literally tell you to eat rocks), generative models (the ones that are stealing the work of creatives without permission), and the ones that are actually used for neat science stuff, where they are trained on a specific set of data and are doing a specific set of tasks repeatedly in a controlled environment, rather than training on the entire internet and then some and trying to do everything!

I think we should label them as large language models, generative models, and predictive models (maybe? Or maybe “targeted predictive models”?). It’s important to emphasise that all of these, even the useful ones, are not intelligent, they do not understand what they are doing. They are just models of data that do thing go in, thing go out.

So I’m doubly wrong! That’s kind of neat

That’s actually pretty cool, I’ll be making an XMPP account then. Adding to my collection of chat apps!

Oh whoops, I didn’t know that! That’s kind of neat, didn’t know had encryption. I will amend my comment

Well, there’s also IRC and XMPP. Could those work better for older devices? Dunno, but neither are encrypted, so don’t use them for anything sensitive. Signal is good if you want security, they’ve been audited a lot, but they are based in the U.S. which isn’t great.

I’ve also heard of Stoat (formerly Revolt) and Fluxer, both are relatively new, but I would prefer Matrix over both since it’s more easily self-hostable (+ all those different clients to choose from!)

edit: I really didn’t know, but looks like XMPP does support encryption! (and it’s enabled by default on most clients!)

I have tried it before, it’s neat, but notifications are not reliable since it is peer to peer (both devices need to be online for a connection), a bit like Briar if you’ve used that before. I don’t think it uses the Tor network, so it might be faster than Briar (but also less anonymous?)

I don’t have experience with the jami daemon though, so can’t comment if that solves the peer to peer issue.

I personally like Matrix the best, since you have federation, options for encrypted chats, self-host able with Continuwuity (or Synapse), lots of alternative clients for nearly every OS (even mobile Linux, you have Fractal! FluffyChat also works but it’s definitely oriented towards Android devices)

The longer you look at the pineapple, the more your food tastes like pineapples. There comes a point when your food is too sweet, too acidic, but you can’t stop looking at the beautiful pineapple.

Alternatively, it makes everyone’s piss a deep yellow. Saturated and not healthy at all. Weeing is painful and feels like a pineapple getting squirted out of whatever hole you wee out of. Everybody avoids drinking water and only eat dried food, and they all die from dehydration within 3 days.

Yeah, maybe I exaggerated a bit on “borderline propaganda for the military” comment. I will amend my post.

I do think they are (mostly, GofG, Dr Strange, Thor Ragnarok, etc. you mentioned are exceptions) U.S. centric though, the superheroes are based in America and work with the U.S. government.

And yep, Transformers is very overtly “the greatest country in the world is the USA”

The Cold War by Kings & Generals on YouTube has lots of excellent videos / “minidocs” on the cold war era. They have many covering both West and East Germany, as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall + reunification.

They’re still internet videos though, they give you brief summaries that encourage you to explore for further details, so I can also recommend reading and listening to the other suggestions!